[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 121 (Friday, September 5, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H8009-H8013]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           PRAYER IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Carter). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, this morning we began our 
session here with a prayer. That was prayer to a God. We did the Pledge 
of Allegiance to the flag, and in that Pledge of Allegiance we 
recognized that this was a Nation under God. And inscribed in marble 
above your chair, Mr. Speaker, are the words ``In God We Trust.''
  Now, while we opened our session with prayer today and recognized God 
in our Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and recognized there is a God 
in that inscription in marble above your chair, at the same time we 
have removed the Ten Commandments that that God wrote from a courthouse 
in Alabama.
  Mr. Speaker, we appear to be a Nation conflicted. We pray in this 
House. Just at the other end of this Capitol, every day the Senate is 
opened with prayer. I understand the Supreme Court prays to open their 
session, and in many public events we have a prayer. In most athletic 
events there is a prayer before the event. Our military has chaplains 
of just about every religion. But in our society the only place where 
prayer is conspicuously absent is our schools, another reflection, Mr. 
Speaker, of the confliction of our society.
  To understand how we got here and how we can open our session with 
prayer and recognize in our Pledge of Allegiance that this Nation is 
under God and have that inscription above your chair ``In God We 
Trust,'' and still to remove the Ten Commandments under court order 
from a courthouse in Alabama, I think we need to go back and review who 
we are and how we got here.
  Mr. Speaker, freedom is not free. Five of the 55 signers of our 
Declaration of Independence were captured and executed by the British. 
Nine of them died on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War, and 
another dozen lost their homes, possessions and fortunes to British 
occupation.
  Today, much of what our Founding Fathers fought and died for is at 
risk of being lost. The major reason for that is that there are three 
big lies that are about in the land today, and for the next few minutes 
I want to look back at our history to refute these three lies that I 
think are the basis for the conflicts in our society which allows us to 
pray to a God here, recognize him in our Pledge of Allegiance, and is 
inscribed above your desk, and still to remove the Ten Commandments 
from the courthouse. These three big lies are that our Founding Fathers 
were largely atheists and deists, that they wanted to establish a 
nonChristian Nation, and in that first amendment they sought to erect a 
big wall of separation between church and State.
  This history, of course, begins in 1776 with the Declaration of 
Independence. In that Declaration of Independence was a radical 
departure from the norms of the time. We read those words, or recite 
those words if we have memorized them, and they do not have the same 
meaning to us as they had to them because we did not come out of the 
milieu from which they came. Today, of course, our citizens are 
children of immigrants from every part of the world, but our Founding 
Fathers came largely from the British Isles and the European Continent. 
Thinking back to the history at that time, essentially all of those 
countries were ruled by a king or emperor who incredibly, from our 
perspective, claimed and was granted divine rights. What that meant was 
that the rights came from God to the king, and the king or emperor 
would then give what rights he wished to his people.
  Now, in our Declaration of Independence we broke with that, because 
we said all men are created equal. Notice the reference to a God, a 
Creator, in that Declaration of Independence, that all men are created 
equal. That was a startling statement to make because in the countries 
from which they came, all people were not created equal. They made a 
break from that and said that all men are created equal and endowed by 
their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  Now, 11 years later, and it took 11 years for the promise of the 
Declaration of Independence to meet the fulfillment of the 
Constitution, the Constitution was written. In that Constitution they 
sought to put down in very plain words the fundamental principles that 
they espoused in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are 
created equal, that the fundamental rights belong to the people, and 
they belong to the people because they were given to the people by God. 
Our Constitution does not give us any rights. Those rights were given 
to us by our God. The best that our Constitution can do is to say we 
are not going to permit another person to take those rights away from 
us.
  But the ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before they wondered 
if people would really understand that they meant that the fundamental 
rights, most of the rights belonged to the people, and so they wrote 12 
amendments that started through the process of two-thirds of the House 
and two-thirds of the Senate, and then three-fourths of the State 
legislatures. Ten of them made it through that process, and we call 
those the Bill of Rights. If Members look through the first through the 
tenth, in many of them, the rights of the people are specifically 
mentioned; but where the rights of the people are not mentioned in 
those words, it is clearly the rights of the people that are being 
protected by these amendments.

