The backlash against Attorney General William Barr’s call for religious freedom now includes a demand that his remarks on the subject be scrubbed from the Justice Department Web site. The demand, according to Indiana Public Media, is being made by a group that reckons Mr. Barr violated his constitutional oath when he delivered the other day at Notre Dame University a speech on the importance of religion and religious liberty.
We hope that the Justice Department stands its ground. The attorney general’s remarks at Notre Dame are one of the most important statements of support that religious Americans have had at a time when a campaign is underway to cast religion as a cover for bigotry. We are in a time when the left seeks to intimidate those who would cast religion as an inherently good thing for America.
The complaint against Mr. Barr, from a group called Faithful America, faults him for quoting John Adams. It was the second president who said: “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
The point Messrs. Adams and Barr were making is not that atheists be excluded from society. It is rather that without religion, not even our Constitution could keep human passions under control. Were religion banned or circumscribed, the result would be anarchy. “This Adams quotation,” says the complaint filed against Mr. Barr “is a personal opinion rather than binding Constitutional interpretation.”
Even were that true, what of it? The fact is that the opinion shared by Mr. Barr and John Adams was shared by nearly all of the Founding Fathers, including most pointedly George Washington. He made the point in his Farewell Address. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” Washington said, “religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
No man could “claim the tribute of patriotism,” Washington averred, if he sought to “subvert” religion and morality. “The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.” He suggested that neither our property, reputations, or lives would be secure were “the sense of religious obligation” to “desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice.”
Then the famous words: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” The words are prophetic, which we know from the last century, when the rise of the Soviet Union and the other communist states, where religion was excluded as a matter of socialist law, emerged as what President Reagan called an “evil empire” that snuffed out the liberty of believers and non-believers alike.
The communist states turned against all religious persons — Jews and Moslems and others as well as Christians. That history is out there to mock any claim that Mr. Barr is seeking but to promote the establishment of Christianity. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. It was worded that way to protect against disestablishment, too.
Attorney General Barr is hardly the first in our time to have made the points he made at Notre Dame. Few, though, have put the issue as eloquently as Mr. Barr did. He put the Justice Department precisely where the results of the 2016 presidential campaign signaled America wants it to be. The protest just filed against Mr. Barr’s remarks underscores nothing so much as the need for him to have delivered his remarks in the first place.
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