


Jews were trapped in a double bind. We claimed allegiance to an American "tradition" of religious tolerance, pluralism, freedom, and separation. But we certainly knew, long before each Dec. 25, that in all but name the United States still was--as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story had once declared--a "Christian country." We worshiped at Jefferson's "wall of separation" without ever learning that the author of that famous phrase had drafted Virginia's "Bill for Punishing Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers," or that the First Amendment was more a monument to federalism and to Protestant definitions of denominational autonomy than to religious freedom.


None of this was clear to me at the time. Christmas was only a "national" holiday. Sunday was merely "a day of rest." Christians deserved to monopolize and control access to positions of public and private power. As Jews, accepting the Christian terms of emancipation, we would behave ourselves by tucking Judaism into our private closets. A double standard, surely, but so much a part of the natural American order that it could hardly be questioned.

Years later, sufficiently provoked by assorted life experiences to examine some cherished assumptions, I prepared a course on religion and the state and, for a book I was writing, read widely in American religious history. The Christian imagery that pervaded American history, from the Puritans to the present, was inescapable. Yet generations of American Jews had been taught that the fondness for "Old Testament" metaphors in American public discourse displayed the fundamental continuity between ancient Jewish and modern American values--when in fact these metaphors expressed a flourishing Christian triumphalism.

Similarly, the First Amendment, that constitutional beacon of religious tolerance, had merely deprived the new federal government of power in the realm of religion, while carefully reserving to the states ample freedom to preserve a Christian commonwealth within their borders, if they were so inclined.

The role of religion in American public life is likely to remain what it has been: pervasively Christian, yet prudently concealed. In a country where 95 percent of the population is nominally Christian, this continues to pose obvious problems for Jews--the more so now that the traditionally united front of Jewish support for strict separation has sharply fragmented. The enthusiastic advocacy of the Lubavitch for menorahs on public property and public funds for yeshivas has shattered the once monolithic "Jewish" position on church-state issues. With their "establishment" battles securely won, Jews must now decide whether they can tolerate their own religious symbols in the public square, where there are already Christmas trees and creches, or whether it remains too risky to demand the free exercise of Judaism, consistent with the promise of the First Amendment.

The more comfortable I became with Judaism, and with Jewish observance, the less I could defend the separationist position. Now, it seems a curiously American form of Jewish self-denial whose primary function is to separate religion from life, precisely contrary to Jewish teaching. I can no longer pretend that separation effectively neutralized Christianity. The United States, after all, is a country whose history, calendar, language, and, more than occasionally, law reflect the Christian piety and purpose that framed so much of the American colonial and national experience.

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