  Now how did we go from a government, a Constitution that was created 
by God-fearing people who recognized God in their Declaration of 
Independence and who sought in their Constitution and those first 10 
amendments, to make sure that those God-given rights were never taken 
from us, how did we come to a society so conflicted as we are today? I 
think it is because of the three great lies that are about in our 
country today: that our Founding Fathers were atheists and deists, that 
they sought to establish a nonChristian Nation, and they wanted to 
erect a big wall of separation between church and State.
  What I want to do now for the next few minutes is to go back into our 
history and let our Founding Fathers speak for themselves.
  Let us see what the courts said. We will take a brief look at some 
things which the Congress did and said, and then we will look at our 
schools and what they were at the beginning of our country.
  We can look all we want in the Declaration of Independence and the 
Constitution for those words, a wall of separation between church and 
State or separation between church and State. Those words do not appear 
in either the Declaration of Independence or in our Constitution. And 
so we looked in constitutions to see where we could find those words, 
and we do find them. We find them in the Constitution of the United 
Soviet Socialist Republic, article 124. It says there, ``In order to 
ensure citizens' freedom of conscience, the church in the USSR is 
separated from the state and the schools from the church.''

[[Page H8010]]

  Those words may appear in their constitution, but they do not appear 
in our Constitution anywhere, so how did we get here? To refute these 
lies then that our Founding Fathers were atheists and deists, and they 
sought to establish a nonChristian Nation, let us let the Founding 
Fathers speak for themselves.
  Patrick Henry is called the firebrand of the American Revolution. His 
words ``Give me liberty or give me death'' every school child knows, 
but I would submit that the textbook from which those words appear for 
your child in his school have been bled dry of any reference to the 
Christian church origin of these words. These were spoken in St. John's 
Church, Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, 1775. This is what Patrick 
Henry said. ``An appeal to arms and the God of hosts is all that is 
left us, but we shall not fight our battle alone, there is a just God 
that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle, sir, is not to 
the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased 
at the price of chains and slavery, forbid it, Almighty God. I know not 
what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me 
death.''
  Was Patrick Henry a Christian? The following year, 1776, he wrote 
this. ``It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this 
great Nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on 
religions but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, 
people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here.''
  Benjamin Franklin was said to be a deist. Now a deist is said to be a 
person who believes that there is a God but does not bother praying to 
him, and this God is very powerful, he created the universe and he 
created this world, and he also set in place certain physical laws, and 
your destiny will be determined by how you relate to those laws, so do 
not bother praying to God. That is what a deist is. Let me read 
something about Benjamin Franklin and you tell me, Mr. Speaker, if you 
think he was a deist. The year is 1787. We are in Philadelphia and the 
Constitutional Convention is deadlocked. There may not be a 
Constitution.
  One of the issues was how to prevent big States from abusing the 
small States, and Benjamin Franklin, 82 years of age, the Governor of 
Pennsylvania, perhaps the oldest and most revered person in that 
Constitutional Convention, rose to speak. And this is what that deist 
said, and I cannot image how Members could conclude he is deist from 
these words. ``In the days of our contest with Great Britain when we 
were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine 
protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously 
answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed 
frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that 
kind providence, we owe this happy opportunity to establish our Nation. 
And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Do we imagine we no 
longer need his assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the 
longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God 
governs in the affairs of men. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground 
without His notice, is it probable that a new Nation cannot rise 
without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that 
except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I 
therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the 
assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in 
this assembly every morning before we proceed to any business.''

