Faith of Our Founders

In the 1977 movie, "Oh, God!," the Rev. Willie Williams, a Billy Graham sound-alike played by Paul Sorvino, introduces a rabbi during an interfaith meeting with this bit of insincerity: "Rabbi Silverstone, my good and great friend and brother in the work of the Lord, with whom we have broke bread many times, is a pillar of the American Jew community."

I thought of the Rev. Williams when I read Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent last week in McCreary County vs. ACLU, in which the Supreme Court said that Ten Commandments courthouse displays in Kentucky violated the 1st Amendment. Scalia sounded his own happy ecumenical note in what he wrote.

"The three most popular religions in the United States, Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- which combined account for 97.7% of all believers -- are monotheistic," Scalia wrote. "All of them, moreover, Islam included, believe the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God, and are divine prescription for a virtuous life."

How con-ven-ient, as the Church Lady might say, that Scalia discovered multicultural warrant for his thesis that posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings is not a 1st Amendment problem. ("Historical practices ... demonstrate that there is a distance between the acknowledgment of a single creator and the establishment of a religion," Scalia wrote.)

But Scalia was called on his 97.7% solution by his liberal colleagues. Justice David H. Souter, the author of the majority opinion and an Episcopalian, didn't find Americans as easygoingly ecumenical as Scalia suggested. "We are centuries away from ... the treatment of heretics in early Massachusetts," Souter wrote, "but the divisiveness of religion in current public life is inescapable."

An even more telling attack came from Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissent in last week's other Ten Commandment case, Van Orden vs. Perry, in which the court upheld a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol.

Scalia is generally regarded as an "originalist" -- a believer that the Constitution should be interpreted from an 18th century point of view. Indeed, in his McCreary dissent, Scalia spent pages arguing the religiosity of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and more: "Those who wrote the Constitution believed ... that encouragement of religion was the best way to foster morality."