Before the Culture Wars
Lo, the Pilgrims gave thanks without a lawsuit.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, November 25, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Thanksgiving, more than any other holiday that decorates the American calendar, is revered as simply respite. Even the Beltway's political butcher shop closes. Tim Russert would rather spend Thanksgiving feeding his family than spooning a Chuck Schumer or Don Rumsfeld another chance to put the opposition's neck on the chopping block. The boss who forced any but the most mandatory work on this holiday would be guilty of sacrilege. Don't mess; Thanksgiving is holy. Or is it?

Maybe it would be safer to say it's just, you know, a nice day. One notices that as with Christmas now, many people don't even say "Happy Thanksgiving" but just "Have a nice holiday." To suggest religious practice to the secular celebrant is thought to give offense. To call Thanksgiving "holy," even as metaphor, today risks making the tail feathers stand on end for large swaths of American people who more than ever, it seems, have become jumpy around religious belief.

Last year the Supreme Court deprived the factions of a grand pitchfork fight by declining to take on the constitutionality of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we began this year with the political bonfire known as the Schiavo case. On campuses, the phrase "intelligent design" causes professors to see religious vampires intent on snatching the corpus of Darwin's sacred texts.

All this tension has had a cumulative political effect. North of the Mason-Dixon line, many otherwise normal people discussing politics reach a moment when the voice drops--as if risking the dungeon--to whisper, "I'm worried about the Religious Right."

It all began around 1980 with the formation of the Rev. Falwell's Moral Majority. Though the group went out of business in 1989, those who worry about a Christian jihad here still invoke the Falwell name. Somehow religious tensions won't abate; if anything, they're worse. In 2004, after concluding they lost the election by overlooking church-going "values voters," many Democrats nonetheless argued that the party shouldn't sacrifice its largely secularist public values with an appeal to moralized voters. The results of that doctrinal debate--the Temptation of the Democrats--will become manifest in the 2008 presidential primaries.

Thanksgiving dinner must have been a cause of some discomfort for many of these folks, especially at that familiar moment when all those gathered at the table turn quiet. As if compelled by the antique code of a more settled religious time, they incline the communal gaze toward the paterfamilias for the ritual saying of once-a-year grace. And Dad knows that Aunt Hattie, who passed the prior hour boiling Dick Cheney in oil, won't much like releasing religious karma into the atmosphere.

One may hope that not too many dinners were disrupted yesterday by Thanksgiving donnybrooks between Dad and Aunt Hattie over the threat to America from the Religious Right. Of course no such tension attended the first Thanksgiving with the Cape Cod Pilgrims, unless the new historiography has refuted what we know about them. They at least agreed on Who to thank for their good fortune. The Mayflower Compact's first line reads: "In the name of God, Amen." Normally one finds the Amens at the end, but the never-shy Pilgrims put the Last Word up front. It ends, "Anno. Dom. 1620." Fortunately, the Mayflower Compact preceded the Supreme Court, though some might disagree with that.

Not much had changed some 170 years later, when George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation put him squarely in the God box. It begins: "Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor . . ." Thank heavens Washington isn't alive today to be interviewed by Michael Moore on intelligent design, for the Father of our Country eerily invokes "that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be."

Books have been written on these religious disagreements, and the bible on it all remains James Davison Hunter's 1992 "Culture Wars." Prof. Hunter divided the camps between settled or orthodox values-holders and evolving or progressive values-seekers. It is persuasive. But during the September confirmation hearings for John Roberts nomination to be chief justice, Sen. Dianne Feinstein got closer to the source of the troubles. Sen. Feinstein recalled how the issue of John F. Kennedy's "faith" and the Establishment Clause preoccupied the presidential election 45 years earlier. She asked Judge Roberts if he agreed with the sainted president that the separation of church and state is, as JFK said then to calm the anti-papists, "absolute."

Absolute? We should be so lucky to achieve the simplicity of a single word. One finds a revealing summary of what the flexible Establishment Clause has come to mean in the Heritage Foundation's just-published and valuable "Guide to the Constitution" (Regnery). Across the past four decades, the justices have fashioned from the rib of the First Amendment three conflicting ways to recognize religion's "establishment." They are: separationism, coercion and endorsement.

A columnist's limited time does not permit extended description of each approach. It does suggest, though, why the Supreme Court routinely enrages one side and then the other in the culture wars. Somewhere amid separationism and coercion one may discover why a public crèche is OK if Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is along for the ride; when a school's "moment of silence" is or is not constitutional; why prayers at high-school football games violate legal dogma; and not least whether uttering "under God" in the Pledge makes nonadherents feel "they are not full members of the political community" (Lynch v. Donnelly, 1984). Each time one of these Supreme Court decisions drops from the clouds, one side's resident army charges back up the hill to attack the cloud.

Here is my Thanksgiving prayer: O Lord, breathe wisdom into Justices Roberts and Alito. Deliver us from judges whose inconstant thoughts on what "religion" might mean condemn us to pitching unceasingly against the rocks of each other's deeply held beliefs. Give us a break, and we will give you thanksgiving.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

Ellie