When I lecture on speechwriting to college students, I sometimes ask them who said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

If I get an answer at all, the answer is usually Abraham Lincoln. And the answer is accurate. Except that Jesus said it first, in Mark 3:25: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

The difference between Lincoln’s era and our own is that Lincoln could be confident that his audience would know that he was quoting Jesus, without him attributing the quote. No speaker today would dare make such an assumption.

Indeed, as Stephen Prothero notes in his current book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know –- and Doesn’t, the United States may be one of the most religious countries on earth, but it is also a nation of religious illiterates.

Prothero backs up this assertion with surveys documenting Americans’ ignorance of the Bible:

-- Only half of American adults can name even one of the four Gospels.

-- Most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible.

-- Only one-third know that it was Jesus – and not Billy Graham – who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

-- A majority of Americans think the Bible says that Jesus was born in Jerusalem.

-- Ten percent of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

Significantly, the younger a person is, the less that he or she is likely to know about the Bible. And “born-again” young people are only marginally better informed than their peers.

This is serious, says Prothero, because young people cannot properly understand literature or history without a basic knowledge of the Bible.

According to Prothero, there are 1,300 biblical illusions in Shakespeare alone –- to say nothing of other English and American authors. The student who doesn’t know who Ishmael was, for example, will never comprehend the first line of Melville’s Moby Dick.

As for history, the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock makes little sense unless students understand that the Pilgrims made the perilous crossing to America so that they could enjoy freedom of worship. Similarly, they can’t fully understand the American Revolution without studying the “Great Awakening” -- the religious revival of the 1730s and 40s that inspired Americans to have no king but God. Nor can students understand the abolitionist movement that led to the Civil War without taking account of the role that religion played in turning people against slavery.

If Americans know little about the Bible, says Prothero, they know even less about the basic texts of the world’s other great religions. This is a serious handicap in a world where religion clearly matters a great deal.

Prothero argues that the Bible should be taught in schools, as it once was. Contrary to popular belief, there is no constitutional impediment to teaching the Bible as literature. The Supreme Court has ruled that the study of the Bible and religion in the classroom does not violate the First Amendment as long as it is presented objectively, as part of a secular program of education.

Prothero then goes one step further. He notes that there are now more than 1,200 mosques in the U.S., and more Hindu temples than in any country outside of India. So study of the Bible alone is not enough; he says that every U.S. high school should have a mandatory course on the religions of the world.

But is the study of the Bible and religion in the schools possible in an era of culture wars? Prothero says it is, but it will require that the Secular Left and the Religious Right reach a compromise. “The Secular Left will need to yield on the dogma that religion has no place in the public square,” says Prothero. “The Religous Right will need to give up its desire to use the public schools for proselytizing purposes.”

Such a compromise will not be easy to effect. But considering the potential consequences of our young people growing up in ignorance of the Bible and religion, we owe it to ourselves to try.

About 25 years ago, I read a book called Presidential Courage by John B. Moses, M.D. and Wilbur Cross. It was a fascinating history of our nation’s chief executives, written from a medical point of view.

In addition to the familiar stories of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, Franklin Roosevelt’s paralysis, Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack and John Kennedy’s back problems, the book chronicled such lesser-known medical episodes as Grover Cleveland’s secret surgery for cancer (kept secret lest word of the President’s illness worsen the financial panic that gripped the country in 1893), and the lung abscess that plagued Andrew Jackson for the rest of his life after a duel in 1806 left him with a bullet embedded in his chest.

The chapter on Abraham Lincoln was particularly interesting. When Lincoln was ten, he was kicked in the forehead by a horse. There was no diagnosis at the time, because he appeared not to have been seriously injured. But medical opinion today holds that his skull was probably fractured on the point of impact, deeply enough to cause brain damage. This was probably the cause of the severe vision problems Lincoln experienced in later life, and may have contributed to his recurring bouts of chronic depression.

The authors also argued that Lincoln was afflicted with “Marfan’s syndrome”, a rare genetic heart disease for which there still is no cure. Further, they explored the little-known fact that Lincoln was suffering from smallpox when he wrote and delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863 –- which may have contributed to the brevity and tone of his most famous speech.

