When US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was interviewed recently by PBS’s Margaret Hoover, he didn’t mention Vice President JD Vance’s name. But Mr. Gorsuch was clearly hinting at the vice president when he rejected the notion that America is a Christian nation.
That’s because Mr. Vance, at Turning Point USA’s annual “AmericaFest” conference last December, said, “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been and… we always will be, a Christian nation.” Loud applause ensued.
The vice president did take pains to accommodate the Constitution. “I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American,” he explained. “I’m saying something simpler and truer: Christianity is America’s creed, the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.”
But even that formulation stuck in the justice’s craw. “We were never supposed to be a nation that was about one race or one religion,” he told Ms. Hoover, adding that “it’s demonstrably not true that we came from the same religion.
“We have a First Amendment, for crying out loud,” Mr. Gorsuch reminded the interviewer and viewers. “No established religion. Everybody has a freedom of religion… We are all equal under law, okay?”
And the justice has indeed championed that ideal. In 2023, for instance, he wrote the majority opinion in a landmark case, holding that state anti-discrimination laws cannot require designers to violate their sincerely-held religious beliefs by creating works they consider religiously objectionable.
The Framers began the First Amendment by asserting that Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion.” And that the amendment prohibits Congress from disestablishing a religion as well as establishing one.
Mr. Vance obviously was not contesting that. But he maintains, all the same, that it is Christianity that “motivated our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak and the belief in individual conscience.”
The dispute between the justice and the vice president is, in the end, much ado about very little. Even Mr. Vance’s extolling of Christianity as the source of some American values, jarring as it may ring in the ears of some non-Christians, does not lead him to assign, in the practical American here-and-now, any special status to the particular faith he praises and to which he hews.
But if there’s any point in an academic dialectic about the role of religion in our country’s founding, the most cogent case that can be made is that the spiritual engine propelling the establishment of the United States was… Judaism.
After all, “our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak and the belief in individual conscience” were borrowings from the Torah.
And the Founders were clearly inspired by the Jewish mesorah. In the summer of 1776, Benjamin Franklin proposed that the Great Seal of the United States should depict Moshe Rabbeinu at the Yam Suf, his staff lifted high, and the pursuing Mitzriyim drowning in the waters.
Thomas Jefferson urged a different design: The Jewish people marching through the desert, guided by the pillars of fire and smoke.
And the image of klal Yisrael persisted in the progression of American history.
In the 19th century, slaves in the United States likewise adopted the imagery and language of yetzias Mitzrayim to express the hopes they harbored to one day be free. In one famous spiritual, “Go Down Moses,” they sang of “When Israel was in Egypt land … oppressed so hard they could not stand,” punctuating each phrase of the song with the refrain “Let my people go.”
Similar references to yetzias Mitzrayim informed the American civil rights movement. In his celebrated “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. pined to “watch G-d’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt … on toward the promised land.” And he sought to assure black Americans that “the Israelites” suffered much before gaining their freedom, and so neither should his listeners give up hope.
So, while, as Mr. Gorsuch reminds us, America espouses no official religion and protects all faiths, it does have spiritual roots. But they run deeper than Mr. Vance imagines.
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