THE SET-UP: Today is May 1st. It is also the “National Day Of Prayer.” And what the hell is the National Day Of Prayer, you ask?
There is a law, passed by Congress and signed by President Harry Truman on April 17, 1952 that, according to TIME, sets aside “a day for the people of the United States to ‘turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.’”
One might object on First Amendment grounds to this apparent breach of the “Wall of Separation,” but it seems otherwise harmless. Then you dig into the forces behind the law and you find Joseph McCarthy, Billy Graham and the Red Scare of the early 1950s.
Bruce Gourley of Christian Ethics Today described Graham’s integral role in ginning-up anti-communist hysteria during his first national crusade (a.k.a. the Los Angeles Crusade) in the wake of the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949:
Throwing history to the wind, Graham gave voice to a mythological narrative, declaring that “Western culture and its fruits had its foundations in the Bible, the Word of God, and in the revivals of the 17th and 18th centuries.”
In reality, Western culture began in ancient Greece while in modern Western culture, America’s founding documents were shaped by Enlightenment principles rather than by religious revivals.
Bearing witness to the falseness of Graham’s claims, colonial Baptists — demanding religious liberty for all and church-state separation — played a pivotal role in shaping the formation of America as a secular nation.
Graham continued: “Communism, on the other hand, has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. Communism is not only an economic interpretation of life; communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.”
With these words Graham pronounced godless communism as the enemy of Christian America.
Graham was, as Gourley points out, an “ardent ally” Joseph McCarthy and, in a fit of paranoia, he made the wild claim in 1951 that “some 1,100 ‘social-sounding organizations … are Communist or Communist oriented in this country. They control the minds of a great segment of the people.’”
Graham, who’s son Franklin is a key enabler of Donald Trump, supported McCarthy’s call to suspend the Constitution to root out these communist interlopers. And, the same year Truman signed the National Day Of Prayer into law, Graham “led a charge to scrub from history the nation’s secular roots by having Congress declare America a Christian nation.” Per Gourley:
Graham and other advocates falsely claimed that America’s founders had prayed during the Constitutional Convention, that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that presidential proclamations of national days of prayer were common during the nation’s pre-Civil War years.
Gone from the narrative are Deism, Jefferson’s Bible and the Age Of Reason. In it’s place, Graham and his ilk instead concocted divine marching orders for Christian soldiers who would eventually march into Vietnam to stop the “godless commies” there before the dominoes of commie atheism fell on America. The specter of “godlessness” powered Cold War propaganda … and agonisticism—to say nothing of outright atheism—was key a warning sign that your friend or neighbor was a communist interloper. Professing one’s Christianity proved one’s American-ness. Not coincidentally, “One Nation Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance two years after the National Day of Prayer.
Amazingly, all of this is still with us today. Trump’s Evangelical support remains the core of his base and he gins them up with invectives like “radical leftist communists” and with fears of alien interlopers. He claims to be bringing back religion and that he was chosen by God to save the nation. He has turned a paranoid lie of widespread Christian persecution into a White House task force headed by a woman who sells access to angels, and he’s actively working to rewrite US history with copious amounts of Wite-Out. At the same time, the Wall of Separation is being scaled in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, among other states … and the Trump-appointed majority on the Supreme Court seems inclined to remove the Wall altogether.
During a Rose Garden “Day of Prayer” event in which he established a “presidential commission on religious liberty,” Trump remarked, “They say separation between church and state … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time’.”
As Politico reported, he didn’t stop there:
“They said, really there’s separation. I don’t know. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure, but whether there’s separation or not, you guys are in the White House where you should be, and you’re representing our country, and we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.”
It’s a really big deal … particularly if you believe in the wrong God, follow the wrong religion or you happen to be an apostate. - jp
TITLE: John Roberts wrote three cases dissolving the separation of church and state. Will he take another leap of faith?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/politics/john-roberts-church-state-catholic-charter-school
EXCERPTS: Roberts wrote the three cases that proponents of an Oklahoma religious public charter school relied on Wednesday in a major dispute over the First Amendment’s protections for religion.
He began in a limited vein in 2017, requiring Missouri to pay for playground resurfacing at a church school as it did for non-religious places. But Roberts then authored decisions in 2020 and 2022 favoring parents seeking student aid and tuition assistance for religious schools, as was available at nonsectarian schools.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, among the dissenters who said those cases breached the constitutional separation of church and state, responded in the last one: “This Court should not have started down this path five years ago. … I warned (in the 2017 case) that the Court’s analysis could be manipulated.”
The St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School now argues that the trio of cases leads unavoidably to a ruling that would require states to finance religious public charter schools. Most of the court’s conservatives appeared to agree.
And after oral arguments Wednesday, it looked as if Roberts, who led the court to this moment, would be the one to cast the deciding vote. The chief justice, however, at times seemed hesitant to take the leap for which he’d laid the ground.
Referring to the three earlier cases, Roberts said, “Those involved fairly discrete state involvement” with religion. He told James Campbell, one of the lawyers representing the St. Isidore school, “This does strike me as a much more comprehensive involvement.”
The new case will be decided by an eight-member court, and the possibility of a tie 4-4 vote exists.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is not participating, did not officially provide a reason for recusing from the case. But the former Notre Dame law professor has a personal connection to members of the school’s religious liberty clinic that helped develop the case.
If Roberts votes with his four conservative brethren, who all seemed ready to side with St. Isidore, they’d have the requisite five-justice majority.
