Why Don’t They...

...Have One Nation Under God?

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

4/16/01

In 2000, I wrote a satirical piece, In the Beginning of Days: The One True Story of How Religion Got Its Start. It turned out to be the most controversial thing I’ve ever written. A couple of acquaintances stopped talking to me, and it generated some interesting mail, which essentially began with the premise that I was a Christian-hater, and then took one of two tracks: either I was going to hell, or I had just come from there. It was quite a response, especially since the story didn’t deal with Christianity, didn’t mention Christianity, didn’t even have anything that was a subtle allegory for Christianity.

What it did do, for those too lazy to read it, was explore the destructive individual and social effects the religious impulse can have, and how people will use it, both benevolently or malevolently, to manipulate their own social standing. In the story a surmise is built from false logic and leaves a primitive tribe of hunter/gatherers to believe that self-mutilation will aid the hunt. This peculiar practice leads to death, first among a scattered few, and then virtually the whole tribe, leaving only a disconsolate pair of survivors to spread the Word to a neighboring tribe. The Shaman of the tribe, apprehending the outcome of this belief, trumps it by devising a more mysterious and menacing religion.

I thought it was a great piece, and others thought so as well, and it went on to get published in the prestigious on-line e-zine, "Swagazine."

What got some of the True Defenders of the Faith so upset, I suspect, is that I had my shaman devise a religion that featured a big, bad, invisible and unknowable deity of immense power, and unfortunately, deities that are big, bad, invisible, unknowable and who have immense power have a way of strongly resembling other deities that share the same traits.

Of course, we live in an age and a place where I can write something like "Beginning of Days" and expect nothing worse than some hate mail and a few cold shoulders. The wrong place, such as Afghanistan, or the wrong time, such as Cromwell’s England, and I would face being whipped in the market square, or worse.

It took us a long time to reach a place where someone can write satire that points in a vague way at religion without being pilloried. We risk throwing it away.

I’m not anti-Christian, or anti-religion. When it comes to religious belief in others, I ask myself, WWJD? Or, as my friends at Americans for Separation of Church and State interpret it, "What Would Jefferson Do?"

Jefferson said this of religious belief: "If my neighbor believes in one god, or twenty, is of no concern to me. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Jefferson didn’t presume to control the religious faith of other individuals. By its nature, religion is non-provable, and Jefferson was cognizant of the fact that people would hold to their beliefs no matter what Jefferson or any other non-believer thought. Jefferson regarded most religious belief as irrational, and argued against such irrationalism, going so far as to create his own version of the bible, one with such irrational phenomena as miracles removed (it wound up a rather thin volume). Jefferson, naturally had opinions on the various religions, just as everyone has opinions on cats.

And yet he had a live-and-let-live attitude: "If my neighbor believes in one god, or twenty, is of no concern to me." He felt free to agree or disagree with his neighbor’s beliefs, but felt no obligation to share them, and regarded them as no threat, provided "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." It’s an imminently sensible approach.

He believed, with every fiber of his being, that the state should have a similar ‘hands-off’ approach to religion. Late in life, when asked what personal accomplishment gave him the most pride, Jefferson pointed to his constitution for the State of Virginia, in which he was able to create the first society in memory in which no man was compelled to support any church through taxation. He realized, correctly, that most of the savage struggles that had ravished Europe for centuries past boiled down to efforts by the faithful to bend the necks of the nonbelievers. Forcing any man to recognize any other religion was wrong, he reasoned, and the best way to avoid this was by building a wall of separation between the coercive power of the secular state and the churches.

He was right. America, for the most part, has managed to avoid a lot of the grief inspired by religious conflict which has beset most of the rest of the world. Not entirely, of course; we invoked God as we wiped out the "heathen savages", and of course, there was that little incident with the Mormons, when we drove them right out of the United States and into the desert. They survived and eventually became a state in America, but that was no thanks to the bible pounders of the time. We knew how dangerous religion could be in a subjugated group, and when we caught slaves praying to the white man’s god, we burned their churches and usually lynched the ringleaders. In the 19^th century, Catholics had to fight hard for the right to have their own private schools where they could teach the kids non-Protestant dogma. They weren’t even asking for tax subsidies, and the Protestants still tried to prevent it. It wasn’t enough that they believe in the same god; they had to believe in the same interpretation. Or else.

