God and the Ballot Box

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The President next attempted to soft-pedal the issue in a speech on Tuesday to the national convention of the American Legion in Salt Lake City. There he voiced a more traditional defense of the separation of religion from Government mandated by the Constitution, acknowledging that the nation's founding fathers had erected "a wall in the Constitution separating church and state." Curiously, though, the President repeated his earlier argument that some unidentified people were hiding antireligious sentiments behind that constitutional wall. Said he: "I can't think of anyone who favors the Government establishing a religion in this country. I know I don't. But what some would do is to twist the concept of freedom of religion to mean 'freedom against religion.'" That muddied the waters again, since it was by no means clear just how freedom causes religious problems that Government should redress: the usual reading of the First Amendment is that Government and the President are supposed to be officially neutral about religion, neither aiding nor hindering it.

While Reagan grappled with such theoretical concepts, it was left to Vice President George Bush to launch a partisan counterattack to Mondale's criticism of the President. Said he: "I would say to Mr. Mondale, 'When you were serving with Jimmy Carter, a Fundamentalist Baptist, a man of deep convictions, I never heard this criticism. I don't recall, Mr. Mondale, your criticizing the National Council of Churches when they involved themselves, usually on the liberal side of most of these concerns.' This is a born-again concern of Mr. Mondale's. I don't think it's fair."

Throughout the week, the debate reverberated widely. In New York City an interfaith group of national religious leaders called a news conference to decry the "serious erosion" they detected in the principle of church-state separation. Disturbed for months by the school-prayer discussion and then alarmed by Reagan's Dallas speech, members of the group nevertheless phrased their joint statement in nonpartisan terms: "The state should not behave as if it were a church or synagogue. It should not do for citizens what, in their rightful free exercise of religion, they are perfectly capable of doing for themselves. For Government to intrude itself into religious practices, or to seek to impose certain beliefs or values on citizens who do not share them, is a clear and present danger to Americans of all faiths. The state should be neutral, not partisan, in matters religious." The interfaith group urged politicians above all "to oppose any and all efforts, whether direct or subtle, to tamper with the First Amendment."