Religion: The Enemy of God

A brisk grey-haired zealot is Joseph Lewis, 46, onetime shirtmaker who calls himself “The Enemy of God.” As president of the Freethinkers of America, Inc. (30,000 members at $1 a year), Mr. Lewis does a thriving business in anti-religious books and sex manuals, busies himself at all times waging guerrilla warfare against the churches of his Enemy. Legalistically Freethinker Lewis hardly ever wins a battle. In the New York courts where he does most of his fighting, the judges are likely to be good Roman Catholics or devout Jews. Last week the Enemy of God was again trying to have the law on his adversary, unsuccessfully as ever.

Pending in the New York Supreme Court is a suit brought by Joseph Lewis to enjoin the Municipal Board of Education, on constitutional grounds, from using the Bible in schools. Dismissed by Justice William T. Collins last week was an application by Freethinker Lewis to have the Board’s defense answers stricken out. In a 14-page opinion Justice Collins declared the use of the Bible constitutional: “The law is astute and zealous in seeing to it that all religious beliefs and disbeliefs be given unfettered expression. Authentic freethinking involves the indubitable right to believe in God, as well as the unfettered license not to believe or to disbelieve in a deity. . . . Undisguised, the plaintiff’s attack is on a belief and trust in God. Such belief and trust, however, regardless of one’s own belief, have received recognition in State and judicial documents from the earliest days of our Republic. . . . ‘In God We Trust’ has become an American aphorism stamped on our coins.”

Few days later Freethinker Lewis was again in court, this time to file a brief in an appeal from dismissal of a suit his organization had brought against Manhattan’s rich old Trinity Church. Mr. Lewis charged that St. Paul’s Chapel, a satellite of Trinity was selling 10¢ postcards bearing what purported to be a prayer written by George Washington. The prayer, declared the Enemy of God, is “phony.” It is a revision of a letter Washington wrote to the Governors of all the States upon disbanding the Army in 1783. Freethinkers’ Trinity Church according to the Freethinkers’ Counsel Joseph Wheless, had altered phrases as follows :

Letter: I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the State in his holy protection…

I have the honor to be, with much esteem and respect sir, Your Excellancy’s most obediant and humble servant, GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Prayer:ALMIGHTY GOD, we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keepthe United States in Thy holy protection…

Grant our supplications, we beseech Thee, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

The Freethinkers’ suit was brought to restrain St. Paul’s Chapel from selling any more cards, to recover, on the ground of fraud, 20 ¢ paid for two such cards, to assess Trinity Corporation $5,000 punitive damages. Also the Freethinkers sought to have a tablet marking a pew that Washington used removed from the church. Trinity’s defense was that, although the prayer was admittedly altered, there was no fraudulent intent since the postcards gave the source of the true text—W. C. Ford’s Writings of George Washington.

Said the Freethinkers’ appeal brief last week: “Of course, not one buyer in thousands would or could have a suspicion that his card was not ‘kosher.’ . . . Trinity knows that Washington was rather notoriously not a Christian, was not a member of its chapel which he attended officially while President in New York, never knelt in prayer, and always walked out on its holy communion service. “

“To the extent of displaying and offering for sale the cards … the defendant is engaged in mercantile business. . . . Does a shopkeeper . . . owe no duty to a customer to sell honest goods because, forsooth—Trinity argues—’a stranger, a licensee, of his own free will’ comes into the open store … to buy a can of baked beans labeled . . . Genuine Boston Baked Beans, pays 10¢ for it, takes it home, and, on opening, finds it to be spoiled stewed prunes—has he no right to recover the price paid under a false label?”