“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
Valedictory addresses should be more than platitudes about “four great years together and now we’re moving on.” It’s fitting and proper for valedictorians to express their opinions and their views on life as they embark on it as adults.
Nearly a decade ago, a Vermont graduate tried to do that. Described by his principal as a “highly principled student,” his commencement address included the announcement that he’d been told he couldn’t say everything he’d written, specifically a confession of his religious faith.
Despite calls from the audience to deliver the entire speech, the young man declined, explaining that he’d promised he wouldn’t. “It’s not the school’s fault,” he added. “It’s the law’s fault, and I’m not going to get the school into trouble.”
The principal correctly noted that, while public schools can allow “personalizing,” including the speaker’s references to his church youth group and his pastors’ scriptural guidance, schools can’t be perceived to endorse “proselytizing.” Offering his “testimony,” recounting the efficacy of “Jesus’s death on the cross” and the consequent “freedom from sin,” and describing his valedictory as what “God has laid on my heart” and “a message this school needs to hear” seem to cross the line into proselytizing, which is what the speaker explicitly intended and the reason school officials cut that portion of the speech.
Religious testimony certainly has merit, and it needn’t be confined to church pews. On the other hand, most who gathered at the commencement ceremony were there for other equally worthwhile personal and civic reasons. They were, in short, a captive audience, and respect for their varied beliefs and the fact that the ceremony belonged to their children as well as to the valedictorian would seem to render the undelivered portion of his remarks inappropriate for the setting.
Some critics charge that school officials violated the valedictorian’s right to freedom of speech. Consider, though, that my freedom of speech wouldn’t license me to preach the gospel in my public school classroom. Neither would it permit me to allow one of my students to take the lectern to preach during class. The situations aren’t identical, but the parallels are apparent and the principle the same, whether we’re in a school classroom or at a school ceremony.
The speaker observed that censoring his remarks was “the law’s fault.” And courts, being human, are clearly capable of bad judgment. But behind his complaint lies a common mirror-image misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights.
Freedom of religion isn’t important because it’s in the Bill of Rights. It’s in the Bill of Rights because the founders believed it’s important.
The First Amendment prohibits our government from imposing or supporting an official religion or preventing any citizen from worshiping according to his beliefs. Jefferson and Madison endorsed this “wall of separation between Church and State” as a safeguard against the “ceaseless strife” of religious intolerance that “soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
Today we’re awash in domestic religious strife. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, for example, has latched onto the talking point that the phrase “separation between church and state” doesn’t appear in the First Amendment.
She’s right. It appears in a reply Jefferson wrote to an association of Baptist congregations. They’d written to congratulate him on his election, to appeal to him regarding taxes levied on their churches by Connecticut’s state government, and to voice their gratitude, as a persecuted minority religion, for his support of religious liberty.
Jefferson reassured them he believed “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” following which he quoted the First Amendment.
Ms. Boebert sadly is “tired of this separation of church and state junk.” She’s merrily spreading the false information that “our Founding Fathers intended” that “the church is supposed to direct the government,” a stunning assertion and evidence she’s either deliberately lying or so shamelessly ignorant she needs a congressional tutor.
She’s especially outraged that all the “junk” is because of a “stinking letter.” She’s referring, of course, to a stinking letter written by the Founding Father who authored the Declaration of Independence.
Meanwhile, Florida’s Gov. DeSantis has launched a teacher training program that will “unabashedly” be “promoting civics and history that is accurate” and “not trying to push an ideological agenda.” According to DeSantis, the “real history” Florida’s children will be learning will correct the “misconception” that “the Founders desired strict separation of church and state.”
It isn’t necessary to purge God from all government discourse. If we tried, we’d be ignoring the example set by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt. There’s also the Declaration of Independence, where our Revolution rests on “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” the “Creator” endows us with rights, and the founders appeal to the “Supreme Judge of the world” as they rely on “the protection of Divine Providence.”
Our nation’s founders weren’t antagonistic toward religion. Washington viewed it as “indispensable.” But he was also an ardent defender of religious liberty for all and therefore adamant that a government religion be left out of the Constitution. Most founders agreed with Jefferson that religious ignorance was a threat to any moral, civil society, but they also agreed that it was even more dangerous to permit government to “dictate modes or principles of religious instruction.”
They believed that separating church and state protected each from the corrupting influence of the other. They believed that my assurance of religious freedom rests on my commitment to religious freedom for everybody else. If I allow you to lose yours, losing mine isn’t far behind.
Which is why our valedictorian should be permitted to express his religious convictions without fear of government reprisal — and why an official ceremony at a government-sponsored public school probably isn’t a venue where he should express them.
We should never be careless in either surrendering or insisting on our rights. And we should never exercise those rights without a decent respect for the impact our actions will have on others.
Anathema is a word applied in secular and religious contexts. It refers to people, ideas and deeds that violate our most deeply held principles and standards. In its religious context, it earns excommunication from the church.
The United States government doesn’t excommunicate people because of their religious beliefs. Anyone who believes it should, anyone who believes the government has a proper place between my God and me, doesn’t understand our Founders, or our founding.
