Remarks at James Madison High School in Vienna, Virginia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, July 17, 1995

This past April a broad coalition of religious and legal groups - Christian and Jewish, conservative and liberal, Supreme Court advocates, and Supreme Court critics - put themselves on the solution side of this debate. They produced a remarkable document called "Religion in Public Schools: A Joint Statement of Current Law." They put aside their deep differences and said, we all agree on what kind of religious expression the law permits in our schools. My directive borrows heavily and gratefully from their wise and thoughtful statement. This is a subject that could have easily divided the men and women that came together to discuss it. But they moved beyond their differences, and that may be as important as the specific document they produced.

I also want to mention over 200 religious and civic leaders who signed the Williamsburg Charter in Virginia in 1988. That charter reaffirms the core principles of the first amendment. We can live together with our deepest differences and all be stronger for it.

The charter signers are impressive in their own right and all the more impressive for their differences of opinion, including Presidents Ford and Carter; Chief Justice Rehnquist and the late Chief Justice Burger; Senator Dole and former Governor Dukakis; Bill Bennett and Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO; Norman Lear and Phyllis Schlafly signed it together - (laughter) - Coretta Scott King and Reverend James Dobson.

These people were able to stand up publicly because religion is a personal and private thing for Americans which has to have some public expression. That's how it is for me. I'm pretty old-fashioned about these things. I really do believe in the constancy of sin and the constant possibility of forgiveness, the reality of redemption and the promise of a future life. But I'm also a Baptist who believes that salvation is primarily personal and private, that my relationship is directly with God and not through any intermediary. Other people can have different views. And I've spent a good part of my life trying to understand different religious views, celebrate them, and figure out what brings us together.

I will say again, the first amendment is a gift to us. And the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in broad ways so that it could grow and change but hold fast to certain principles. They knew - they knew that all people were fallible and would make mistakes from time to time. And as I said, there are times when the Supreme Court makes a decision, if I disagree with it, one of us is wrong. There's another possibility: both of us could be wrong. [Laughter] That's the way it is in human affairs.

But what I want to say to the American people and what I want to say to you is that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did not intend to drive a stake in the heart of religion and to drive it out of our public life. What they intended to do was to set up a system so that we could bring religion into our public life and into our private life without any of us telling the other what to do.