By Judge Roy S. Moore, Circuit Judge, 16th Judicial District
Editor's Note: Since 1992, Judge Roy S. Moore has been a circuit judge for the 16th Judicial District in Etowah County, Alabama. A former deputy district attorney, he is also a Vietnam veteran, a graduate of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point and the University of Alabama School of Law. Twice in recent years Moore has been sued for displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. His remarks here are excerpted from the August, 1999, issue of Imprimis, a monthly publication of Hillsdale College.
June-July 2000 – In his first official act, President George Washington did something that would be unthinkable today. He prayed in public! Specifically, during his inaugural address he made:
…fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes... No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.
Even the American justice system, which is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has developed a bias against public worship and the public acknowledgment of God that ought to give the most militant atheist cause for concern. If judges can deny Christians and Jews the right to express their beliefs in the public square, they can surely deny secular humanists (devout believers of a different sort) the same right.
In California, creches and crosses have been removed from downtown Christmas and Easter displays.
In Kansas, city hall monuments featuring religious symbols have been torn down.
In Rhode Island, high school graduation invocations and benedictions have been banned.
In Alabama, students have been prohibited by federal court order from praying, from distributing religious materials, and from even discussing anything of a devotional or inspirational nature with their classmates and teachers.
And in Ohio, an appellate court has overturned the sentence of a man convicted of raping an eight-year-old child ten times. Why? Because the judge who pronounced the sentence quoted from the 18th chapter of Matthew: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
In the courtroom in which I preside, the public display of the Ten Commandments and voluntary clergy-led prayer prior to jury organizational sessions have sparked not only a national controversy but also an epic legal battle. In 1995, I was sued in federal court by the ACLU and the Alabama Freethought Association. Just prior to that case being dismissed for lack of standing (the ACLU and Alabama Freethought Association failed to show that they had been or were about to be injured), a separate lawsuit was filed in Alabama state court requesting a ruling on whether the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the display of the Ten Commandments and voluntary prayer in the courtroom. A state circuit court judge presiding in Montgomery County, Alabama, held that the practices in Etowah County were unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause,” which reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….”
The state circuit court’s ruling was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court and, appropriately, was set aside by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1998. Nevertheless, federal constitutional issues regarding public worship and the public acknowledgment of God remain unresolved.
Church and state
[The] now famous “wall of separation” phrase does not appear in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or any other official American document, yet millions of Americans have been led to believe that it does and that, in the words found in a 1947 Supreme Court decision, “[t]he wall must be kept high and impregnable.”
The phrase is actually mentioned for the first time in a letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 in reply to an inquiry from the Danbury Baptist Association. Jefferson said,
…I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
But did Jefferson mean that the government should in no way support religion? To find the answer we must go back more than one hundred years before he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association. Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke, a well-known English philosopher, who published “A Letter Concerning Toleration” in 1689 in which he clearly defined the proper church-state relationship. Locke stated that “[t]he magistrate has no power to enforce by law, either in his own Church, or much less in another, the use of any rites or forms of worship by the force of his laws.”
Herein lies the true meaning of separation between church and state as the concept was understood by Jefferson and the other founding fathers: Government may never dictate one’s form of worship or articles of faith. Not all public worship of God must be halted; on the contrary, freedom to engage in such worship was the very reason for creating a doctrine of separation between church and state.
Obviously, neither Jefferson nor any other officials in the early Republic understood separation between church and state to mean that the federal government was precluded from recognizing the necessity of public worship or from permitting active support of opportunities for such worship. Indeed, they plainly recognized that the duty of civil government was to encourage public professions of faith. Perhaps this is why John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, specifically authorized the opening of jury sessions over which he presided with voluntary prayer led by local clergy of the Christian faith.
Many believe that James Madison, as chief architect of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, led the fight to keep religion out of politics. In truth, he was more interested in protecting religion from politics.
