RELIGION AND THE CONSTITUTION By lr. William C. Kernan, Director, Christian Institute for American Democracy PROTESTANT group in Amer- I ica 1s circulating a petition to A Congress asking that the Consti- tution of the United States be amended to read, “We, the people of the United States, devoutly recognizing the authority and law of Jesus Christ. the Saviour and King of nations,” ete. All Christians pray and work for the recognition of Christ as Saviour and Lord, and many of us strive daily to the end that the kingdoms of this world may become the kingdoms of our God and His Christ. But a long and painful history of the formal recognition and establishment of religion by the state, has surely taught Protestants that Christ is not thereby exalted, nor does His religion, by any such arrangement, flourish in terms of justice and enlighten- ment and peace. We cannot legislate Christ into the hearts of men. The Pil- grims, the Puritans, the Methodists, the Huguenots, and many others, have suf- fered grievous things at the hands of state religions-——and, in causing that suffering, religion itself has been degraded by reason of the persecution of dissenters to which it resorted. That ix not honoring Christ, though it may be granting to Him a formal kind of recognition which He does not want or need. At a time when we struggle to preserve religious freedom and our other liberties, the claim of come Protestant Christians for formal state recognition marks the begin- ning of the long-sought alliance with re- ligion that the Fascist forces in America have desired. Totalitarian society, as dis- tinct from democracy, can be established in a variety of ways. It can be established by the legal recognition of the supremacy of a race, a class, or a religion. And alwavs it finally develops that those who do not be- long to the legally recognized group are denied the full rights of membership in that brotherhood which ought certainly to dis- tinguish a Christian society from all others. In a democracy like ours, which recog- nizes the equal rights of all groups and the supremacy of none, what would happen to those believers in Christ who do not agree with the tenets of the dominant group, and to the non-Christians, who compose a large part of our population, if we should adopt the suggestion that we change the Consti- tution 1 accordance with the proposal of some Christians? They would lose. They would be reduced to an inferior status. And America would be no longer a land where all have equal rights, but a land where certain classes of Christians would be particularly favored. Thix 1x a form of totalitarianism and, as all know who are familiar with the Fascist technique in America, it 1s the end that they assiduously seek. Had our forefathers thought that either religion or democracy would have been better subserved by the formal recognition of Christianity, they would have said