Extreme liberal bias in NYT's 'The Crusade to Place Church Over State'
As I have confessed previously, I read TheNew York Times on a daily basis and have done so since I was an 18-year-old Princeton University freshman. The fact that I continue this masochistic behavior is a combination of obsession and opposition research.
In the process of perusing the pages of the “Old Gray Lady” this past week, I came across an editorial bizarrely titled, “The Crusade to Place Church Over State,” by Linda Greenhouse. Greenhouse is “a journalist who reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.” During that time, she gained such a reputation for influencing Supreme Court justices to move leftward in their judicial philosophy through her reporting that the term the “Greenhouse Effect” was coined to describe her impact.
Greenhouse’s quite liberal judicial philosophy was vividly on display in many of her articles analyzing Supreme Court decisions during the legally-tumultuous decades she was covering the Supreme Court (1978-2008).
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The current column which drew my attention, “The Crusade to Place Church Over State,” demonstrates that Greenhouse has lost none of her extreme liberal bias. In this particular case, it is difficult to imagine how Greenhouse could have been more wrong in her understanding of the judicial philosophy of the current Supreme Court justices, which is guided by constitutional principles cherished by the Founding Fathers of our country as they formed that “more perfect” union they desired through the U.S. Constitution.
Having covered the Supreme Court during some of its most aberrant liberal decades, Greenhouse is evidently now laboring under the delusion that a Supreme Court majority is in “complete identification with the movement in the country’s politics to elevate religion over all other elements of civil society.”
Now, to the article in question: “The Crusade to Place Church Over State.” In seeking to justify the astonishing claim emblazoned in bold letters on the upper fold of the Times’ editorial page, she reveals the extent to which she herself has been seduced by the legal zeitgeist of the era of liberal judicial jurisprudence that dominated the last half of the 20th century of our nation’s history.
The Supreme Court’s philosophy underwent a drastic sea change in the mid-20th century. As the Court lurched left, aided by Greenhouse and her colleagues in the commentariat, it generated a powerful backlash that spawned the “original intent” movement. This movement, aided and abetted by the Federalist Society, has now produced more than a generation of law school graduates who are committed to understanding and implementing the “original intent” of the Founders in reaching their rulings, rather than legislating from the judicial bench through their decisions.
Nowhere has this titanic struggle between original intent vs. license to impose liberal philosophies through judicial decrees been more stark and prevalent than in the area of religion.
In the middle of the 20th century, a majority of the court began successfully using an erroneous interpretation of the separation of church and state to turn the establishment clause of the First Amendment on its head and reverse the original intent of the First Amendment. The phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the First Amendment. It was apparently first used by Roger Williams, the 17th-century founder of Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island) when he spoke of a wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the state. His concept was that the wall was there to protect the garden of the church from being corrupted by the wilderness of the state.
The more prominent mention (the one referred to by the Supreme Court) was found in a letter that President Thomas Jefferson penned to the Baptist ministers of Danbury, Connecticut, in January 1802. President Jefferson, writing to Baptist ministers suffering from discrimination from a Congregational official state church in Connecticut, declared that he believed in a wall of separation between the church and the state.
It is clear from both the letter itself and the context of the recipients to whom the letter was sent that Jefferson meant that while he was against the institution of an official state church, he never intended the separation of religiously informed debate concerning issues facing the nation.
The Supreme Court’s misinterpretation and misapplication of Jefferson’s letter helped usher in a half-century of rulings increasingly hostile to religious participation as the Liberal Establishment sought to completely secularize America’s public spaces.
Contrary to the Liberal Establishment’s beliefs and wishes, the U.S. Constitution created a government where there was guaranteed freedom for religion and not freedom from it.
As John Adams, our second president and one of the chief architects of the constitution asserted in 1798, “We have a government designed only for a moral and a religious people. It is insufficient for any other.”
The First Amendment’s Establishment clause forbids the government from getting into the religion business by establishing an official government church. The First Amendment’s “Free Exercise” clause forbids government interference with citizens’ rights to exercise their faith in the public square according to the dictates of their own consciences, unhindered by government censorship.
Fortunately, President Jefferson’s letter to the Baptist ministers of Danbury, Connecticut in 1802 is not unique.
In 1809, he wrote a letter to the Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church of New London, Connecticut expressing virtually the same conviction he had expressed at the beginning of his presidency.
“No provision in our constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of civil authority. It has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the consciences of men either attainable, or applicable to any desirable purpose…I trust that the whole course of my life has proved me a sincere friend to religions, as well as civil liberty.”
So, what influenced Greenhouse’s epistolary impulse this time?
The answer is a pending case before the Court, Groff v. McCoy. The Court is set to hear arguments on April 18 and Greenhouse is convinced the majority with the trifecta of Trump-nominated justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) leading the way, are going to overturn a precedent set in Transworld Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison (1977). In this case, the Supreme Court had turned down an employee’s right to not have to work on a day his religion required him not to work. The plaintiff had argued that this violated his religious right to follow the rules of his religion—in this case, the Worldwide Church of God which had forbidden work on Saturdays.
Greenhouse acknowledges that the Hardison decision “reflected the spirit of the times” but was deeply unpopular in religious circles. Greenhouse can neither conceal her glee at that decision or her panic at the prospect of it being overturned in Groff v. McCoy, in which the plaintiff is—wait for it—“an evangelical Christian” and he is suing the U.S. Post Office for demanding that he work on Sunday, which violates Mr. Groff’s religious convictions. An evangelical Christian demanding his First Amendment rights—how terrifying!
Greenhouse’s column shows just how out of kilter the liberal mindset is on First Amendment and religious freedom. Religion is the first right, and the other freedoms are there to help defend religious freedom.
The extreme degree to which she and others of the more than half-century judicial hegemony don’t get is revealed in her closing paragraph.
“Religion is the lens through which the current majority views American society; as I have written, there is no other way to understand the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood that Roe was legally flawed and had the impact of making the abortion issue even more contentious by fundamentally taking the issue out of the political process.
All the Supreme Court has done by overturning Roe is to return the issue to the American people both religious and nonreligious, to decide. While many people oppose abortion on demand for religious reasons, many also oppose it on civilizational and humanitarian grounds, and more than a few of them are atheists or agnostics.
And I do hope the Supreme Court rules that Mr. Groff has the right to not to have to work on Sunday if it violates his religious conscience unless there is some exceptional, temporary, compelling emergency.
And for many Americans unaffected by Greenhouse’s bias, accommodating his religious convictions is just the fair and decent thing to do, regardless of religion.
And by the way, the current Supreme Court majority does not want to “Place Church Over State.” It does, however, desire to end the State’s continuing attempts to vitiate and compromise American citizens’ God-given, constitutionally protected rights of conscience.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
