The Separation of Church and
State was
printed in The Freeman, an obscure conservative monthly published by The
Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533, volume 42 #6,
June, 1992, p. 214ff. Anyone may reprint this piece, provided proper
attribution is made and two copies sent to FEE.
The
Separation of Church and State
My father, Jacob, arrived in this country as an immigrant
in 1923. He would have come here
earlier, but was drafted for service in the Polish army in 1919 and, under the
banner of Marshal Pilsudsky, helped fight Poland's successful war against
Trotsky and the communists. In America
he joined his wife and son, who had preceded him. He settled in Detroit and opened a dry-goods store, begot two
more sons (myself the second of the three), throve and prospered. He died last summer, aetat. 92, seven
years after the death of his faithful wife.
Fighting for Poland did not particularly please my
father, since as a Jew in Nasielsk, a small town near Warsaw, he was never
truly at home. The distinction between
Jew and non-Jew in the Poland of the Russian Empire was in most ways more
strict than the distinction between Negro and White in the American South in,
say, the period 1890-1915. It had been
a newly virulent sequence of pogroms, murderous mob attacks on Jews and their
goods and houses, that had generated the great emigration of Polish (and other)
Jews to America at that time. Jews feared
Eastertide in particular, a time when ignorant priests often preached the guilt
of the Jews, and even fostered the libel, widely believed among the Polish and
Russian peasants, that Jews used the blood of murdered Christian children in
the making of Matzos for the Passover.
But with the fall of the Czar and the liberation of
Poland one might hope for better times, even for Jews. My emigrating father left his own father and
mother in a new Polish Republic, reborn with his help and with that hope. The worst excesses of Polish anti-Semitism
did in fact diminish after the war, and in the end -- twenty years later -- it
was the Nazis, not the Poles, who murdered those of his family that did not
follow him to America.
At my father's death last year I collected some of his
personal papers and among them found his Certificate of Naturalization, given
in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan. It concludes, "IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF
the seal of said court is hereunto affixed on the ninth day of July in the year
of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-eight, and of our Independence the one
hundred and fifty-third."
The "year of our Lord" 1928? Much evil had been done, in the name of that
Lord, to my father and his family in Nasielsk.
Too, Anno Domini 1928 was equivalent to the year 5688 in
the Hebrew calendar, which counts, instead of the years since Christ, the years
since Creation, the work of an earlier Lord.
Was not the language of the United States Court for the Eastern District
of Michigan a bit ethnocentric?
Insensitive? Did not my father
feel left out of things, with his citizenship dated according to a Christian
tradition with its casual assertion that "our" Lord was Jesus?
I must say that he did not. He never ceased to bless the United States of America, from the
day of his arrival to the day of his death.
He loved even the police because he knew the nightstick
was not intended for him, but for those who might want to harm him. In Nasielsk, he told me, the sight of a
policeman would induce him to cross to the other side of the street and pass at
a distance; why take a chance? Here in
America, on the other hand, he would sometimes get a call in the middle of the
night, from a policeman telling him that he had left a door unlocked in his
store; "Best come round, sir, and lock it up properly," the cop might
say.
"Sir"? To a
Jew? It was a miracle, America.
I never asked my father what he thought about the separation
of church and state. It was not a
question. They were separate here; he
knew that, and he also knew the Constitution required it so. Everyone could attend the church of his
choice, or no church at all, and at school nobody asked the religion of his
children, either.
But Christmas was a legal holiday; what about that? – I
might have asked him. We sang Christmas
carols at school; what about that? I
might have asked him, yes, but I never did, for it would never have occurred to
him that these things constituted "an establishment of
religion." They were merely an
American tradition. We were in a country that had been founded by Christians,
a country whose Constitution owed its structure to English philosophers, all of
them Christians; why shouldn't the echoes of these origins remain in our public
documents? There is a difference, after
all, between a Christian sentiment and a pogrom.
My father knew all this.
In America we speak a language whose origin is in England, and we follow
a law whose origin is in England. Our
very liberties, won "from" England in 1776, had their origins in
England nonetheless; there was nothing like them in Russia either before or
after their Revolution. My father
arrived here in 1923; that it should be styled Anno Domini 1923
did not make it for him any less blessed a year, or restrict its boon to
Christians alone.
Even so, I'm glad the Certificate of Naturalization also
included that other, more secular date, "and [in the year] of our
Independence the one hundred and fifty-third," for my father (and I) owed
a great deal to those who secured our independence, as the celebration of the
200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights has recently reminded us. But the Founders, who insisted in the First
Amendment that Congress should make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, had no intention of making religion, or its milder echoes in our
public observances, downright illegal.
They knew as well as we that 1776, watershed though it was, was still
not The Beginning. Unlike the French
Jacobins who declared the date of their ill-fated revolution to be Year 1, our
American forbears saw danger in rejecting all tradition, and they were right.
American Jews in 1791 were as free as Christians, and
they still are, nor does their liberty suffer from an occasional Christian
reference, whether in a prayer at the opening of Congress or in a carol sung at
school. It is not words that tyrannize,
after all, but evil intention.
Communist Russia for seventy years oppressed all religion and
practically forbade all public religious expression. 1917 was Year 1 for their new order; Lenin be praised! Did that make their Jews – or anyone else --
free? Secure? At home?
I intend to have my father's and my mother's
naturalization papers framed for the wall of my study. I am proud of those documents, or, more
accurately, grateful. My parents came
to America so that I might be free. I
will point this out to visitors. It
might be that some of them, infected by ACLU propaganda, will be horrified by
that impermissible Christian reference, "in the year of our Lord,"
printed right there on a United States Federal Court document. If so, I will explain:
"Well, it's not exactly my Lord they're talking
about, sure, but that's the way they said it in 1928. Maybe they still do. My
father never saw any harm in it.
'Establishment of religion'? Don't make me laugh."
Ralph A. Raimi
1991