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The overlap of religious and secular realms has lately become more complex. Last year the country's Roman Catholic bishops entered the debate over arms strategy, effectively endorsing the concept of a nuclear freeze. The Supreme Court last spring heartened the Religious Right, led by Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, when it ruled that a municipal creche in Pawtucket, R.I., was not in violation of the First Amendment. And in his singular campaign for the Democratic nomination, Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister, skillfully used black churches and religious rhetoric.
The ante was upped this summer. Religion became an offensive weapon. Almost as soon as she was named to the Democratic ticket, Geraldine Ferraro, asked about her Roman Catholicism, replied with a suggestion that the President's aura of piety amounted to political hypocrisy. "The President walks around calling himself a good Christian," she said, "but I don't believe it for one minute, because [his] policies are so terribly unfair." New York Governor Mario Cuomo, a devout Catholic, got into a media debate with New York Archbishop John J. O'Connor over abortion. Then came the Republican Convention in Dallas, where the assertiveness of the Religious Right, and its power in the Republican Party, was shown in full force.
The President's prayer breakfast speech in Dallas added new intensity to the debate. Reagan began with what is essentially a truism: "I believe that faith and religion play a critical role in the political life of our nation and always have." But then he made a series of assertions that were arguable and, to many, objectionable. Because of Supreme Court rulings since 1962, he claimed, "our children are not allowed voluntary prayer." In fact, no judicial fiat prevents any individual schoolchild from praying in voluntary fashion, nor could it. Reagan, however, went further: "Today there are those who are fighting to make sure voluntary prayer is not returned to the classroom . . . those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance . . . Isn't the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?"
Newspaper editorials from the New York Times ("dangerous, divisive mixing of religion and politics") to North Carolina's Raleigh News and Observer ("profoundly insulting" and "self-righteous") denounced the address. For Reagan to declare that opposition to school prayer is an intolerant attack on religion, says Howard Squadron, president emeritus of the American Jewish Congress, "is utter nonsense. Tolerance means allowing religions to go their own way, without Government interfering. To argue otherwise is Alice in Wonderland." The Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., like most mainline Christian denominations and Jewish groups, is against organized school prayer. "We are not intolerant of religion," said Charles Bergstrom, a council officer. "We just don't want the President involved in our prayers." Such opponents fear, quite rightly, that children from a religious minority—a Jew or Muslim, say—would be pressured into joining a Christian class prayer. Nor are the libertarians assuaged by freshly invented "nondenominational" prayers that have been tried by some schools.