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In his autobiography, Henry Adams said, "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." This is true for politicians as well. Quoting Adams usually implies only a positive influence, but it may also be negative.

The legacy of James G. Blaine is an unfortunate example.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1830, Blaine died in Washington, D.C. in 1893. He was briefly a teacher in Kentucky, returned to Pennsylvania, and moved to Maine to begin a political career which included serving as Speaker of the House at the state and national levels, as U.S. Secretary of State and almost being elected President of the United States in 1884.

The Concise Dictionary of American Biography says his "permanent influence was through his foreign policy." If only that were so. Neither that work, nor many history books, mention his real "permanent influence" -- what are termed "Blaine Amendments."

As a member of Congress, Blaine proposed a constitutional amendment prohibiting public aid to religious schools -- a common sentiment at a time when public schools were overwhelmingly Protestant in their orientation. The Senate narrowly rejected the idea, but anti-Catholic bigotry was so prevalent that many states put the proposal in their constitutions, including those required to do so by Congress before they could be admitted to the Union.

The controversy over "the separation of church and state" largely began at that time, not with the founding fathers, the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. Even so, it was 80 years before the U.S. Supreme Court took it on directly. By then, the idea had acquired a life of its own and its birth in bigotry was forgotten.

Blaine himself paid for his bias. While he was the Republican candidate for president in 1884, one of his supporters, New York Presbyterian minister Samuel Burchard, described Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." Because Blaine failed to disassociate himself from that remark he lost New York and the presidency.

Yet Blaine's harmful affect on eternity lives on.

John Coons, has written, "The machinery of public monopoly was chosen specifically by brahmins like Horace Mann and James Blaine to coax the children from the religious superstition of their barbarian parents. Today, that antique machinery continues its designated role, and if this function was ever benign, it has long since ceased to be so. What has endured is the public school system's peculiar legacy of intolerance, racial segregation, religious bigotry, discrimination against the poor...[and] the careful buffering of the freedom of the rich to decide for themselves." (First Things, April 1992)

As Coons suggests, the public school system is perhaps the most divisive institution in our society, a source of continual and increasingly bitter controversy. There is every indication that this will continue and accelerate until all parents can exercise their constitutional right (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925, a U.S. Supreme Court unanimous decision) to control their children's education.

How did a society, the individual members of which may be the most religious of any western democracy, become so anti-religious? No other democracy so opposes any public display of, belief in, or respect for, religious sentiment.

No other nation expresses such concern (fear?) over a "separation of church and state" (an expression which appears nowhere in our Constitution or other official acts of the Founding Fathers) or some perceived "establishment of religion."

The irony is that, at the time of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and the creation of the United States, nine of the states had an established church, so the religion clause of the First Amendment clearly meant what it said -- that Congress shall not establish a religion for the nation.

Within the next few decades the states with an established church discontinued the practice. No one since has seriously suggested that we have an established religion at any level of government, and there isn't the slightest possibility that it will occur.

Thus, it isn't an established religion that presents a danger to our society. The true danger comes from the establishment of a government-owned and -operated schooling establishment that emphasizes indoctrination and control rather than education and freedom. The correction for this depends, as the Court said in 1925, on educational freedom of choice, a freedom on which this nation is supposedly based, and which remains blocked by today's more subtle but no less real anti-religious bigotry.

Thomas Jefferson, the author, in a personal letter, of the "separation of church and state" phrase, also said that every generation, which he calculated at about 19 years, should decide its own destiny, unburdened by the dead hand of the past. In the Declaration of Independence, he also expressed a concern for "a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind," now too often absent in public life.

The Arizona Supreme Court, while upholding in 1999 a law providing tax credits for contributions to nonprofit groups that would award grants to pupils, became perhaps the first court in our history to cite this past and present religious bigotry. Other courts should take note.

Removing the shame of Blaine amendments is long overdue.

Part 1  |  Part 3

Copyright 2003 David W. Kirkpatrick
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Douglassville, Pennsylvania 19518-9240
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