                              {time}  1700

  That precedent, Mr. Speaker, we honor today because we began today 
our session with prayer. Every day we do that.
  Thomas Jefferson was also said to be a deist. This is what he said:
  ``I am a real Christian. That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines 
of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be 
rallied to the unity of our creator, and I hope to the pure doctrine of 
Jesus, also.''
  On slavery, Jefferson wrote, ``Almighty God has created men's minds 
free. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. I tremble for my 
country when I reflect that God is just and his justice cannot sleep 
forever.''
  George Washington, our first President:
  ``It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible. Of 
all of the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, 
our religion and morality are the indispensable supporters. Let us with 
caution indulge the supposition, that is, the notion or idea, that 
morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both 
forbid us to expect that our national morality can prevail in exclusion 
of religious principle.''
  What would he have thought of removing the Ten Commandments from that 
courthouse in Alabama? In Washington's prayer book, he wrote:
  ``O eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words and work, 
wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the lamb, and purge my 
heart by thy Holy Spirit. Daily frame me more and more in the likeness 
of thy son, Jesus Christ, that living in thy fear and dying in thy 
favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the 
justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind 
and let the world be filled with the knowledge of thee and thy son, 
Jesus Christ.''
  John Adams, our second President, was also President of the American 
Bible Society and this is what he said:
  ``We have no government armed with the power capable of contending 
with human passions unbridled by morality and true religion.''
  And now listen to these words:
  ``Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It 
is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.''
  What would he say about removing the Ten Commandments from that 
courthouse in Alabama?
  John Jay, our first Supreme Court Justice:
  ``Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and 
it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian 
Nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.''
  That is our first Supreme Court Justice. What would he say about the 
refusal of our Supreme Court today to hear this case?
  John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, also President of the American 
Bible Society and, by the way, he told his friends that he valued his 
presidency of the American Bible Society above his presidency of the 
United States. These are his words:
  ``The highest glory of the American revolution was this. It connected 
in one indissolvable bond the principles of civil government with the 
principles of Christianity. From the day of the declaration, they, that 
is, the founders were bound by the laws of God which they all 
acknowledged as their rules of conduct.''
  And then somewhat later on, Calvin Coolidge, Silent Cal, a President 
of very few words. He was known for this. I understand that at one 
banquet a lady sat next to him, and she told the President that she had 
made a wager with one of her friends that she could get the President 
to say at least three words that evening. He responded to her and his 
response was the only words that he uttered that evening and those 
words were, ``You lose.''
  Calvin Coolidge said, ``America seeks no empires built on blood and 
forces. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty 
God.'' He later wrote, ``The foundations of our society and our 
government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be 
difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be 
practically universal in our country.''
  We could quote from a great many more of our Founding Fathers. 
Essentially all of them made comments like this. But let us turn now to 
our courts, to the Supreme Court.
  In 1811, there was a case the People v. Ruggles. This was a person 
who had publicly slandered the Bible. This case got to the Supreme 
Court and this is what they said:
  ``You have attacked the Bible. In attacking the Bible, you have 
attacked Jesus Christ. In attacking Jesus Christ, you have attacked the 
roots of our Nation. Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity 
manifests itself in the dissolving of our civil government.''
  What would that court say about the removal of the Ten Commandments 
from the courthouse in Alabama?
  In 1845, there was a case Vida v. Gerrand. This was a lady teacher 
who

[[Page H8011]]

