By Bernie Hendricks | Brookings
Searchlight contributor Rick Snedeker recently added his voice to the secular humanist nationalist chorus harmonizing across these pages over the past several years.
Snedeker was incensed over the Republican-led passage of Senate Concurrent Resolution 604 during the 2026 South Dakota legislative session, a formal declaration urging the citizens of our fair state to “seek the Lord Most High for his healing presence and mercy upon South Dakota” (Brookings Register, 2-10-26).
According to Snedeker, America’s Founders, “… acutely aware of the catastrophic dangers of religious dominance of governments… sought to carve such overweening sectarian influence out of their new democratic republic’s governance.”
He denounced SCR 604 as a symbol of the unconstitutional “infiltration” of traditional Judeo-Christian moral values into “American life and governance” in our current era and fumed about “Christian Bible classes in public schools,” repealing “laws legally allowing abortions,” and “designated congressional prayer weeks and chaplains” – all of which Snedeker called “corruptions of church-state separation.”
Mr. Snedeker’s revisionist interpretations in this matter are pure nonsense. The Founding Fathers would be shocked at his caricature of early American constitutional history and fictitious claims about religious exclusion.
On Sept. 25, 1789, (from The Annuls of Congress), Congress formulated a request to President George Washington for a National Day of Thanksgiving to “Almighty God.” This happened to be the same day that the final wording for the First Amendment was approved. Washington established the proclamation, Oct. 3, 1789.
One of America’s most famous founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, himself a product of the Enlightenment and rationalism advocate, openly encouraged and promoted Christian moral principles in public education. While U.S. President (1801-1809), Jefferson “…chaired the school board for the District of Columbia, where he authorized the first plan of education adopted by the city of Washington. This plan used the Bible and Isaac Watts’ Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707, as the principal books for teaching reading to students” (America’s God and Country).
School-initiated prayer was legal in America’s public schools for a full 174 years, from the ratification of the U.S. Constitution on June 21, 1788 through 1962. Only then did the Supreme Court rule, Engel v. Vitale, June 25, 1962, public school prayers to be unconstitutional. Such prayers, “with no compulsory engrossment by students or staff,” vanished into thin air and were forever thereafter condemned, school district by school district, across America.
Voluntary Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s prayer were legal in public schools for 175 years, until banned by the Supreme court in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, June 17, 1963.
The Ten Commandments, legally displayed in America’s public schools for 192 years, were subsequently banned by the Supreme Court in Stone v. Graham, 1980. Despite the “passive and noncoercive nature” of the display, the Court rejected the postings as being impermissible under the Establishment Clause, explaining, “If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the school children to read, meditate upon, and perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.”
The Constitution of the United States protects the freedom of citizens to openly practice any (or no) religion – providing such practices not lead to licentiousness or express deviant or socially violent behavior. These protections, however, were never intended to oblige official governmental indifference, or worse yet, hostility, toward Christianity.
Judeo-Christian moral principles have been, from the beginning of our Republic, the life blood of America’s national conscience.
Christianity, whose moral virtue was well recognized for promoting benevolence and good-will toward those of other faiths, was deemed to be an essential foundation for true pluralism, or true religious tolerance in America.
There is significant legal support for this guiding principle, including Charleston v. Benjamin, 1846 (Christianity cited as that “Noble safeguard of religious toleration”) and Lindenmuller v. The People, 1860 (“This liberty of conscience in matters of faith and practice is entirely consistent with the existence, in fact, of the Christian religion”).
Justice Joseph Story, appointed to the Supreme Court by President James Madison in 1812, served as an associate justice for 33 years. Known as the “Father of American Jurisprudence, Story pointedly affirmed, “One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is a part of the Common Law. There never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundations.”
Snedeker should have read SCR 604 more closely. It includes the very internal validation which destroys Snedeker’s entire thesis – President John Adams’ “Proclamation for a National Fast 1798.”
President Adams’ proclaimed, March 23, 1798: “The safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and blessing of Almighty God; and the national acknowledgement of this truth is not only an indispensable duty, which the people owe to him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety, without which social happiness cannot exist, nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed.”
SCR 604 concludes: “We call upon all those who are physically able and spiritually inclined to join us annually during the month of July, for a time of prayer and fasting, depriving ourselves of those temporary physical comforts so that we may be awakened to our need and hunger for God, humbling ourselves before Him, prayerfully seeking His face, asking for His forgiveness, forsaking all wickedness, and begging Him to bestow His healing, blessing, grace, and mercy upon us, so that we, our communities, our state, and our nation will be transformed into a people fit to be His own.”
God-fearing Americans all across South Dakota should wholeheartedly thank their Republican legislators for sponsoring this continuing resolution.
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