The Bogus and Bigoted Wall of Separation Between Church and State

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The Bogus and Bigoted Wall of Separation Between Church and State

By Steve Bussey

Well, Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday is upon us marking the official start of the 2010 Christmas Season in America. And with the advent of a new Christmas Season comes the inevitable politically correct “holiday office party” and the attendant arguments and struggles between Church and State. I have an idea; how about we try to interject some truth into the debate this year, some real historical facts?

Many people, like me, erroneously ascribe the Separation of Church and State movement to communism attempting to overthrow America by destroying traditional, religious-based morality and ethics, or the secular humanists. But that’s wrong, or at least, not how it all started. Communists and humanists may have co-opted the movement in modern times, but they really had nothing to do with the origins.


The separation of Church and State advocacy has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States – nothing. The separation of Church and State advocacy groups simply found judges and justices willing to bastardize and defile our Constitution toward their own racist, anti-immigration and bigoted ends, as liberal/progressive groups usually do.


The movement really started in the early 20th Century as an anti-Catholic movement, and involved, to a great degree, the Ku Klux Klan. That’s right; the separation of Church and State movement in America is an outgrowth of the KKK’s anti-Catholic stance of religious bigotry, hate and fear and is much the same today. But what it is not about is the Constitution.


Barry Lynn is the current Executive Director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State . However, that organization was started in 1947 by Glenn L. Archer as Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Why would Protestants start such an organization? Can you say W.A.S.P. – White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant American – KKK?


I find that original name extremely significant. Here’s part of the Wikipedia entry for Glenn Archer:


Glenn L. Archer (1906–2002) was the founder of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, formerly known as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.[1]
In its first years, a main focus of AU’s activity was opposition to the political agenda of the Roman Catholic Church and it was seen by critics as an anti-Catholic organization.[2] It was under Archer’s tutelage that the Roman Catholic hierarchy was dubbed in 1949 as being more dangerous and clever than communism.
He petitioned the FCC to deny TV licenses to Jesuits because they were an alien organization. He also demanded that Cardinals in the Catholic Church have their citizenship revoked.[3] Furthermore, he asked the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the intentions, scope and achievements of Vatican espionage in the United States, charging that the Catholic clergy had learned American secrets hardly anyone except the president knows.[4]


Notice that Mr. Archer petitioned the FCC to deny TV licenses to Jesuit priests because they were an alien organization and not due to any separation of Church and State.


According to Princeton University:


POAU was founded largely because of the climate in the United States permitting government support of religious schools, notably the 1947 Supreme Court decision of Everson v. Board of Education that affirmed the principle of the separation of church and state but approved busing children to parochial schools at public expense on the grounds that it provided welfare to the child, not the school. Fearing that this would provide justification for other federal funding to parochial schools, POAU instituted a multifaceted, proactive program to educate the American public on the issues at stake and raise support for church-state separation.


Who was predominating in parochial education in America? The Catholic Church. But this wasn’t even the beginning of the Church and State movement. The movement really began in the 1920’s. Check out this information from Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project:


""During the Ku Klux Klan’s revival during the 1920s, the organization formed a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest. In Washington, the majority of the Klan’s work was devoted to passing an anti-Catholic school initiative and attempting to spread their particular brand of white, Protestant supremacy. Yet while Oregon passed an anti-Catholic school bill in 1922, heavily backed by the Oregon Klan, Washington voters rejected a similar measure–and the influence of the Washington Klan–two years later. The Ku Klux Klan that surfaced in the 1920s formed the second wave of Klan activity in the United States. Unlike the first emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, formed in the South in 1868 and mainly concerned with keeping black people from exercising their new freedoms, the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan focused their efforts on a wider range of issues. This new wave portrayed themselves as a race-protecting group that “espoused a virulent form of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. . . ."
. . . The Oregon School Bill aimed to close private Catholic schools in Oregon and have the children sent to the public school system. Since public schools taught state-mandated curricula, the Klan saw this measure as a way to “Americanize” Catholic children and limit the amount of “non-Protestant” instruction they received. Oregonians who supported the Compulsory Education Bill, including the Oregon Klan, made the argument that private and parochial schools were often controlled by non-American organizations that emphasized foreign ideologies over traditional American values."[6]


It’s more than just a little ironic how the KKK’s concern was the same as Mr. Archer’s – Catholic schools. I contend that Barry Lynn’s group is an outgrowth of the KKK’s anti-Catholic bigotry, and a manner by which to mask that bigotry. Their anti-Catholic initiatives in the 1920’s were too narrow in scope and too identifiable with an anti-Catholic bigotry so they had to expand it to all religion in order to mask their narrow WASP bias, especially since the KKK fell from grace. Bigoted groups rarely fold up their tents and go home when they lose. They simply morph into something more palatable.

But why, why were Catholics such a threat in the 1920’s and why would an anti-Catholic organization spring up in America in the first place? According to Julie Byrne, Department of Religion, Duke University:


The story of Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century IS the story of immigration. Until about 1845, the Roman Catholic population of the United States was a small minority of mostly English Catholics, who were often quite socially accomplished. But when several years of devastating potato famine led millions of Irish Catholics to flee to the United States in the mid 1840s, the face of American Catholicism began to change drastically and permanently. In the space of fifty years, the Catholic population in the United States suddenly transformed from a tight-knit group of landowning, educated aristocrats into an incredibly diverse mass of urban and rural immigrants who came from many different countries, spoke different languages, held different social statuses, and emphasized different parts of their Catholic heritage.

So, the Catholic population in America was growing – and growing through immigration. Here’s a post from Answers.com . Now admittedly, I do not know the origins of this post, who posted it or what their background is.

The KKK has never liked the Catholic Church, but became even more vocal about its opposition upon its resurgence in the early 20th century. Reasons for the Klan’s anti-Catholicism stems from both social and religious reasons. Historically, the Klan has Protestant roots, from which it takes the more radical views on Catholicism. The KKK considers the pope a Roman dictator, placing itself before God. As well, Catholicism is notorious for its multi-culturalism, another mark against it. Socially, many of the immigrants coming to America were Catholics, whom the Klan felt were taking jobs away from Americans and hence were undesirables. In 1974, faced with dwindling popularity and numbers, David Duke made a milestone, shifting Klan policy by opening Klan membership to Roman Catholics provided they were white.


There is more than enough information to show the current Separation of Church and State crowd as the bigots and liars that they are. Don’t buy into their crap this Christmas, and insist we return to the America bequeathed us by our Founders.


The author can be contacted at:  Frawddawg@aol.com