"Americans are doubtless a religious people, but we don't believe in the hard stuff any more. Certainly not in the doctrine of sin, original or otherwise, which seems to have gone missing, even among evangelicals, sometime around the time hell disappeared."
When the Rev. George F. Regas delivered a sermon opposing the Iraq War in All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif., two days before the 2004 presidential election, he expected to upset a few members of the congregation. Instead, he seems to have upset the Internal Revenue Service, which began an investigation that is still under way.
The IRS has also announced it will no longer wait for complaints to come in, but will instead take action "to prevent violations." It will be reviewing the content of sermons, it says, as well as the financial books of religious organizations.
Summary: Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country's political scene -- with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines.Many American liberals also seem to lose their sense of proportion about evangelical influence, as is demonstrated by this review of several books about the supposed and feared impending arrival of Christian theocracy in the US.
"...I have found that it replenishes the soul. God wanted us to see the importance of rest and replenish so much, that He commanded it, though He has not commanded which day."” [emphasis added]Ah, well - at least he he thinks a Sabbath is important.
“The founders adopted a much more expansive amendment to keep the new federal government from making laws even ‘respecting an establishment of religion,’” he added. “They did not merely want to keep the federal government from setting up an official national church or to ban denominational discrimination.”The founders, unless Justice Scalia has his history entirely wrong, don't seem to have felt that favoring religion amounted to "establishing religion." Justice Scalia:
“…George Washington added to the form of Presidential oath prescribed by …the Constitution, the concluding words "so help me God." The Supreme Court under John Marshall opened its sessions with the prayer, "God save the United States and this Honorable Court." The First Congress instituted the practice of beginning its legislative sessions with a prayer. The same week that Congress submitted the Establishment Clause as part of the Bill of Rights for ratification by the States, it enacted legislation providing for paid chaplains in the House and Senate. The day after the First Amendment was proposed, the same Congress that had proposed it requested the President to proclaim "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed, by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many and signal favours of Almighty God." President Washington offered the first Thanksgiving Proclamation shortly thereafter, devoting November 26, 1789 on behalf of the American people "to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that is, that was, or that will. be," thus beginning a tradition of offering gratitude to God that continues today. The same Congress also enacted the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, Article III of which provided: "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." And of course the First Amendment itself accords religion (and no other manner of belief) special constitutional protection.
These actions of our First President and Congress and the Marshall Court were not idiosyncratic; they reflected the beliefs of the period. Those who wrote the Constitution believed that morality was essential to the well-being of society and that encouragement of religion was the best way to foster morality. The "fact that the Founding Fathers believed devotedly that there was a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly evidenced in their writings, from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution itself." School Dist. of Abington Township v. Shempp, 374 U.S. 203, 213 (1963). President Washington opened his Presidency with a prayer, and reminded his fellow citizens at the conclusion of it that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Farewell Address (1796). President John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia, "we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Letter (Oct. 11, 1798). Thomas Jefferson concluded his second inaugural address by inviting his audience to pray:
"I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations."
James Madison, in his first inaugural address, likewise placed his confidence "in the guardianship and guidance of that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations, whose blessings have been so conspicuously dispensed to this rising Republic, and to whom we are bound to address our devout gratitude for the past, as well as our fervent supplications and best hopes for the future."
The early Americans were not only the Virginians, but also the Pennsylvanians, who in some ways solved some problems of religious liberty even more successfully, and the men of Massachusetts, who put in place yet another alternative. When, together, the Founders put together the Constitution of the United States in 1787, and when they added the Bill of Rights in 1792, they declared the federal Congress incompetent to make any law respecting the establishment of religion or inhibiting the free exercise thereof. This is the way in which they provided for the so-called "separation of church and state." They did not want the federal Congress to impose any one religion on them. They took the government out of the business of religion.It has always seemed to me to be a perverse reading of the First Amendment, that the rights of a political or religious group might demand that someone else "shut up." Neither the right to free speech nor "free exercise" include anything about a right "not to hear." The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. There is nothing about hearing a prayer with which I disagree that forces me to do anything. Coercion is only involved if I am prevented from expressing my views.
