The Nine [48]
From this ruling, it was just a short jump for the Court to impose ever-greater limits on mandatory observances of any kind in public settings. The next key moment came in 1962, when the Court banned prayer in public schools, even when children were given the right not to participate. In Engle v. Vitale, Justice Hugo Black employed the same reasoning as Jackson did in prohibiting mandatory salutes of the flag. “When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain,” he wrote. A year later, the justices banned mandatory Bible reading in public schools as well.
The backlash to these rulings was not long in coming. Prayer and Bible reading had been staples of American public education for generations. The court-ordered end to such religious observance in public schools was soon followed by the chaotic late 1960s. The cause-and-effect was debatable, but for many Christians there was a clear connection between the increased secularization of public life and the licentiousness and disorder that followed. In this period, Rev. Billy Graham, in an indirect way, and then Rev. Pat Robertson, in explicit terms, merged their religious messages with a conservative political agenda. In the election of 1980, Rev. Jerry Falwell mobilized what he called the Moral Majority to defeat a Democratic president and a generation of liberal senators. By the time Bill Clinton was elected president, the evangelical movement represented the core of his conservative opposition. The twin pillars of their agenda were clear—one against legalized abortion, the other for public religious expression, especially prayer in schools.
By the midnineties, after Casey, there was no point in pushing an antiabortion agenda on a Court that had made up its mind on the issue. But the issue of religious expression was wide open. Curiously, although the evangelical movement had amassed enormous political clout, it had not cultivated comparable leadership in the legal arena. But all social movements in America eventually find a strategist who sets their course in the courts—their Thurgood Marshall or Ruth Bader Ginsburg—and this was the moment when the evangelicals discovered theirs. Oddly enough, their savior, Jay Sekulow, turned out to be a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.
Sekulow’s mother went to high school with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but Jay didn’t just come from a different generation than the new justice—he chose to live in a different world. He was born on June 10, 1956. His family tracked the migration pattern of the country as a whole—city to suburb to Sun Belt, in his case, Brooklyn to Long Island to Atlanta. An indifferent student, unmotivated rather than unintelligent, Sekulow initially planned only to attend a two-year college and then get a job. But junior college ignited a desire, if not exactly a roaring bonfire, for more education. Too lazy to look elsewhere, Sekulow settled on a college close to his home, Atlanta Baptist College. He worried what his parents, moderately observant Jews, might say about his choice, but his father encouraged him. “Baptist-shmaptist,” the senior Sekulow said. “Go ahead. Get yourself a good education.”
Sekulow was drifting through the mandatory Bible classes when a friend, whom he regarded at the time as a “Jesus freak,” challenged him to study the Book of Isaiah. Sekulow knew that Jews were supposed to believe that someday the Messiah would come—but that he hadn’t come yet. Still, in reading the passages about the Messiah, Sekulow thought he recognized the description—it was Jesus Christ. Sekulow still considered himself a Jew, but one who believed that Jesus was the savior. In time, Sekulow learned that there were other Jews who shared his belief, and they were called “Jews for Jesus.” At a ceremony