Both Jefferson and Madison would have agreed with United States Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story’s definitive Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833) in which he posed the question of whether any free government could endure if it failed to provide for public worship. They would have concluded, as did Justice Story, that it could not. Justice Story explained that
[t]he promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded on moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues; these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive, how any civilized society can well exist without them.
Historical precedent
When the federal legislature met in 1789, one of its first actions was to appoint chaplains in both houses of Congress. (Congress still recognizes God by appointing and paying chaplains who open each session with a prayer – even the recent session devoted to the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.)
On the very day that Congress approved the wording of the First Amendment, its members resolved to request of President Washington a day of public thanksgiving and prayer for the peaceful manner in which the Constitution was formed.
A month earlier, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, one of the most important documents in our history. Article III of the Ordinance declared, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Every president of the United States (with only one possible exception) has been administered the oath of office with his hand on the Bible, ending with the words “so help me God.”
The Supreme Court begins every proceeding with the ringing proclamation, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”
United States currency bears our national motto, “In God We Trust.”
Also by law, the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag affirms that we are “one nation under God.” Congress would not even allow a comma to be placed after the word “nation” in order to reflect the basic idea that ours is a “nation founded on a belief in God.”
Have we become so ignorant of our nation’s history that we have forgotten the reason for the adoption of the Bill of Rights? It was meant to restrict the federal government’s power over the states, not to restrict the states from doing what the federal government can do.
False neutrality
The Pharisees demanded of Jesus, “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” He asked them to produce a coin and tell him whose image was inscribed on its face. When they replied, “Caesar’s,” Jesus gave his answer: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
But in the latter half of the 20th century the state is trying to take by force the unalienable rights freely given to us by God, declared in the Declaration of Independence to be “self evident.” Caesar is trying to tell us when, where, and how we can profess our faith.
In 1962 the Supreme Court outlawed a simple, 22-word, nondenominational prayer devised by the New York Board of Regents and used in the New York public schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.”
A year later the Court issued another ruling declaring that reading the Bible and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Pennsylvania and Maryland public schools was unconstitutional, thus outlawing “without the citation of a single case” practices that had existed in American schools for over 170 years.
Since the 1960s judicial activists have made a concerted effort to banish God from the public square. They have done this by deliberately destroying the distinction between “religion” and “religious activity.” These terms may sound similar, but in fact, they are very different. Religious activities may include many actions that would not themselves constitute religion. For example, prayer and Bible reading might be characterized as religious activities, but they do not constitute religion, and they are not limited to any specific sect or even to religious people. One may read the New Testament to gain wisdom, and school students may pray before a big exam. Neither activity was intended to be, is, or should be, proscribed by the First Amendment, even if practiced in public.
No student should ever be forced by law to participate in prayer or in other religious activity. But to outlaw the public acknowledgment of God simply because another student might have to witness it is as illogical as abandoning a school mascot or motto because it might not be every student’s favorite or because some might not believe in “school spirit.”
Disastrous Consequences
October 1997-Pearl, Mississippi; December 1997-Paducah, Kentucky; March 1998-Jonesboro, Arkansas; April 1998 - Edinborough, Pennsylvania; May 1998- Fayetteville, Tennessee; April 1999—Littleton, Colorado. These dates and places – these outbreaks of mass violence and needless loss of young lives – serve as a cruel reminder of something gone wrong, desperately wrong, in a nation founded upon faith in God and a respect for His eternal commandments.
Liberal commentators in the media, academe, and the justice system deride the notion that restoring prayer and posting the Ten Commandments can help stem the tide of violence and bloodshed. They prefer secular solutions, especially ones that involve more federal spending and regulation. In effect, they favor more concertina wire, metal detectors, and armed security guards instead of the simple and effective teaching of moral absolutes.
Yes, teaching moral absolutes is out of the question. “We don’t want to trample on the civil rights of students or we don’t want to teach that one creed or one code of conduct or one lifestyle is better than another.”
When will they understand that secular solutions will never solve spiritual problems? 
