German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reported to have said:
God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.
⛪ Separation of church and state
Please know that I am a firm believer in freedom of religion. Everyone should be free to believe whatever they want to believe and I do not believe that any one religion should be empowered to impose their beliefs upon me! I don’t care if it’s Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam or Scientology. Believe what you want, but don’t impose your beliefs upon the American people.
Our country is supposed to stand for freedom from religious persecution. Unfortunately, human nature has led to the creation of organized religion and men have used it to divide us and to gain power over people at great cost to humanity.
We religiously (pun intended) hear from "conservatives" that America’s founding fathers established the country under Christian doctrine — that we are a “Christian nation” and should operate accordingly.
The notion that our country’s roots are explicitly Christian is wrong and actually disrespects the genius of the founding fathers.
✝️ ✡️ ☦️ 🕉️ ☪️ ☸️ ☯️ America is not a Christian nation
Deism is a philosophical belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems. Deists believe in a supreme being who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws and who, after creation, is absent from the world.
This belief in reason over dogma helped guide the founders toward a system of government that respected faiths like Christianity, while purposely isolating both to prevent them from encroaching on other practices so as not to dilute the overall purpose and objectives of either.
There is a ton of evidence that can be found to support this position. One of the most concrete examples is a treaty of peace and friendship between the United States and Tripoli that was approved by George Washington. It explicitly stated:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion …
Do you know that the Pledge of Allegiance — originally written in 1892 — had no reference to religion? None. And neither did our currency.
That began to change in 1954, when President Dwight Eisenhower — a Republican — signed a bill to insert “under god” into the Pledge. The year 1954 was one of political upheaval in the United States. Sen. Joseph McCarthy crusaded against the “godless” Communists. Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress for the last time in the 20th century.
In June of that year, by voice votes and with little discussion, the Senate and House passed a resolution adding two words, ''under God,'' to the Pledge of Allegiance. The change was made to draw attention to the difference between the system of government in this country and ''godless Communism.'' Introducing his resolution in the Senate, Sen Homer Ferguson, Republican of Michigan, declared
'I believe this modification of the pledge is important because it highlights one of the real fundamental differences between the free world and the Communist world, namely belief in God.'
A year later, on July 11, 1955, Eisenhower signed a bill to require “In God We Trust” to appear on all paper and coin currency.
This is a recent modern rewriting of history!
Why is this OK?
Once again, this is an area where fairness and common sense should reign supreme.
Most Americans do not accept the GOP’s view of America as a “Christian nation.” For example, two-thirds of U.S. adult respondents (67%) said in a Pew Research Center survey the Constitution was written by humans and reflects their vision, not necessarily God’s vision. And a similar share (69%) says the government should never declare any official religion. (Respondents were offered the opportunity to reply “neither/no opinion” in response to each question, and substantial shares chose this option or declined to answer, suggesting some ambivalence among a segment of the population).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey finds that Christians are much more likely than Jewish or religiously unaffiliated Americans to express support for the integration of church and state, with White evangelical Protestants foremost among Christian subgroups in this area. In addition, Christians who are highly religious are especially likely to say, for example, that the Constitution was inspired by God.
But even among White evangelical Protestants and highly religious Christians, fewer than half say the U.S. should abandon its adherence to the separation of church and state (34% and 31%, respectively) or declare the country a Christian nation (35% and 29%).
This begs the question: Why does the GOP continue to push this agenda? As best I can discern from a lot of research, the GOP saw the United States becoming more secular, more ethnically diverse, more socially and environmentally conscious and therefore significantly harder to control. (And the issue plays to a vocal minority that comprises the "base" (primary voters), which dominates the agenda of its party!)
If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.
Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape, leading many people to wonder what the future of religion in America might look like.
It begs another question: Could the shift in GOP policy be attributed to these trends? I hope that sooner, rather than later, the Republican Party will awaken to the fact that its current strategy is not working and might, in fact, be making matters worse.
If you take a step back and really consider what’s happened over the past 50 years, the GOP chose to align with evangelical Christian leaders around the country to devise a purposefully long-term strategy to reverse the secularization of the United States and prevent the loss of the white majority. At the same time, they worked to embed evangelical Christian “morality” in our laws and thereby imposing their religious beliefs in violation of the Constitution’s establishment clause, which kicks off the Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment therefore prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion." The amendment also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another. It also prohibits the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion.
Yet, the GOP has continued to foster the inclusion of Christianity into our government. The Trump administration doubled down! As you may be aware, Betsy DeVos, a devout Christian who served as secretary of education under Trump, found ways to expand federal support for religious schools and organizations. DeVos tweaked a wide range of federal education policies, large and small, to bolster faith-based organizations. She changed regulations, for example, to make it easier for members of religious orders to access federal financial aid and expanded federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness to cover clergy members. And she created new protections for faith-based campus organizations at public universities.