was teaching morality without using the Bible. I have no idea how that 
case got to the Supreme Court, but it did, and this is what they said:
  ``Why not use the Bible?'' This is the Supreme Court. ``Why not use 
the Bible, especially the New Testament? It should be read and taught 
as a divine revelation in the schools. Where can the purest principles 
of morality be learned so clearly and so perfectly as from the New 
Testament?''
  And then in 1892, the Church of the Holy Spirit had made the 
contention that Christianity was not the faith of the people and that 
came to the Supreme Court and this is what they said:
  ``Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and 
embody the teachings of the redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that 
they should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our 
civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.'' This is 
the Supreme Court. ``No purpose of action against our religion can be 
imputed to any legislature, State or national, because this is a 
religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this 
continent to this present hour, there is a single voice making this 
affirmation.''
  The justices went on citing 87 different legal precedents to affirm 
that America was formed as a Christian Nation by believing Christians.
  What happened? In 1947, a Supreme Court enlarged by Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt from seven to nine did a 180-degree about-face, and they 
repudiated 160 years of precedents in a ruling which talked about this 
wall of separation between church and State. They misunderstood as many 
today what our Founding Fathers hoped to accomplish by that first 
amendment.
  We might spend a moment looking at why that was the first amendment. 
Our Founding Fathers did not come here to get rich. As a matter of 
fact, many of them left riches to come here to get freedom. Freedom 
from what? There were two tyrannies that they came here to escape, some 
one, some the other, and some both. One was the tyranny of the church. 
In England, the Episcopal Church was empowered by the state so it could 
oppress other religions. On the European continent, it was the Roman 
Church that was empowered by the state so that it had the power to 
oppress other religions. And then, of course, there was the tyranny of 
the crown, this divine right of kings and emperors. I think it is no 
accident that in 1791 when our Founding Fathers wanted to make crystal 
clear what they meant in the Constitution, they wanted to say 
explicitly in those first 10 amendments what was implicit in the 
Constitution, that the first two addressed these two tyrannies from 
which they sought to protect themselves. It is very interesting that 
the establishment clause of the first amendment, that Congress should 
enact no law relative to the establishment of a religion, that a major 
architect of that was a Roman Catholic, Charles Carroll, for whom 
Carroll Creek in Frederick County is named, for whom Carroll County in 
northern Maryland is named. You see, in old Virginia, Roman Catholics 
could not vote and in colonial Maryland, not only could Roman Catholics 
not vote but Jews could not vote. To their great credit, our Founding 
Fathers recognized when it came time to write the Constitution, and 
those first 10 amendments, that that is not what they came here to do, 
to discriminate, to deny, and so they chose a person who had been 
discriminated against, a Roman Catholic, to be a major architect of 
that first amendment. Clearly what they wanted to do, and they say it 
over and over, and the courts have said it, that what they wanted to do 
was to prevent the State from empowering any one religion so that it 
could oppress others. They had no fear of religion itself. They had no 
concern about people of religion being in government. They had no 
concern about God being in government. They mentioned God in the 
Declaration of Independence. We have ``In God We Trust'' on our coins 
today and every bill that you carry in your purse. We began this day 
with prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, we recognize there 
is a God. ``In God We Trust'' is in marble over the chair of the 
Speaker. Clearly these are the roots of our country. How could we have 
wandered so far away?
  Ever since 1947, no Supreme Court has ever gone back for any verdict 
dealing with this subject that repudiated 160 years of precedents 
before that.
  Let us move now to the Congress and look at a couple of things that 
the Congress did and said. The first of these is in 1854. Humanism and 
Darwinism were sweeping the country and there was an assertion that 
America was not a Christian Nation. The Congress studied this for a 
year and after a year, on March 27 of 1854, the Senate Judiciary 
Committee issued its final report. These words are from that report:
  ``The first amendment clause speaks against an establishment of 
religion. The Founding Fathers intended by this amendment to prohibit 
an establishment of religion such as the Church of England presented or 
anything like it but they had no fear or jealousy of religion itself 
nor did they wish to see us an irreligious Nation.'' This is the 
Congress. I love these next words. With the time we spend in front of 
the television set, we no longer have a vocabulary or the ability to 
produce these kinds of phrases:
  ``They did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and 
the whole public action of the Nation the dead and revolting spectacle 
of atheistic apathy. Had the people during the revolution,'' and this 
is the Congress, the Senate, ``had the people during the revolution had 
a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that revolution 
would have been strangled in its cradle.''
  At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, 
the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, 
just not any one sect or denomination. The object was not to substitute 
Judaism or Islam or infidelity but to prevent rivalry among the 
Christian denominations to the exclusion of others. ``Christianity must 
be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure rests. 
Laws will not have permanence or power without the sanction of 
religious sentiment, without the firm belief that there is power above 
us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices.''
  Consistent with this philosophy, the Continental Congress bought 
20,000 Bibles to distribute to their new citizens, and for 100 years, 
at the beginning of our country, this Congress appropriated money to 
send missionaries to the American Indians.
  Let me read further from this report from the Congress:
  ``In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity. By its 
great principles, the Christian faith is the great conserving element 
on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of our free 
institutions. That was the religion of the Founding Fathers of the 
Republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their 
descendants.''

                              {time}  1715

  Let us turn now to our schools. And the Congress in 1854 made this 
statement about our schools. It said: ``The Congress of the United 
States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in our schools.'' 
Consistent with that, it was used.
  The New England Primer was used for over 200 years. Notice how they 
taught the alphabet.
  ``A. A wise son makes a glad father but a foolish son is heaviness to 
his mother.
  B. Better is little with the fear of the Lord than abundance apart 
from him.
  C. Come unto Christ, all you who are weary and heavily laden.
  D. Do not do the abominable thing, which I hate, sayeth the Lord.
  E. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.''
  The ``McGuffey Reader,'' used for 100 years. Not too many years ago 
it was brought back to some of our schools when for a number of years 
the achievement scores had considerably dropped and we graduated over 1 
million people who literally could not read their high school diplomas, 
and, out of desperation, they brought the ``McGuffey Reader'' back to 
some of the schools, because when we had that in our schools, the 
graduates could read when they graduated from school.
  The ``McGuffey Reader.'' This is what it says: ``The Christian 
religion is the religion of our country. From it our derived our 
notions on the character of God and on the great moral Governor of the 
universe.'' This is the author of

