Don't Take Down the Wall of Separation

I am primarily a writer of fiction, and when on occasion I have ventured into the essay, it has been with a pointedly literary purpose. I have no qualifications--or capacity--for discourse on public issues. What I come equipped with is not a set of arguments but something quite other: my childhood dread of a school-imposed Christmas and my undiluted memory of the shock of public punishment for refusing to sing Christian hymns at school assembly. The pain of this inescapably overt and helpless nonconformism, forced on a diffident and profoundly frightened Jewish child, has left its lifelong mark.

That is why--this suffering recollection of having been put on display on a platform as a recalcitrant enemy of the polity--I remain unreconstructed on the subject of the unadorned public square and what is, in my view, the still entirely viable heritage of separation. You may exclaim: "What stupid teachers you had! How insensitive to treat a child like that! If only you'd had kind or intelligent teachers, how much more yielding you'd be on this matter." But the kindness or intelligence of teachers is hardly the issue. Stupidity will always be in good supply.

What we ought to work for is an absence of opportunity for stupidity to take action. The wall of separation protects against just such opportunity. Of course it is harder, speaking historically, for Christianity (and for Islam) to relinquish the public square than it is for Judaism, because "relinquishment" is indeed what American separationism requires of Christianity. In almost every nation but our own, Christianity has not been accustomed to go without at least nominal recognition or fealty by the state. Judaism, by contrast, under both Christianity and Islam, has not experienced any connection with sovereign status for 2,000 years; hence, there is no authority or public influence to be surrendered.

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