Compared to other countries, where religious differences could and often did lead to mass murder, this was nothing!

For Jefferson and the other Founders, 1688 wasn’t that far in the past. Less than a century gone at the time the Constitution of the United States was being drafted. Most of the Founders had been schooled in the horrific excesses of the Cromwells, and the endless strife and bloodshed throughout Europe as Protestants and Catholics struggled for control, taking time out on occasion to massacre the Jews.

They learned their lesson well. When they crafted the Declaration of Independence, they made one very oblique reference to a generic deity, and when they drafted the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution, they carefully removed even that vague mention, and declared that the government must uphold freedom of religion, and that it should never, ever, have religious tests for any position of trust or public office.

Where they anti-Christian? No. In fact, many of them were Christian, some quite devout in their beliefs.

But they understood that the greatest threat to freedom of religion was other religions, and that the government must not ever favor one religion over another.

They also understood a dirty little secret that doesn’t get discussed very much. The bible doesn’t support western liberalism. In fact, it’s largely antipathetic toward the whole notion that people should select their rulers and devise laws outside of scripture. Anything not biblical is sinful, and the concept of individuals selecting their rulers and devising their laws is foreign to the bible. The bible, simply put, does not mention democracy, or liberties on an individual level, two of the bedrock principles of most developed western nations. There are any number of instances where the Israelites, often at deistic behest, slaughtered other tribes for no other reason than that they were "sinners"; ie, non-believers.  America had slavery, in large measure, because the Bible sanctioned slavery.  Biblical xenophobia was used to justify the slaughter of natives.  We got most of our worst habits from biblical rationalizations.

Fundamentalist dogma is that what they believe is Truth, and anything that is not a part of that belief is, of necessity, false. This is the precise opposite of democracy, where a course of action is by consensus or plebiscite, and the only way it can work properly is by enforcing the right of people to hold different beliefs. Freedom of religion, under such a system, doesn’t just mean that a person is free to follow his or her own beliefs; it means that their neighbors are free to follow their own beliefs, and you may not impose your beliefs upon them, nor they their beliefs upon you.

When you happen to believe that your religion is the natural law of the universe, and exposure to different beliefs risks your immortal soul and that of your family, that can be quite a burden.  It makes tolerance of others a soul-endangering activity.

Most fundamentalist religions understand that they cannot impose this truth, but merely "spread the gospel" and try to convince people to join them. It may well be that they believe this simply because they lack the political clout to force the issue and would happily subjugate the non-believers and punish them for that non-belief, but as long as they lack political clout, the point is moot.

Most people of faith understand the need for a separation between church and state. They understand a few basic truths, made manifest by every theocracy in history.

First, they learn that when religion and secular politics mix, you don’t end up with a less corrupt government; you end up with a more corrupt church. Always. Without exception. It's the reason theocracies always fail.  The principal reason is that religion has become a political entity, and has entered the arena of the possible. There are no absolutes in politics, and no absolute truths. You don’t end up with a religious state. You merely end up with a political church. This is not good.  For one thing, you end up with corruption, as you would with any system, but in this case, it is sanctioned by the resident god!  

Religious fervor combined with secular power inevitably results in great harm. In theocracies that have a distinct minority population, be it religious, racial or ethnic, the minority suffers to varying degrees, and particularly if they don’t attend the same church. Absolutism meets resistance, or worse, incrementalism, and turns repressive and very nasty quite quickly. In a theocracy, it usually doesn’t take long for the public whippings and executions to begin as an effort to reassure the faithful that heresy will not be tolerated. Incidentally, both nazism (worship of the State) and communism (worship of the proletariat as the State) both followed the same pattern as other theocracies. In all cases, you have a brittle authority structure that invokes and "interprets" the will of an unseen entity, and does not deal well with challenges to that authority as a result.

And when things go badly, as oft times they must, religion in a position of power runs the risk of leadership–that of being blamed for the unhappy circumstances, fairly or not.

Finally, there is a simple, pragmatic reason to support separation of church and state among the religious: the church that ends up in power is most likely not going to be your church, and indeed may have the same general label but be inimical to your beliefs. If Protestant Church "A" were to take over the government, Protestant Churches "B" through "ZZZZ" would be among the first to be persecuted. Among sects, the tinier the differences, the more bitter the antagonism among them. More people have died over disagreements on how to spell a god’s name than over whether that god exists in the first place.