[[Page H8012]]

the ``McGuffey Reader": ``On its doctrines are founded the 
peculiarities of our free institutions. From no source has the author 
drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred scriptures. For all of 
these extractions from the Bible I make no apology.'' That is the 
author of the ``McGuffey Reader.''
  Of the first 108 schools in our country, 106 were distinctly 
religious. The first of these was Harvard University, named after a 
beloved New England pastor, John Harvard.
  This is what they said in their student handbook: ``Let every student 
be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main 
end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is 
eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only 
foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.''
  For over 100 years, more than 50 percent of all of the graduates of 
Harvard University were pastors.
  We now expose these three great lies: the wall of separation, those 
words appear only in the Constitution of the Soviet Republic. They are 
not in our Constitution, they were not intended by our Founding 
Fathers. Their only intent was to make sure that the state never 
empowered any one religion so that it could oppress others.
  Clearly in letting the Founding Fathers and the courts and the 
Congress and the schools speak, it is very clear that our Founding 
Fathers were not atheists and deists, that they did intend to establish 
a religious Nation.
  We have changed. What have we reaped? America 100 years ago had the 
highest literacy rate of any nation on Earth. Today we spend more on 
education than any other nation in the world, and yet since 1987 we 
have graduated more than 1 million high school students who cannot even 
read their diplomas.
  We spent more money than any other nation in the industrialized world 
to educate our children, yet SAT scores fell for 24 straight years 
before finally leveling off at the bottom in the 1990s, and there they 
remain, if you watch your papers. There they remain at the bottom.
  In a 1960 survey, 53 percent of America's teenagers had never kissed 
and 57 percent had never necked, that is to hug and kiss, and 92 
percent of teenagers in America said they were virgins in 1960.
  Just a little personal anecdote. I got my doctorate at the University 
of Maryland in 1952, just in this time period, in a little building at 
the highest point on the campus there, Memorial Hall, a brick building 
that still stands. Just over the hill from there were girls' 
dormitories, and the dean of women would not let the girls go barefoot 
because she said it was too sexy.
  How have we changed? Today, instead of that, we have coed dorms, and 
I am afraid far too many coed rooms at the University of Maryland.
  By 1990, just 30 years after 1960, 75 percent of American high school 
students are sexually active by 18. In the next 5 years, we spent $4 
billion to educate them how to be immoral through trumpeting the 
solution of safe sex, and it worked. One in five teenagers in America 
today loses their virginity before their 13th birthday, and 19 percent 
of America's teenagers say they have had more than four sexual partners 
before graduation.
  The result? Every day 2,700 students get pregnant, 1,100 get 
abortions, 1,200 give birth. Every day another 900 contract a sexually 
transmitted disease, many incurable. AIDS infection among high school 
students climbed 700 percent between 1990 and 1995. We have 3.3 million 
problem drinkers on our high school campuses, over half a million 
alcoholics in any given weekend in America. Thirty percent of the 
students population spends some time under the influence of alcohol.
  A couple of years ago a young woman in a high school in Oklahoma 
wrote this poem as a new school prayer:

     Now I sit me down in school
     Where praying is against the rule.
     For this great nation under God,
     Finds mention of him very odd.
     If scripture now the class recites
     It violates the Bill of Rights.
     Any time my head I bow
     Becomes a Federal matter now.
     Our hair can be purple, orange, or green.
     That's no offense; it's a freedom scene.
     The law is specific, the law is precise.
     Only prayers spoken out loud are serious vice.
     For praying in a public hall
     Might offend someone who has no faith at all.
     In silence alone we must meditate,
     God's name is prohibited by the State.
     We are allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
     And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.
     They have outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
     To quote the Good Book makes me liable.
     We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
     And the 'unwed daddy' our Senior King.
     It is inappropriate to teach right from wrong,
     We are taught that such 'judgments' do not belong.
     We can get our condoms and birth controls,
     Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.
     But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
     No word of God must reach this crowd.
     It is scary here I must confess,
     When chaos reigns the school's a mess.
     So Lord, this silent plea I make:
     Should I be shot, my soul please take.''

