This article is quoted from The Alternate Approach, newsletter of the Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio. It was written by Robert S. Alley, a member of Americans United's Board of Trustees and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of Richmond. Alley's published books include: James Madison on Religious Liberty, The Supreme Court on Church and State, and Without a Prayer: Religious Expression in Public Schools.

While many members of Congress decry the lack of historical knowledge among our youth, the evidence is overwhelming that there is fundamental ignorance of American history in Congress itself.

The most recent evidence of that fact came to national attention last March when U.S. House members rallied to the side of Judge Roy Moore, an Alabama judge who was ordered on church-state grounds to remove a plaque of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom wall. The congressional defense was translated into House Concurrent Resolution 31, a non-binding measure that praised Moore and insisted: "The public display, including display in government offices and courthouses, of the Ten Commandments should be permitted."

The proponent of H.Con.Res.31 included Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.), who took to the House floor to contend that foes of Judge Moore's Ten Commandments display were wrong in saying they wished only to protect the Constitution. Scarborough argued this was true because, "The father of the Constitution, James Madison, stated while he was drafting the Constitution: `We have staked the entire future of the American civilization, not on the power of government, but upon the capacity of the individual to govern himself, to control himself and sustain himself according to the Ten Commandments of God.'"

That alleged Madison quotation has been cited frequently over the past 50 years, but never with a primary source. There's a reason for that: It is proper to state that Madison cannot be found to have said anything even vaguely similar to the words attributed to him.

David Mattern, an editor of the Madison Papers, in 1993 commented on the so-called Madison "quote." "We did not find anything in our files," he concluded, "remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent us. In addition, the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison's views on religion and government, views he expressed time and again in public and private."

Scarborough moved from his bogus Madison material to George Washington. The Florida Republican claimed the father of our country had stood up at his Farewell Address and said, "It is impossible to govern rightly without God and the Ten Commandments."

As a minor note, Washington did not deliver his address standing up, but rather sent it to a newspaper for publication. Further, Washington did not write the words Scarborough cited in his Farewell. Equally interesting, the editors of the George Washington Papers inform me that a computer check of the entire corpus of the first President's writing reveal not a single reference to the Ten Command-ments.

To make matters worse Scarborough, having disseminated two completely false statements, had the audacity to say that Thomas Jefferson agreed with the two comments that were never uttered.

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) took the floor to argue that religious liberty pioneer Roger Williams intended "to protect the church, not the state." This is patently false and misses the entire thrust of the Williams experiment in freedom of conscience brought to colonial Rhode Island atheists, Jews, agnostics, and all manner of dissenting Christians. He was banished from Massachusetts where the church was protected by the state.

Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala) returned to the fabricated statement attributed to Madison and followed with yet another alleged quote, this time from Jefferson. According to Riley, Jefferson said, "(T)he Bill of Rights are built on the foundations of ethics and morality found in the Ten Commandments." The editors of the Jefferson Papers at Princeton assured me they found no evidence that the Sage of Monticello ever said any such thing.

When the pro-Moore members of Congress concluded their time at the microphone they had referred to Thomas Jefferson five times, James Madison four times, George Washington twice, and John Adams once. Of those 12 references, 10 are completely false. Of the remaining two, one is a garbled misquote from Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, the other a reference to John Adams that seems genuine. Finally neither of the two quotes that have some degree of verifiability mention the Ten Commandments.

Relying almost exclusively on these egregious historical distortions, Republicans in Congress castigated their opponents as supporters of moral corruption. Rep. Scarborough, the most historically ill-informed of the lot, offered-with his voice in high-pitched piety-arguably the most ridiculous sentence in the debate. Citing the Madison and Washington quotes, he said, "Now, if the revisionists do not like that, that is fine, but please, do not insult Americans' intelligence, please do not try to do a verbal burning of our American history books."

Regrettably, the House passed H.Con.Res.31 by a whopping 295-125 margin. And many among that majority on March 5 had come to office decrying the sad state of public education. How would they know?