John Adams, who succeeded Washington as America’s second president, captured in a succinct manner our Founding Fathers’ view of the role religion was meant to play in America. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” Adams wisely observed in a 1798 letter. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was a religious and biblically literate Christian. Our sixteenth president, famously dedicating and consecrating that bloody Pennsylvania battlefield, put it this way: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Two years later, he repeatedly invoked and relied upon appeals to our Creator during what was perhaps our nation’s darkest and bloodiest hour, encapsulated by the captivating denouement of his magisterial Second Inaugural Address:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The next century, as the United States led the World War II effort to defeat the existential evil that was Nazi Germany, President Franklin D. Roosevelt contrasted America and our genocidal foe in a starkly religious juxtaposition:
Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the book of Genesis: “God created man in his own image.”… We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God.
In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement in America arose from the churches. Its greatest leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of course, was also Reverend King. He was a Baptist preacher who held an undergraduate degree in Bible studies and a Ph.D. in theology. His speeches and writing constantly appealed to America’s Judeo-Christian religious and moral tradition.
For the past two years, I have twice had the privilege of joining several other bipartisan senators in reading aloud the entire text of Dr. King’s magnificent “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on the Senate floor. That missive was addressed to “My Dear Fellow Clergymen,” and was a powerful call to action to the church to defend civil rights. He called the church to be not simply “a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion,” but rather “a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”
And Dr. King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, is as powerful a Christian sermon as ever delivered, worth quoting at length:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.…
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.…
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Read those words again, dwell upon them and hear Dr. King’s powerful cadence echoing through history, and then try to imagine arguing that it is the Supreme Court’s job to ensure that we keep God out of the public square. In doing so, we deny our country’s profound history and legacy of protecting religious liberty, diversity, and faith.
Our story begins with a landmark religious liberty case that I had the privilege of litigating before the Supreme Court: Van Orden v. Perry. And, curiously enough, it begins at the movies.
Cecil B. DeMille was one of
