TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Adelle Banks
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON—Fifty years after “In God We Trust” first appeared on U.S. paper currency, those four little words have proven to be the source of big debate in the courts.

Michael Newdow, the California atheist known for trying to strip “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, has asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to declare “In God We Trust” an unconstitutional mingling of church and state. In Indiana, the American Civil Liberties Union has gone to district court, arguing it’s unfair for the state not to charge administrative fees for “In God We Trust” license plates when a plate advocating for the environment carries extra fees.

Why, decades after the words were made the nation’s official motto and printed on our dollar bills, do they still inspire ire?

Long before the words were printed on paper money, they first appeared on coins after a Pennsylvania minister wrote to the secretary of the treasury in 1861, suggesting God’s name should be featured on U.S. coins.

“This would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism,” M.R. Watkinson wrote to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase in 1861, according to the website of the U.S. Treasury Department. Three years later, U.S. coins began to bear the words “In God We Trust.”

It wasn’t until 1956 that Congress declared those words to be the national motto. On Oct. 1, 1957, they began appearing on the back of dollar bills under the words “The United States of America.”

Newdow, whose case was dismissed by a lower federal court last year, said the words referring to a deity divide society by making non-believers “second-class citizens.”

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, has filed a brief opposing Newdow on behalf of dozens of members of Congress.

“It reflects the heritage of the country,” he said of the debated motto. “It’s something the founding fathers recognized, that our rights and liberties were endowed by a creator. You recognize the source of these rights.”

A 2003 Gallup Poll found 90 percent of Americans approve of the inscription “In God We Trust” on U.S. coins. A survey released earlier this month by the First Amendment Center found 65 percent of Americans think the nation’s founders intended the country to be a Christian nation, and 55 percent think the U.S. Constitution establishes it as a Christian country.

About a dozen states have passed laws declaring public schools can post the motto. Five years ago, the American Family Association was involved in a campaign that shipped hundreds of thousands of posters to supporters so they could send them to local schools.

“I think we need to be constantly reminded and, although I don’t look at my coins and my paper money day by day, there is a great satisfaction knowing that it’s there and knowing that our government still recognizes God,” said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Miss.

Labels: "In God We Trust", ACLU, Adelle Banks, American Center for Law and Justice, Christian, God

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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Church-state disputes as human dramas

By CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN,
Associated Press Writer
Wed Jun 20, 12:54 PM ET

"God on Trial: Dispatches From America's Religious Battlefields" (Viking, 362 pages, $26.95) — Peter Irons: Combining legal analysis with good storytelling, a lawyer-professor explores church-state disputes.

Nobody talks about how it feels to be right in the middle of an ACLU lawsuit in a small, fundamentalist town. But in a new book, a Texas woman who filed such a suit does exactly that. Surprisingly, her words might even make you laugh.

"I got the word out, very loudly in the community, if they burn a cross in my yard, I'm inviting everybody over for hot dogs and marshmallows," she tells author Peter Irons. "And that stopped them. Because they want you to be scared, they thrive on that."

One of the best elements of Irons' book, "God on Trial: Dispatches From America's Religious Battlefields," is a series of extended first-person statements like this, allowing real people involved in these disputes to explain themselves.

An atheist in one of these soliloquies, traces his nonbelief in part to a slap he received from a clergyman after asking an unwelcome question as a boy; and, in another personal narrative, a defender of a Christian religious display, who turns out to be Jewish, recalls his Holocaust-survivor parents' words about the danger of suppressing religious symbols.

"God on Trial" is a highly readable exploration of several church-state separation disputes that combines thoughtful analysis of the law with journalistic storytelling about the personalities and personal stakes on both sides.

Although Irons clearly has a viewpoint — he represented plaintiffs in one case he details, the longest-running church-state struggle ever, about a giant cross in a hilltop park in San Diego — he does not shortchange the positions of those who support prayer in school or Nativity scenes on the courthouse lawn.

He takes on the usual sound-bite views, for example, the notion that church-state separation is a "myth" without basis in U.S. history. In response, he notes that way back in 1785 the issue was real enough that a ban on religious taxation was taken up by Virginia's legislature.

And what about the idea that the United States is "a Christian nation"? Irons doesn't buy it, but in any event: Which Christians? He details intolerance and power-grabbing, pitting Christian sects against each other, from colonial Massachusetts to contemporary Texas.

Irons, a lawyer and emeritus political science professor, occasionally overdoes the legal detail. More often, his writing is lively, engaging and sometimes amusing. In one case where tempers are rising, a colorful judge roars: "Anyone who violates these orders, no kidding, is going to wish that he or she had died as a child."

In the end, "God on Trial" illuminates our never-ending religious battles. It shows that these cases are not all the same, that some are harder calls than others. And it suggests that if we recognize that the antagonists aren't two-dimensional, maybe we can make some progress.

Labels: ACLU, Christian, church-state, Peter Irons, religion