Whether or not Lincoln had Marfan’s syndrome –- which would have killed him within a year, had he not died at the hands of John Wilkes Booth –- is still being debated by medical experts. But the smallpox diagnosis was confirmed just last month in an article published by two researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

A few days before Lincoln left for Gettysburg, his son, Tad, was confined to bed with a high temperature. The doctor had misdiagnosed Tad’s illness as scarlet fever. Actually, it was smallpox, and when Lincoln left for Gettysburg, he carried the same disease in its incubation period.

On the trip back to Washington, immediately after giving his speech, Lincoln was seized by a severe headache, violent sweats and utter exhaustion. As there is no evidence that Lincoln was ever immunized against smallpox, there was at least a 30 percent chance that he could have died, according to Dr. Armond S. Goldman, the lead author of the UTMB study. Fortunately, he recovered, and was able to return to work about three weeks later.

Even in the shadow of a potentially fatal illness, however, Lincoln retained the saving humor that sustained him through even the darkest days of the Civil War. When his doctor told him he had smallpox, Lincoln asked him if he had passed through the White House waiting room on his way in.

Yes, replied the doctor, and he noted that it was jammed with people.

“It’s always full of people,” said Lincoln. “Do you have any idea what they are there for?”

“Perhaps I could guess,” ventured the doctor.

“Yes, Lincoln quipped, “they are there, every mother’s son of them, for one purpose only: namely, to get something from me. For once in my life as President, I find myself in a position to give everybody something!"

Writing is a solitary occupation. If you freelance, you’re even more isolated than most, since you miss being part of a communications team. (OK, maybe you don’t miss it, but you can still get lonely at times.) And if you’re a freelance speechwriter … well, you’re the closest thing to one of those holy hermits who lived in remote caves in the desert during early Christian times.

Happily, there is hope. Ragan Communications, which sponsors this blog, has a new web site called, MyRagan.com (http://www.myragan.com).

MyRagan.com functions as a sort of cyber water cooler for communicators who want to share ideas and keep abreast of new developments in the communications world. There’s also a useful jobs board and a place to post your resume.

So far, over 5,000 communicators have signed up –- from abroad as well as from the U.S. – so this site looks promising. Ragan had been promoting it by offering free educational and training materials, which I think is a first for them.

So have a look. It might be that this site will become the preferred cyber water cooler for communications professionals –- both domestic and international.

Mitt Romney’s Mormonism appears to be causing as much concern to Mormons as to some orthodox Christians, according to an article in today’s New York Times.

The problem is that Romney is offering what might be called a “Mormon Lite” version of his faith whenever he speaks in public. For example, when Romney was interviewed on 60 Minutes, he said, “I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy” –- notwithstanding the fact that his own Mormon ancestors had plural marriages.

The Mormon church outlawed the practice over a century ago but, according to the Times, Mormons are taught to understand that polygamy had a theological and historical context in the church, which Romney seemed to reject.

Similarly, when he was asked where he thought Jesus would return to earth at the time of the Second Coming, Romney replied that Jesus will return to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, “the same as the other Christian tradition.”

Not so, say other Mormons, who claim that Jesus will land in Missouri. It is apparently an article of faith for the Mormon church that “Zion will be built upon the American continent.”

It will be interesting to see how the controversy over Romney’s faith will affect the next presidential election.

The situation is analogous to the presidential election of 1960, when John Kennedy’s Catholicism made some Americans anxious. The U.S. had never before had a Catholic in the White House, and there were those who wondered how a Catholic president could reconcile his oath of office with his allegiance to a foreign pope. Even today, any Catholic who aspires to high office has to walk a fine line on the issue of abortion.

John Kennedy tried to defuse the controversy by saying that he was a Catholic “by accident of birth.” This answer may have satisfied some Protestants, but it also disappointed many Catholics –- in particular, conservative writer and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley replied to JFK’s declaration by writing a column about how another Catholic politician, Hillaire Belloc, had handled anti-Catholic bigotry over fifty years before.

Early in the 1900s, Belloc was campaigning for a seat in the British Parliament when a heckler demanded to know if he was a “papist.”