  Our Nation, which used to lead the world in every arena, now leads 
the world in these areas:
  We are number one in violent crime, number one in divorce, number one 
in teenage pregnancies, number one in abortion, number one in illegal 
drug abuse, and we are number one in the industrialized world for 
illiteracy.
  Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured this country for 5 years, asked 
what was there about America that made it so special. He summed up his 
lengthy visit in 1831: ``I sought for the key to the greatness and 
genius of America in her great harbors, her fertile fields and 
boundless forests; in her rich minds and vast world commerce; in her 
universal public school system and institutions of learning. I sought 
for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution.
  ``But not until I went into the churches of America and heard her 
pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her 
genius and power. America is great because America is good; and if 
America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.''
  Would Alexis de Tocqueville understand why we took the Ten 
Commandments out of that courthouse in Alabama?
  In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared a National Day of Humiliation, and 
these are his words:
  ``We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We 
have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have 
grown in numbers, wealth and powers as no other nation has ever 
grown.''
  And, Mr. Lincoln, the growth from then on has been uninterrupted and 
today we are something that you could not even have imagined then.
  ``But we have forgotten God,'' he says. ``We have forgotten the 
gracious Hand, which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched 
us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that 
all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of 
our own.''
  Could you have a clearer description of where largely we are today in 
our attitudes?
  ``Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-
sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too 
proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us then to humble 
ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and 
to pray for clemency and forgiveness.''
  Abraham Lincoln said this to our Nation. We need to hear it again: 
``It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining 
before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to 
that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that 
we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, 
that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.''
  Most of this present generation have not forgotten from whence we 
came. They never knew. Our textbooks have been bled dry of any 
reference to the Christian heritage of our country.
  Abraham Lincoln understood that this Nation was a new experiment, 
that it might not be successful, because four score and seven years 
later, and if you do the arithmetic that takes you back to the 
Declaration of Independence, four score and seven years ago our fathers 
founded on this continent a new Nation, conceived in liberty and 
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We are now 
engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation or any nation so 
conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

[[Page H8013]]

  Then he went on to say they were met on a great battlefield of that 
nation and we come here to dedicate that to those who fought and died 
here.
  Then he ends that Gettysburg Address with almost a prayer: ``This 
government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not 
perish from the Earth.''
  Let me end with where I started. We opened our day's business today 
in this House with prayer; we did the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, 
in which we recognized that we are in a Nation under God; and over the 
Speaker's Chair inscribed in marble in large letters are the words ``In 
God We Trust.'' And yet at the same time we now have required the 
removal of His commandments from that courthouse in Alabama.
  I submit that if our textbooks had not been bled dry of the Christian 
heritage of our country, if in fact our leaders today would go back and 
read the Federalist Papers to understand the milieu in which our 
Constitution was written, that they would understand very clearly that 
our Founding Fathers never could have imagined that we would have 
interpreted that Establishment Clause as requiring freedom from 
religion, and that is what they are trying to do. They clearly meant it 
to assure freedom of religion.
  Those are two very different concepts, Mr. Speaker, and my prayer is, 
my hope is, that our leaders today will go back for a refresher course 
in our history, look again at our Founding Fathers and who they were 
and what they stood for and what they fought and what they died for and 
what they said and what they did in their Congress and what they did in 
their Supreme Court and what we taught in our schools.
  If we did that, Mr. Speaker, those Ten Commandments would be hauled 
back as quickly as one could to that courthouse in Alabama, because 
their presence there clearly is not at any variance with any of the 
principles of our Founding Fathers.
  As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, they would be appalled that we had 
so misinterpreted their assurance that never should the State empower 
any religion so that can could oppress others. They would ask us, How 
could you have misunderstood? Didn't we make it clear to you that we 
were talking about an establishment of religion? Wasn't it clear from 
all of our personal statements, from all of what we did in our courts, 
from what we said in our Congress, that we believed that God was 
essential in our Nation?
  Certainly children should pray in schools. Certainly the Ten 
Commandments should be in public places. We are a Christian Nation, 
established by Christian people, and I hope, Mr. Speaker, that our 
leadership in our courts and in our Congress and in all of our States 
go back and review our history so they can understand from whence we 
came, because if we do not, Mr. Speaker, go back and understand from 
whence we came, I am concerned about where we are going.

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