As a result, Trump-enabled folks like Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert denounced the separation of church and state as “junk” and proclaimed that:
The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church.
Forget constitutional interpretation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. What do you think Boebert is really saying? It appears to me that she’s tacitly elevating the public standing of one religion above all others. If so, she is not alone. In the annual American Values Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center last year, 63% of Republicans agreed that being Christian is an important part of being truly American. How did we get here? Where has our education system failed us? This feels like indoctrination to me. And, this implies that non-Christians are less than fully American and that their views can lead the country away from its true identity.
Does that work for you? Do you want to live in a theocracy?
I want to be clear: Morality matters! It absolutely does. And a belief in the Divine (in whatever form you feel that takes) has been a source of incredible moral clarity for millennia. But it is also the source of great conflict any time one sect believes its definition of divinity is superior to another. All we need to do is look at the violent attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 from a group whose charter is founded on genocidal ideas. Morality matters. Right and wrong matters. Good and evil matters.
But none of us should want another person's religious texts to be interpreted and weaponized against us. Whether that's Islamic extremists weaponizing the Quran or Orthodox Jews weaponizing the Torah or evangelical Christians weaponizing the New Testament.
😇 The arbiters of morality
I am a spiritual person and I’ve read the Old Testament many times. I'm also fascinated by spiritual teachings and believe that the figures depicted in ancient religious texts, from Moses to Jesus, from Abraham to Buddha, were spiritual people whose teachings are profound and have much to contribute to the moral fabric that formed the basis of our earliest civilizations. There have been amazing and truly transcendent spiritual leaders throughout history who have brought people together in love and harmony.
But we can't ignore and must consider how many tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions) have died over the last 5,000 years in the name of religion! Sadly, we do not need to look back over distant history to see what happens when religion is weaponized and humans believe they are acting in the name of their god. The barbaric acts of Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the violence being perpetrated against the Jews around the world demonstrate how religion can be used as a justification for acts of oppression and aggression.
Beyond war and strife, blindly following any religious leader denies human nature. I’m not meaning to judge or demean anyone's religious beliefs — I only care when one religion is being imposed upon me by my government.
And let's consider the less than respectable track record of many modern day religious leaders who hold themselves out as the arbiter of morality.
To me, it seems reasonable that if you’re going to hold yourself up to the world as a pious person and you’re going to try to lead men, women and children from a supposedly moral pulpit, then you damn well should be held to a higher standard. Unfortunately, the sheer number of scandals surrounding religious leaders undermines their moral authority and should give all of us pause before blindly having faith in any individual interpretation of what God is, or how he or she “demands” we live in order to be viewed favorably by him or her.
Remember Jerry Falwell Jr.’s rise and fall; or Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker rape and fraud scandals, or the Bishop Eddie Long sex scandal, or Jimmy Swaggart’s sex scandal; or the Vatican leaks scandal that exposed stories of financial corruption, including bribery as well as an internal investigation which revealed that Church outsiders had blackmailed homosexual clergymen. And then there’s the Boston sexual abuse scandal, which involved numerous cases of abuse by Catholic priests that the church covered up or how the church has vilified and demonized the Jewish people over the millennia, including being complicit in the Holocaust. At some level, religious orthodoxy has the tendency to be as polarizing as the far left and the far right in politics. The prejudice is insidious, and it appears to be never ending. But I am not saying all of this to disparage Christianity. I point all of this out because it only serves to highlight why the church (or any religious institution) has no business being involved in governing or, at least, the government of the United States of America.
📚 Religion in the classroom
Do you believe religion has a place in the classroom? Let me be clear on this point: If you want to send your children to a private religious school (as I did), that is wonderful and no one should ever be able to deny you that right. But when it comes to public education, that is an entirely different matter.
It represents the end of the centuries-old constitutional ban on direct state aid to the teaching of religion. And remarkably, it does all this in the name of religious liberty, giving the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment primacy over the establishment clause found in the exact same amendment.
Please know that I am not anti-religion and I don't subscribe to Karl Marx's belief that "Religion is the opium of the masses." But I do believe that over time the trendline is going in the wrong direction and we must find a way to unite our country and not find fulcrums that continue to divide us.
The only way we can resolve this imbalance is to "unrig" the system and allow fairness to reign over the land and ensure that the common sense "silent majority" is properly represented in D.C.
😜 Ending with some levity
Comedian Patton Oswalt discusses the dawn of man and how civilization wouldn't exist without religion. It's entertaining and poignant.
