The last word.(American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation )(Book review)

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, by Jon Meacham (Random House, 416 pp., $23.95)

THIS book is a great poultice on the simmering antagonism between the ultra-separationists (we must not be required to say "under God" in our pledge of allegiance) and those who plead co-existence. No--Jon Meacham documents--religion was hardly extraneous to the development of the Constitution or the birth of the Republic. But the Founders did not incorporate religion in the Constitution. Church and state would be separate (and only contingently unequal). There was not even, in 1787, church/state division over the philosophically sundering question of slavery. There wasn't anything like a significant corporate challenge by Christian stalwarts to a Constitution that protected slavery, nor was there any serious effort by strict-enforcement zealots to disavow Christian overtones in the republican enterprise (Meacham usefully supplies the Biblical passages selected by every president at oath-taking time). What happened in the 20th century was a polarization on church-state over such issues as busing children to church schools. In some quarters, constitutional hygiene was taken to preposterous lengths. Justice William O. Douglas pointed out that the absolutist position would require the conclusion that public firefighting facilities could not constitutionally be used to douse fires in churches.

What has very much been needed is such a voice as this of reasoned calm. American Gospel confirms that religion had a great deal to do with the genesis of the nation, and Meacham deduces that religion should reasonably continue to inform the citizenry, but always with regard to the protocols of separation. On some conundrums, notwithstanding that lines are clearly crossed, it's wisest just to ignore the syllogistic short-circuits. James Madison, who basically signed on to Thomas Jefferson's unfortunate concept of a "wall of separation," was confronted with such problems when Congress came up with a chaplain--a manifest breach of The Wall. Mr. Madison leaned back and said in effect, Forget the problem. Just do it. And it was done, as also myriad other trespasses, like tax-protected religious enterprises and the presidential inaugural ceremony.

With magisterial sweeps, traveling from the Founding to the beginning of the 21st century, Meacham (who is managing editor of Newsweek) disposes of the internecine absolutists, but acknowledges that there are unresolved and bitter questions brought on--most divisively--by the Supreme Court's intervention into the City of God when it ruled, in Roe v. Wade, that abortion was a constitutional right. President Jimmy Carter would comment privately that he did not believe that Jesus would have accepted abortion (or capital punishment), but as president Carter was under obligation not to the word of Christ, but rather to the word of the Constitution. One has to believe that such reservations as his were privately held by other presidents and lawmakers who, while standing by their Christian faith, defended a Constitution that protected slavery.

Meacham examines, as expected, problems posed by some on the Christian Right. Religion, he reminds the reader, is not in most people an isolatable element of life. "Humankind could not leave off being religious even if it tried. The impulse is intrinsic." He cites implied sanction of religion in the words of William James. "We and God have business with each other," the philosopher told a scholarly audience in Edinburgh; "and in opening ourselves to His ...