America has avoided much of that, and prospered from it. The avoidance hasn’t been perfect – "heathen" native tribes were slaughtered and driven off their land in the name of God, people were forced to observe "the Sabbath" whether it happened to be their sabbath or not, and children were forced to pray using the prayers of a different church. But in the main, America has fared better than most secular nations, and far better than any theocracy.

Things changed fairly dramatically over the past half century, leading to the situation we have today. First, a brief overview:

World War Two brought about changes. In the shadow of the death camps of Europe and threatened by the egalitarian promises of communism, America had to clean up its act. You can’t exactly stand as the exemplar of liberty and opportunity and still have signs in restaurant windows that say, "No Jews or dogs", or separate drinking fountains and separate schools.

You also couldn’t have a de facto state religion that bent others to its will. Social consensus pushed religious encroachments into a broad retreat. You couldn’t ban Jews from restaurants, and it became bad form to ban them from Country Clubs. Kids were no longer required to mouth protestant prayers at public schools. You couldn’t ask an employee his religion unless you happened to be a church or church-related organization. Huxley and Russell started showing up on the shelves in American libraries, and elements of the surge in humanistic thought from Europe showed up here.

In the fifties and sixties, America secularized in the name of freedom, and for the first time in its history, very nearly reached the ideals set forth by the Founders.

Organized religion, used to viewing Americans with a certain proprietary air, was slow to react, even slower to construct their reaction. For one thing, they had the problem that the secular elements indisputably had the constitution on their side. Not only the constitution, but a national sense that religion had its place, and that place was not in the corridors of government. Most Christians felt that way.

Since history didn’t agree with them, they set about to rewriting history. In the revisionist version, the Founders were all devout, and intent on establishing a Christian nation, and that had been stolen from the American people by socialist liberal humanist activist judges. It was never explained why judges would want to do such a thing, but they got around that by explaining that those judges were intellectuals, and intellectuals just liked doing things like that.

Having devised this alternate history, they set about promoting it for all it was worth, on the evangelical television shows, and on the 24 hour a day jeezus wheezers of evangelical radio. They repeated it ad nauseum from pulpits and microphones and in literature, over and over and over. In fairly short order, they had a growing cadre of followers who were utterly convinced that the Christian nation of America was subverted by atheistic humanists.

That movement has grown to the point where it is a danger to freedom in America.  Today is Easter, and we had an entire cadre of political religionists turn up on Usenet and in the media and even on the comics page, howling and beating their breasts and maintaining that they were martyrs because "liberals all hate Christians".  As a liberal, I don't hate Christians, but I've no use at all for anyone who proposes to use my neck as his kneeling pad.

Of course, they were all saying that America was always a god-fearing Christian nation, and liberals ruined that.

I have a whole slew of quotes from the Founders that give the lie to this propaganda. It is the clear and indisputable intent of the Founders to keep religion and government apart. This includes some who were very publicly devout, such as Ben Franklin and George Washington. Bureaucrats and politicians should not be priests and shamans, and shamans should not be elected leaders.

Aside from the First Amendment, there is one line in the body of the Constitution that directly mentions religion. It is the penultimate line in the document, the final directive, the last restriction placed upon government. It is unique in that, by its own language, it is the one clause in the Constitution which may not be amended: "...;but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any office or public trust under the United States".

How do you set up a Christian state if the guiding document explicitly forbids religious tests for any office or position of public trust?

We have an ongoing assault by opportunists preying on the religious sensitivities of people, and convincing them that the United States is somehow in the domain of their church. Never mind that, as demonstrated in this essay, not only do the precepts of their religion not lend themselves to the principles upon which the United States is founded, but that the United States was designed to be free of such religious interference in its doings.

The saddest claim of all is from these political religionists who claim they only want "freedom of religion", and that by not allowing them to use the government as a tool for their own church, their freedom of religion is somehow being abridged.

Is anyone stopping them from attending the church of their choice?

Are their kids being asked to pray in creeds foreign to their own beliefs?

Are they being forced to pay taxes for a church they don’t wish to support?

If the answer to all these is "no", then they have freedom of religion, of a type undreamt of in England just five years before the Constitution was enacted.

Quite a lot of people died to achieve that goal.

Political Religionists, you have freedom of religion.

Now respect the right of all the rest of us to that same freedom.