In this way, too, they prevented any one religion from becoming the official "“established" and in some way mandatory religion of the people as a whole. (An individual state could have an established religion, and some did, for a generation or so, but the practice soon proved to be impracticable and irksome to both the church and state.) Experience showed them that both the church and the state prospered more when the officials of the church did not make political decisions with the authority of the state and when the state did not make authoritative religious statements.
Certainly, the churches have prospered better under such a regime in America than the more or less established churches of Europe. The American solution, however, is not properly described as the "separation of church and state."” Its actual practice is more like an "“accommodation,"” each treating the other to public acts of mutual exposure and mutual respect. At many religious ceremonies, officials of the state are present in formal ways. At many state functions, ceremonies begin with a prayer and often conclude with a religious blessing. Quite often a sermon by a clergyman is written into the program. Above all, politicians in America speak often of God, and sometimes with observable seriousness and devotion, —and also sometimes in a more or less perfunctory way. But speak of God they almost all do, especially on formal political occasions.
It has often been remarked, for instance, that President George W. Bush seems unusually serious about religion and speaks of God fairly openly. But close observers have also noted that President Bill Clinton used to speak about God even more often than Bush and was perhaps even rather more ostentatious in being in church each Sunday. In fact, every American president has felt the duty to speak of God, since that is what the American people want and expect of them.
Still, although the "separation of church and state"” is in part a misnomer, it does point to an important difference of function and public role. But that "“separation"” is not the same thing as demanding an end to the interpenetration of religion and society. Church and state do not cover the same territory as religion and society. Church and state are narrower, institutional concepts. Citizens have a right to the free exercise of their religion in private and in the full range of the public activities of civil society. They also have a right to follow their religious conscience in public life, consistent with fidelity to their public duties and to the Constitution of the United States. And they have a right to argue in the public square, in accord with the rules of democratic give-and-take and the civic virtues of civility, for their own convictions, religious or secular, about the full range of issues of our common life, including laws concerning marriage, birth, and death. Civic life can be quite alive with religion, the more so for being uncoerced by the state.
To present a few samples of how the American accommodation of religion and society, church and state, have actually worked out in practice, let me mention that in the earliest days of Washington, D.C., beginning with the Jefferson Administration (1800-1808), the largest church service in the whole United States was held in the Capitol Building every Sunday, with music provided at government expense by the U.S. Marine Band. President Jefferson was often in attendance. Both before and after Jefferson, both the Congress and the presidents have often by decree urged Americans to pause for a Day of Thanksgiving, or Fasting and Humiliation in an hour of need.
Another six days’ work is done
Another Sabbath is begun;
Return, my soul, enjoy thy rest,
Improve the day that God hath blest.
Joseph Stennett, 1732
"I’m convinced that good people of every spiritual hue, precisely for their decency, cannot comprehend how profoundly outrageous the goals, evil the methods and pervasive the influence of religio-political extremists. Many see those so labeled as merely religious and political conservatives. How dangerous our naivete! How frightening our ignorance! Thank God for the Anti-Defamation League’s publication of The Religious Right: The assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America." [Report from the Capital, Sept. 20, 1994]A Missouri Baptist Layman's Association website identifies the groups Dunn describes as "religio-political extremists":
"The groups...the ADL book deals with...in separate chapters are: Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition; David Barton’s Wallbuilders; James Dobson’s Focus on the Family; Don Wildmon’s American Family Association; Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation; Robert Simonds’ Citizens for Excellence in Education; Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America; Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition; Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue; Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly."Although I would choose not to identify with some of these organizations, others are well within my boundaries of political acceptability.
Dunn railed frequently against the "radical religious right," which he described as "a bunch of crazies-people like Gary Bauer, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority types." In one of his more memorable rhetorical flourishes, he compared Christian conservatives to the Crusaders (circa 1000 A.D.): "Full of hate, killing people in order to save them, dehumanizing and bloody."One of my own encounters with James Dunn occurred at a General Conference he attended at which an anti-abortion resolution was being considered. In our conversation he was strongly [vehemently] pro-choice and very critical of those who would outlaw abortion.