Never a man to mince words, Belloc pulled a rosary from his pocket and replied: "Sir, so far as possible I hear Mass each day and I go to my knees and tell these beads each night. If that offends you, then I pray God may spare me the indignity of representing you in Parliament."

The crowd cheered, and Belloc won the election.

Why can’t politicians talk like that today?

Today is the twentieth anniversary of President Reagan’s speech in Berlin where he issued his famous challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The story has often been told how Reagan’s speechwriter, Peter Robinson, was advised by senior State Department officials that the Berlin Wall was no longer a big issue with the people of West Berlin, so the President should devote his speech to other matters.

Robinson was skeptical, and his own conversations with people he met in West Berlin during the preparations for the President’s visit convinced him to include the line in the speech. Reagan concurred, and the line stayed in.

As the President neared the platform at the Brandenburg Gate, Robinson tells us that he turned to his aide Ken Duberstein and said, “The boys at State are going to kill me, but it’s the right thing to do.”

History concurred. Less than three years after Reagan uttered the famous line, the wall came tumbling down.

Another chronicler of the Reagan years, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweitzer, says that there is both a prologue and an epilogue to this story. He recounts both in his book, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism.

The prologue was in two scenes. The first scene was twenty years earlier, when then-Governor Ronald Reagan debated Senator Robert Kennedy on CBS. When the subject of the Cold War came up, Reagan suggested that the Soviets could demonstrate their peaceful intentions by tearing down the Berlin Wall.

The second scene took place eleven years later, in 1978. While preparing to run for President, Reagan made a tour of Europe with his foreign policy advisor Richard Allen. Their itinerary included Berlin, so Reagan could see the wall first-hand. Reagan and Allen actually entered East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, and had a look around. While they were there, they witnessed a scene that Reagan never forgot. A passing shopper was forced to drop his bags by the East German police, who spent next few minutes probing him and the contents of his bags with the muzzles of their guns. It was a grim reminder of the realities of life under Communism.

The epilogue occurred in 1990, when Reagan made his last visit to Berlin. The wall was down by then, and he was greeted with shouts of, “Thank you, Mr. President.” There was even a song written to commemorate the occasion called, “The Man Who Made Those Pussyfooters and Weaklings Feel Ashamed.”

To me, the prologue is more interesting than the epilogue. It shows that Reagan’s embrace of Peter Robinson’s line was no whim of the moment. Twenty years before, and doubtless long before that, he knew it was the right thing to do.

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan also discussed the New York Times article on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism that I cited in my own post on Monday. Andrew’s web site may found at http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com.

A Mormon reader of Andrew’s took exception to the Times article, saying that Mormons in fact believe that at the Second Coming, Jesus will appear on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and will also appear at the New Jerusalem in America. A further discussion of this issue may be found on a Mormon web site, www.mormonmentality.org.

I mention this because while I merely cited the Times article, I don’t wish to be a party, even indirectly, to misrepresenting anyone’s religious beliefs.

That said, I think the argument I made in my post still stands. If Mormons believe that Jesus will return to earth on the Mount of Olives and in America, and Mitt Romney omits the latter appearance in order to make Mormonism appear more acceptable to orthodox Christians, then he is still pulling an artful dodge.

Why can’t he be as frank about his Mormonism as Hillaire Belloc was about his Catholicism?

Just when it seems impossible to dredge up any more secrets about the life of John F. Kennedy, journalist David Pitts has written an eye-popping book called Jack and Lem, which details JFK’s intimate, 30-year friendship with a gay man.

Kirk LeMoyne (“Lem”) Billings met Jack when they were teenagers at Choate School for Boys in 1933. They were an odd couple, even then. In contrast to Jack –- Irish, Catholic, Democrat and new money –- Lem was establishment to his fingertips: Mayflower ancestors, Episcopalian, Republican and shabby genteel rather than rich.

Nevertheless, the two boys were drawn together by a shared contempt for authority and an unquenchable love of fun. From Choate to Dallas, the two spent every moment they could together. “Jack made a big difference in my life,” Lem would say in his later years. “Because of him, I was never lonely.”

Lem’s affection was reciprocated, despite the fact that Jack knew, almost from the beginning of their friendship, that Lem was gay.

