Anyone dealing with Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow would do well to take a look at a few things.

First, Kenneth C. Davis wrote a wonderful op-ed in Friday's USA Today talking about the case and its merits. He takes John Ashcroft to task for stating that God is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the national anthem, and our coins: "Well, he was 80 percent right -- but he was wrong on the most important item. The Constitution is the creation of 'we, the people' and never mentions a deity aside from the pro forma phrase 'in the year of our Lord.' The men who wrote the Constitution labored for months. There's little chance that they simply forgot to mention a higher power. So what were they thinking?"

Despite Bush and Ashcroft's insistence that the law comes from God, the Constitution disagrees. Though the Declaration of Independence may mention God, it is not a legal document and was written thirteen years before the Constitution was ratified. It is not a body of law but a persuasive essay indicating why the Second Continental Congress went to war against the British. The Constitution is a legal document, one that sets the most basic parameters for our country -- and a compelled belief in God or a god is not one of them. Nor is the belief that God is the source of the liberties found in the Constitution. As far as it is concerned, all people are born with inherent natural liberties, as any document that comes out of the Enlightenment would believe.

Second, the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom offers a plethora of compelling reasons why, even if I believe that God is the person from whom all law comes, the state is not obliged to believe the same thing. Railing perhaps against a monarchy that believed it was divine and infallaible, the Act comes out against

the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time[. . . .] to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles, on the supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency, will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own[. . . .]

Thus, even though the Bush Administration may claim that the ultimate authority of law is God, that can only be the opinions of the people who compose the Bush Administration. Officially, the Administration can only believe that law comes from the Constitution; for it to think otherwise would render it guilty of basing its opinion on a particular set of priniciples in which not all of the people believe.

In an attempt to lambast the authors of the First Amendment, it has been said that they themselves were not atheists. Of course they weren't! But that doesn't mean that they didn't understand that religion has a divisive power as well as a unifying one. Like any other system of personal identity and classification, it separates everyone into two groups: "us" and "them." It draws the "us" together while pushing the "them" away (and remember that this is not true of all religion, but Western Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions tend to be more exclusive than they are inclusive. The Church of England in 1786 was certainly an exclusionary body, not welcoming even into government service those who professed a different religion).

If the founders of our country had intended for the ultimate source of law to be God, they would have said as much in the Constitution. But they didn't, so He isn't. The fact that the words "under God" were added to the Pledge years after its original writing confirms that there was an ulterior motive behind it -- to separate the Christian "us" from the Godless Soviets. The original Pledge omitted a god because we were not pledging our allegiance to a God or acknowledging that he had anything to do with our country; we were pledging our allegiance to the United States, not a nation "under God," which implies that He is somehow leading the way in this grand experiment in democracy. He is not; the people of the United States are.

In a parable in Matthew 22, Jesus talks about a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. After the parable, the Pharisees ask him whether or not, given his position that he "[cares] for no man; for [he does] not regard the position of men," it is right to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus replies, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." Even Jesus knew that church and state should be separated.