‘Holy Battles’ Details Fight Between Church and State

Allowing the viewing public to come to terms with the Constitution is rare enough, but “The Supreme Court’s Holy Battles” (tonight at 9 on Channel 28) goes further.

On one level, it is a study of how the United States became the first nation to institute a separation between church and state, and how that institution has been attacked and defended ever since. But on a more subliminal level, host Roger Mudd--sounding and looking better than ever--helps us explore how the Constitution is a living document, and why it must remain so.

Most hourlong programs of this sort give history the short end of the hour, driven by the fear that we will turn the channel. Mudd and producer-director Karen Thomas obviously feel differently. The groundwork of today’s legal battles over school prayer and other church-state clashes begins with James Madison’s and Thomas Jefferson’s pre-Revolutionary War efforts to allow a measure of liberty to non-Anglican worshipers in the Virginia colony. What Mudd and historians Thomas Buckley and Martin Marty explain so well is the profoundly radical and simple nature of what became the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom: A person’s beliefs, or non-beliefs, are a personal matter. It was Madison who inserted the essence of this into the First Amendment.

Mudd tosses in some curious, uncited “facts,” as when he says that “90% of us believe in a Supreme Being.” True or not, it does point out that the social, church-organized pressure to break down--in Jefferson’s famous phrase--”the wall of separation” persists. In the past 50 years, the program reports, more than 90 religious cases have been heard before the Supreme Court, with half of those since 1980.

As the report cuts between the crackling intelligence of historian Leonard Levy--who thinks it’s unconstitutional for congressional chaplains to be on the payroll--and the born-again teens of Renton, Wash.--who see nothing wrong with having their services on public school property--the viewer can only be amazed at the frightening ignorance of the Constitution rampant in the land.

We can also understand how constitutional language is deliberately vague, patched together and debated over by human beings. Why it’s so vague is best summed up by Marty, quoting the Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray: “A republic is people locked in civil argument. When the argument ends, the republic ends.”