HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017392.jpg

4.2.12
WC: 191694

Mrs. Bakker has yet to make Mr. Dershowitz's acquaintance. But she said she went right out to watch "Reversal of Fortune" and added, "Every time he's on, I run to the television."

"One of my biggest desires now is to meet him," she went on. "He's our kind of people, a real down-to-earth, nice man."

Eventually, I did meet her. She kissed and hugged me and repeatedly blessed me in the name of Jesus. When she kissed me, so much of her makeup came off on my face that it took me several minutes and some hard scrubbing to remove it.

Several weeks later, I received a gift in the mail from Tammy Faye. It was a Passover Haggadah—the prayer book that is read at the Seder. We have a large collection of Haggadahs, some dating back hundreds of hears, many with beautiful illustrations of the Passover story. At our ecumenical Seder, which usually includes several dozen guests of all religions—we once invited Anwar Sadat’s daughter—we distribute the different Haggadahs among the participants, and each one reads a passage in the English translation. I try to make the passage selected for each guest relevant to their background. I purposely gave the Bakker Haggadah to a friend who reads very expressively and who focuses more on his delivery than on the content. He began to read about the reasons we eat matzo on Passover.

"This is the bread of affection that the people of Israel had to eat when they fled from Egypt."

So far so good. But then, it went on to describe why matzo had small holes:

"The holes in the matzo represent the wounds on the body of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who in his body was punctured during his crucifixion."

Not in the traditional Jewish Haggadah! Tammy Faye had sent me a Christian Evangelical rip-off of the Haggadah designed for use at Seders conducted by Jews for Jesus. I had perused it before distributing it to my friend to recite, so I knew what it contained. We all had a great chuckle at what Tammy Faye regarded as an appropriate gift for liberating her husband from bondage.

These stories and cases vindicating both freedom of, and freedom from religion, highlight one of the great ironies of the American experiment with separation of church and state. And it was surely an experiment. Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to separate religion and government, at least in theory. Our constitutional provisions remain among the strongest in the world. Yet we are the most religious democracy on the face of the earth. More Americans believe in God and go to houses of worship than in any other democracy. No Atheist and Agnostic can be elected to high office (though that was probably not always the case.) Indeed, in order to get elected, a candidate must loudly and repeatedly proclaim a deep belief in God and a strong commitment to "faith" (which has become the new political buzz word).

305

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017392