Jack and Lem were inseparable within days of meeting each other, but Lem soon decided that being Jack’s boon companion wasn’t enough. In June of 1934, unable to contain his passion any longer, Lem wrote Jack a letter while Jack was in the hospital, recuperating from one of his frequent bouts of illness. The letter contained a sexual overture. Lem’s letter has not survived, but Pitts quotes Jack’s reply: “I’m not that kind of boy.” Incredibly, the two remained close despite the pain and embarrassment that this episode caused them both.

Even more incredibly, Jack not only involved Lem in all his election campaigns, from his first run for Congress in 1946 to his successful bid for the presidency in 1960, but kept him in almost constant attendance -- in Washington, Hyannis Port and Glen Ora, the Kennedy’s weekend retreat in Virginia. Jackie Kennedy, who liked Lem, sometimes found his omnipresence exasperating. She once complained that Lem Billings “has been a houseguest every weekend of my married life.”

Jack wanted Lem with him even though Lem had little aptitude for politics and could have proved a serious embarrassment had his sexual orientation ever become public.

Just how serious may be inferred from the arrest of Walter Jenkins, a top aide to Jack’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, during the climactic weeks of the presidential election of 1964. Jenkins was nabbed by the D.C. police for having public sex with a man at the local YMCA. Despite LBJ’s best efforts to kill the story, it made the papers and might have tipped the balance had the election been close. And Walter Jenkins did not have a guest bedroom reserved for him at the White House so he could come and go as he pleased. Lem Billings did.

Why did Jack insist on having Lem on hand, despite the obvious risk he posed? According to Gore Vidal, another gay member of the Kennedy circle, Lem was Jack’s “idiot friend” –- a court jester who amused him during his off hours, ran his errands and cleaned up his messes.

But there is ample evidence that there was more to Lem than that. A successful advertising executive, Lem was the inventor of “Fizzies” –- an instant sparkling drink that children could make by dropping an effervescent tablet into a glass of water. The tablet made an instant hit with the kids, and grew into a ten-million-dollar business during the 1950s and 60s.

Jack thought enough of Lem’s abilities that he offered to put him in charge of the newly-created Peace Corps. (Lem declined, and the post went to Jack’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver.)

So what lay behind Jack’s attachment to Lem? David Pitts suggests that it was because Lem was practically the only person with whom Jack was completely at ease. Lem had known Jack since they were boys. He shared all of Jack’s secrets, and knew all of his faults. And he yet never judged him or gave him anything but unqualified love and unquestioning loyalty.

With Lem, Jack felt safe. With Lem, he could be a boy again –- joking, teasing and playing outlandish pranks.

Apparently, Jack reverted to adolescent horseplay for the much same reason that Lincoln and Reagan told funny stories –- to escape, if only for a moment, from the crushing burdens of the presidency.

Because Lem worshipped Jack, he didn’t mind being the butt of his hero’s jokes. This was just as well, since Jack’s humor could often be sharp-edged.

Pitts describes how Lem once returned from a visit to Europe, bubbling over with the news that he had become chummy with screen legend Greta Garbo. The two had actually toured the Italian Riviera by car together.

Lem’s bragging on his friendship with Garbo finally got under Jack’s skin, and he decided to get even. He invited both Garbo and Lem to an intimate dinner at the White House with just him and Jackie. But he arranged for the actress to arrive first, so he could enlist her in a little plot he had hatched to take his pal down a peg or two.

So when Lem arrived, feeling rather full of himself, Garbo pretended that she had never met him before. Abashed, Lem spent practically the whole dinner desperately trying to remind the actress of the times the two had spent together, only to have each effort met by a frosty denial from Garbo.

Finally, the three conspirators –- Jack, Jackie and Greta -– could contain their amusement no longer and burst out laughing. Lem was let in on the joke and, although shaken, he pulled himself together and managed to enjoy the rest of the party.

The date was November 13, 1963. Jack left for Dallas little more than a week later. After that night, Lem never saw his friend again.

Jack’s death devastated Lem. He lived on for another 18 years as a keeper of the Kennedy flame, transferring the tenacious loyalty he felt for Jack first to Jack’s brother, Bobby, and then to the Kennedy children. When he died in 1981, it was a cohort of young Kennedy men who carried his coffin to his final resting place.

