Whose Country Is It Anyway?

By Roger Rosenblatt

The Supreme Court last week reached a decision allowing cities to display Nativity scenes, after considering whether minority interests would be impaired. At the same time, the Senate began debate on a constitutional amendment to counteract the Supreme Court's 1962 decision on school prayer, which had come into being only because of a perceived infringement of minority rights. That these matters are hurled about the court would seem to suggest they are legal puzzles dealing with the First and 14th Amendments. But the issue also involves human feelings. When a member of a minority loses a sense of belonging to the country, the country deliberates, sometimes changes shape, and occasionally comes apart.

To anyone but an American this may seem preposterously unfair, not to say illogical. If most Americans, being Christian, want creches in the public squares and prayers in the public schools, why should they be forced to back down for a discomfited handful? Whose country is it anyway? And then there is the time-honored (and politically useful) association of the national identity with God. In spite of radicals like Jefferson and Madison, who erected the so-called wall of separation between church and state, the fact is that from the start the Government has been bound up with religion. In the majority's name are there Army chaplains, House and Senate chaplains, prayers for Congress. Not even the Supreme Court meets without calling for God's blessing.

Why, then, does the majority not have the right to establish, through its Government, a religious character for the country? In most cases no harm is intended. Read the tepid nonsectarian prayer that led to the 1962 decision, and you wonder what all the breast beating was about: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country." Similarly, how could plaster-of-paris figures in Pawtucket, R.I., have alarmed anybody but the A.C.L.U., which brought the suit?

The two issues are not the same size. Many who could not care less about the creche in Pawtucket would go to the wall of separation on the school-prayer decision, but both issues derive from minority protests. Without malice or belligerence, a Christian could reasonably ask: Whose country is it anyway?

Nor is that a question to which minorities reply automatically, "As much mine as yours." No one really believes that, there being too much painful evidence to the contrary. Still, many members of minorities wholeheartedly enjoy then" status because it gives them a useful relationship to the mainstream. Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) remarked that a black writer has an advantage because, being black, he has been forced to live in an isolated room in the nation's house, thus when he emerges from that room into the rest of the house, he knows the entire structure. So too for any Irishman, Chinese, Puerto Rican, a member of a minority religion or of none at all. Without a sense of unbelonging, one might never cast a critical eye on the majority culture, which in a way minorities cherish for their difference from it.

Then, too, minorities often take genuine pleasure in the culture of the majority. Many Jews enjoy the Christmas season for its songs and geniality, without feeling put upon to convert or run and hide. Buddhists may dye Easter eggs. Things inevitably get tense whenever a minority seeks to hold on to some cultural tenet that goes against the American grain (e.g., Mormons and polygamy), but in less extreme cases the tension works out to a compromise. Those who make concessions to the majority culture may be scorned as Uncle Toms or assimilationists, yet accommodation does not necessarily entail a loss of integrity or self-respect. If the hordes of immigrants who contemplated coming to America had not envisioned some definable majority culture that they admired, they might not have made the trip in the first place.

What, then, is the fuss about? Why on issues such as the Nativity display and school prayer cannot the majority simply say, "Take it or leave it"? On the creche issue, that is what the court decided it could say, though not without a lot of irrelevant hand wringing about the "passive symbolism" of the Nativity display as opposed to the "active symbolism," say, of the cross. (The distinction is meaningless.) In the matter of school prayer, the court continues to hold its ground, but why? And why not have an amendment allowing everyone to pray to his or her God, or to none?

Four reasons. First, the voluntary nature of school prayer would be compromised by the fact that a public institution was handling it. Second, no matter how earnestly school officials would protest that the God referred to is anybody's God, it is almost inevitable that God in a public institution will appear to take on the religion of the majority. A Jewish child would know that he is being invited to spray to a Christian God, who seems to bear no resemblance to the God of his synagogue, and an atheist would have no place in the scheme whatever. Third, school prayer does not allow full freedom of choice because it deals with children, and in an educational situation; if a school says, "Pray (or do what you feel like)," a child assumes that prayer is a part of learning. Finally, school prayer violates a fundamental assumption of American life, one that has something to do with privacy, something with freedom of speech, and something less codified and explicit: that one ought to be able to retain one's humanity without being made to feel a pariah in one's own country.

Of these four, the last may be the most important, since it goes to the heart of the minority-majority relationship. This is a country of outsiders, majority and minority alike. Government in America, for all its clauses and amendments, is basically a moral contract in which the minorities make concessions, but so does the majority. And the main concession the majority makes is never to use its power at the expense of individual humanity. How can one conduct prayers in a public institution without interfering with the sacrosanct relationship of a person with himself? People in a democracy hold dual citizenship; they are citizens of their country and citizens of their souls. When the state starts imposing on the soul, democracy is in trouble.

That President Reagan happens to be the one proposing the socialist solution to the American faith problem has its ironic element, but is beside the point. Public opinion polls indicate there is a vast majority feeling that God is good for children and that the Government ought to say so. If by saying so, however, the Government begins to destroy its principles from the inside, what then? For a big place this is an awfully delicate country, the nettings so intricately drawn that everyone feels the same reverberations. Even schoolchildren. It seems hard to believe that the whole enterprise could be endangered for one small child standing off to the side wondering if he belongs. But whose country is it anyway? --By Roger Rosenblatt