They’ll be excused from praying. But that way everybody will know who prayed and who didn’t pray. That’s not a choice anyone should have to make in public—in a school or anywhere else. You know why?”
“Because it’s nobody else’s damn business if you pray or not!” Luke yelled.
“You got it!” Dickinson smiled broadly. “Religion is personal, and it’s a private matter for those who want it to be a private matter. Religion has nothing to do with Government, and Government must have nothing to do with religion. To make sure that in this country, everybody
would
be free to worship in his own way—would be free of any Government pressure to worship in the way the Government wanted him to—the Constitution set up what Thomas Jefferson called a wall of separation between church and state. And the Supreme Court has agreed with Tom Jefferson again and again.”
The lawyer loosened his tie and began to walk up and down the stage. “But these decency groups and morality groups and Americanism groups, they want the Government to line you up at eight o’clock every morning so you can get ready to pray. Does that sound like a free country to you? It’s
these
groups who are getting out of hand. If they keep getting stronger, what’s to stop some Government official—somewhere down the line—from telling you not to wear anything red because that’s the Communists’ color?”
There were some giggles in the audience.
“Oh, you think it can’t happen here?” Dickinson said. “Well, let me tell you something. In 1919 twenty-four state legislatures passed a law saying that if you hung a red flag out of the window, you were committing a criminal act. The next year, eight more state legislatures did the same thing. And so did some cities. Before that nonsense was all over, fourteen hundred Americans were arrested for breaking the Red Flag laws, and about three hundred of them wound up in prison. No Government craziness is impossible if people just let it happen. Freedom does not come with any guarantees, you know. You can lose it just by not paying any attention to those who are taking it away from you.”
As he returned to his seat, there was more applause from the students. Dickinson got up, at first seeming to bow, but he was actually looking for his banana, which was suddenly tossed up to him by a student in the first row.
“I sure wouldn’t want to be Matthew Griswold after that,” Maggie Crowley said to Nora Baines.
“Don’t engrave the winner’s cup yet, Maggie. You haven’t seen Griswold at work. I have.”
VIII
Matthew Griswold, pushing his eyeglasses down onto his nose, walked slowly to the lectern. He opened a thin manila folder, glanced at it, and looked out into the audience.
“Let me begin with a story,” Griswold said in a calm, clear voice that carried throughout the auditorium without any discernible effort on his part. “It’s a true story. Not long ago, a brilliant neurobiologist from Australia was lecturing at Harvard on how the brain works. At the end of his series of lectures, he said that the theory of evolution certainly accounts for man’s brain in its present physical state, but evolution cannot explain the mysteries of the mind. That is, the mysteries of thought, of imagination. Only something else, something beyond the capacity of science to explain, could account for these mysteries. This scientist did not actually say that these mysteries come from God, but someof those in the audience thought that was what he meant. And do you know what they did? They hissed him.”
Griswold paused. “I told you this story not because of that neurobiologist’s notion about the limits of science. I don’t know enough about the brain, or about evolution for that matter, to be able to tell whether he’s right or not about what he calls the mysteries of the mind. I told you that story because my friend here, Mr. Dickinson, makes so much of the individual’s freedom