Through a Glass Darkly

Here is a copy of my letter to the editors of First Things concerning law professor Robert T. Miller’s essay on the Kitzmiller case, along with Miller’s reply to me. I’m very pleased to have had my letter published in FirstThings, a journal I esteem highly (notice that my letter follows one by Mike Behe).

In his reply to me, Miller says I understimate “how unusual Kitzmiller was.” Maybe, but I don’t think so. I don’t think it was an “unusual” case at all. Rather, given the record concerning the school board’s motivations, I think it was right in line with a long string of “creation science” precedents.

Miller also criticizes the notion that “intent” is enough for an establishement clause violation. He sides with Justice Scalia’s view of the establishment clause, which requires a substantive evaluation of a challenged policy, not merely an examination of legislative intent. I might agree with Miller that the establishment clause should be read as Scalia suggests (though I would probably disagree with him that this should compel a rejection of an ID-teaching policy), but that is not the law as it now stands or as interpreted and applied by Judge Jones. Judge Jones applied Justice O’Connor’s “intent” based test, found the school board’s policy wanting, and then went ahead and pronounced on the philosophy of science anyway. I think that was a misuse of the judicial office, even though I think the end result was problably correct under the circumstances of this particular case.

“The founders believed that true religion was not something handed down
by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free,
rational inquiry. They possessed a great confidence in an individual’s
ability to understand the world and its most fundamental laws through the
exercise of his or her reason. This core set of beliefs led the founders,
who constantly engaged and questioned things, to secure their idea of
religious freedom by barring any alliance between church and state.”

–U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, who outlawed the teaching of
“intelligent design” in science class, in his commencement address Sunday
to 500 graduates at Dickinson College, his alma mater.

My goodness, this is just awful. I despise “Christian America” rhetoric, but I despise this sort of revisionism even more. Some of the “founders” were rationalists, many were Deists, and a few outright rejected traditional religion. But most were Christians, and though they intended to establish a secular republic and not a “Christian nation,” they surely would never have accepted the trope that “true religion” is reason freed from the tyranny of quaint artifacts like churches and Bibles.

Nor would they have recognized “religious freedom” as “barring any alliance between church and state.” They viewed the church as fundamentally the ally of the state because they understood that a republican democracy is doomed without an informed, virtuous public, and they further understood that knowledge and virtue come fundamentally from institutions like the church and the home, and not from the government (or from government-run schools). They would have been horrified to learn that the first amendment, which was intended to secure religious freedom in part by prohibiting an official state religion, has been read to require the establishment of a state-run education system scoured of references to God and religion.

More and more it’s clear to me that Judge Jones is no friend of anyone who believes religion and science need not exist in perpetual conflict.