But if Roberts instead votes with the three liberals, who voiced strong reservations about the possibility of a taxpayer-funded religious school, it would be a 4-4 split. The result would affirm the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision last year invalidating the St. Isidore initiative.
TITLE: The Supreme Court Seems to Think the Separation of Church and State Is Anti-Catholic Bigotry
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/supreme-court-analysis-brett-kavanaugh-catholic-school.html
EXCERPTS: Wednesday’s case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, was engineered by conservative activists seeking to expand state funding of religious education. They worked with the diocese to create St. Isidore—a full-time virtual Catholic school that provides overtly sectarian instruction—and apply for participation in Oklahoma’s charter school program. The board that runs this program narrowly approved the school’s application, making it the first religious charter school in the nation. But Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, objected; the state’s constitution, he pointed out, forbids the expenditure of public money on any “sectarian institution” and requires that public schools be “free from sectarian control.” The Oklahoma Supreme Court sided with the attorney general last year, ruling that the state constitution prohibits taxpayer funding of St. Isidore.
The school’s lawyers then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that its exclusion from the charter school program violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, presumably because of her close friendship with an attorney advising St. Isidore. The court took up the case nonetheless, reflecting a clear desire among the conservative justices to declare that Oklahoma had violated the school’s constitutional rights.
Just a decade ago, that argument would have been unthinkable. The Supreme Court had long held that the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which safeguards separation of church and state, bars states from spending public money on religious instruction. In recent years, though, SCOTUS has turned that precedent on its head, holding instead that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause requires states to fund religious schools. Until now, it has focused on private schools, ordering states to extend tax credits, vouchers, and scholarships to religious academies. This case extends that line of precedent all the way to public education.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed indignant that anyone would even question whether St. Isidore has a right to taxpayer dollars. “All the religious school is saying is, Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,” he told Gregory Garre, who defended the attorney general’s effort to block the school. “I mean, if you go and apply to be a charter school and you’re an environmental studies school, or you’re a science-based school, or you’re a Chinese immersion school, or you’re a English grammar–focused school, you can get in. And then you come in and you say, Oh, we’re a religious school. It’s like Oh, no, can’t do that, that’s too much. That’s scary. We’re not going to do that.”
His voice rising, Kavanaugh continued lecturing Garre. “Our cases have made very clear, and I think those are some of the most important cases we’ve had, of saying you can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second-class in the United States,” the justice said. “And when you have a program that’s open to all comers except religion, No, we can’t do that, we can do everything else, that seems like rank discrimination against religion.”
The problem with Kavanaugh’s position, of course, is that Oklahoma treats religion differently because the First Amendment treats it differently, limiting its entanglement with the state. The Framers imposed this rule not out of hostility toward the faithful, but to ensure that believers of every stripe—and nonbelievers too—are not forced to support a faith that conflicts with their conscience. Kavanaugh does not appear to care that non-Catholic Oklahomans would be subsidizing Catholic indoctrination if St. Isidore is approved, or that non-Catholic students could face discrimination or expulsion for failing to share the school’s beliefs. His tunnel vision blocks out these competing interests, leaving him with the false impression of heinous anti-Catholic persecution.
TITLE: Supreme Court appears inclined to establish Free Exercise Clause
https://baptistnews.com/article/supreme-court-appears-inclined-to-establish-free-exercise-clause/
EXCERPTS: The [Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty] and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship filed a brief on behalf of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and interfaith organizations in support of opponents of the St. Isidore proposal which “threatens to make public schools an arm of churches fully supported with tax dollars. We are very hopeful that petitioners attempt to fuse the institutions of religion and government will be rejected by this court.”
The St. Isidore plan may seem “pro-religion on the face of it,” but it comes with the sinister threat of government meddling in faith, Interfaith Alliance president and Baptist minister Paul Raushenbush said outside the court after the hearing.
“Taking government money invites government regulation. Becoming agents of the government will put the independence of religious institutions at risk. Religion flourishes best when it is free from government interference and government sponsorship.”
Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, joined Raushenbush in warning about the implications of a high court leaning right on matters of church-state separation: “If today’s arguments are any indication, the Supreme Court may be on the verge of abandoning one of the bedrock principles of our democracy. Let’s be clear, this was always a test case, and today, the constitutional protections that have guarded true religious freedom for generations are at risk.”
For the proponents of state-funded religious education, the issue is about money, warned Erin Brewer, the parent of two children and co-founder of the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Advocacy Coalition, lead plaintiff in OKPLAC Inc. v. Statewide Virtual Charter School Board.
“This case is not about faith, it’s about access to government funding,” Brewer said during an April 29 Americans United press conference with plaintiffs in the federal suit. If the Supreme Court sides with defendants, “every religious school in the country will demand to your taxpayer dollars.”
She urged parents to speak up for the First Amendment protections against government interference in the religious lives of families. “We as parents have come to realize that we are the last line of defense in protecting this uniquely American invention of public education.”
Forcing taxpayers to support religious institutions violates basic religious freedoms, said plaintiff and Baptist minister Mitch Randall, CEO of Good Faith Media. He lives in Norman, Okla.
“The government should not be creating public schools that indoctrinate students in any religion, even my own,” he said. “Doing so violates our religious freedom. Children should not be made to feel unwelcome in public schools because of their beliefs. Doing so violates the bedrock principle of religious freedom.”