An unnamed friend of Lem’s contributed an observation to David Pitts’ book that might well serve as an epitaph for this gentle, self-effacing but nonetheless remarkable man: “His closest friends were his heroes. To them, he gave everything he had to give.”

Reading David Pitt’s new book about John Kennedy and his gay friend, Lem Billings, made me nostalgic for the early 1960s. So I rented Advise and Consent, the 1962 movie based on Allen Drury’s blockbuster novel about the seamy underside of Washington politics.

The film, although dated, is still worth watching, if only for Charles Laughton’s spread-eagle performance as Seab Cooley, the senior senator from South Carolina.

Laughton was English, but he was also a consummate actor. With his shock of white hair, rumpled white suit, outrageous tie, honeysuckle drawl and foxy expression, he is so convincing as an old-time southern pol that he looks and sounds uncannily like Sam Ervin, the North Carolina senator who presided over the Watergate hearings over a decade later.

In the novel, Alan Drury says something about Seab Cooley’s rise to power that should be especially heartening to speechwriters. He says this:

It had begun, like so many careers in American politics, with a speech. The story is a familiar one in the annals of the Congress: there was a high school valedictory, and the hero had delivered it with extraordinary fire and brilliance; or there was a debating contest, and the hero defeated ten other eager lads and carried off all honors; or the featured speaker at the county political rally dropped dead and the hero took his place with an impromptu oration that made strong men weep and maidens swoon; or casting about for a speaker at the annual Fourth of July picnic, somebody said, “Why not get young Seab Cooley? He’s just back from law school and ought to know a thing or two.” And they did, and there was awe and shouting and dancing in the streets.

The story of a career launched by a speech is indeed a familiar one in American politics. It was a speech at New York’s Cooper Union in February of 1860 that first made Abraham Lincoln a national political figure, rather than just another Republican from the Midwest. It was the “Cross of Gold Speech” at the Democratic convention of 1896 that catapulted an obscure former Nebraska congressman named William Jennings Bryan to the nomination and made him, at the age of 36, the youngest presidential candidate ever. It was a televised campaign fundraiser on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964 that started Ronald Reagan on the road to Sacramento, and then to Washington. And it is because of the speech he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004 that Barack Obama may yet become our nation’s first black chief executive.

Speechwriters of the world, take heart! We may toil away anonymously, but the work we do is important. Even in this cyber age, a really good speech can still produce “awe and shouting and dancing in the streets.”

Monday’s Supreme Court decision against the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was a blow for the First Amendment. McCain-Feingold restricted the airing of “issue ads” by unions, businesses and other “special interest” groups immediately before an election if they mentioned a candidate by name.

Self-styled reformers argued that banning the ads was the only way to keep special interests from exerting undue influence in elections. Otherwise, said the reformers, the special interests would run roughshod over the average voter. As I see it, there are at least two problems with that argument.

First, who are these strange creatures called “special interests”? Who makes up the membership rolls of unions, corporate political action committees, pro-environment or pro-development associations, pro-life or pro-choice groups, pro- or anti-gun lobbies or any of the other “special interests”? Isn’t it millions of ordinary Americans like us?

Are ordinary Americans more likely to make their voices heard as individuals – for example, by writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper -- or by acting in concert with others who feel as they do on a particular issue? If individual voters choose to amplify their voices by acting together, isn’t this democracy in action rather than a conspiracy by the special interests?

Second, it is precisely during the period before an election that voters most want to know a candidate’s position on say, abortion -- or gun control or global warming. Issue ads are an effective way of making these positions known. As such, they provide information to the voters.

Yes, say the reformers. But don’t these ads often engage in “dirty” politics? That’s a fair point, I grant you. But politics is messy by its very nature. So is democracy. So is freedom of speech.

Attempting to make elections “fair” by limiting freedom of speech usually ends up limiting free speech without making any real improvement in the quality of our political campaigns.

Reformers, it seems, are always trying to take the politics out of politics. It can’t be done. And sometimes you can do real harm to the First Amendment by trying.