If Christians Founded This Country…
…Then Why Did They Institute the Separation of Church and State?
Or, Why Fundamentalist Christians Get It Wrong
Over on smwance‘s Wanceblog there has been a fooferaw regarding a blog posting of someone I believe is a mutual friend of our’s. This friend is a big Christian. Giant Christian. 6 feet 6 inches tall. Red hair. Seven hundred pounds. 7 feet tall. Flaming red hair. Laser beams shoot from his eyes. 9 feet tall, hair of fire. Etc.
So this dude wrote a post that, in a nutshell, says America is going to hell in a handbasket because we elected Obama. The future as indicated by the post is one of 16 year old pornstars watching TV featuring full frontal nude celebrity Jell-O wrestling who are getting live abortions while child molesters and murderers tap dance in a grand chorus line. This peculiar vision of the future is due to the supposed fact that Democrats have been on a campaign to remove God from this country.
The most surprising thing about the folks who argue that we are moving farther and farther away from a truly Godly nation is that they conveniently forget this was founded as a specifically un-Christian nation.
They usually bring up such things as “In God We Trust” being on our currency, and an incomplete quote from John Adams stating that America was founded on Christian principles, and a few other things. Here’s an article about it from the Christian perspective. But a question is never asked by the proponents of these thoughts.
Why, if this country was founded as a Christian nation, did the Founding Fathers insist on the separation of church and state?
The answer is very simple, and yet elusive to fundamentalist Christians. They did not want our Government to interfere with religion. This wasn’t a decision to push religion away from the citizens, but rather to ensure that religion would not be tainted by government.
For folks who aren’t religious, the inclusion of faith-based government doctrines is not actually that big of a deal. I see plenty of non-religious folks who argue that the Government should not be trying to make us Christian. But our Government would ultimately do little more to those individuals than irritate or abrogate rights. Not good, but also not a spiritual crisis.
On the other hand, a state-run religion has every possibility of eroding the very beliefs behind that religion.
The effects of this are easy to see. “In God We Trust” is written on our currency. Let’s set aside the issue of this being an extremely un-Christian concept, and instead focus on the effect to Christianity of this situation. The Supreme Court upheld keeping the phrase on our money because it has “lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.” (This was the case about Christmas decorations, but the decision has informed future cases regarding the motto. For more information, see Wikipedia’s entry.)
“In God We trust” has lost any significant religious content? Well, it’s true. This phrase is printed routinely on our currency, and this currency passes through our hands quickly. We do not contemplate what it says, much less what it means.
But aside from demeaning a religion by institutionalizing it as in the example above, the biggest fear of anyone who is religious is that the wrong people could be making decisions about spirituality. As this blogger pointed out, Obama became president, and he’s not too pleased about that. What if this were a Christian nation? Could this blogger abide by the changes to our State religious intitution?
There is certainly a great deal of dissention, even among fundamentalist Christians, about the details of their religion. You can select from churches that believe gay marriage is acceptable or ones that believe divorce is unholy. The fact that this disagreement exists begs what would happen if a state-run religion had to make the decision for all Christians. I think our 2nd Amendment rights would really come into play–probably in the way our Founding Fathers intended.
But the most important aspect of this is that spiritual faith is a personal choice that can not be effectively imposed on you by anyone else. As Christians believe, an individual has to accept Christ as their “personal savior” to get that passcard into Heaven. If the state made these decisions for you, are they truly a personal choice?
Christians should be on the forefront of separating church and state. They should be in the vanguard of turning our country around from imposing a religious doctrine on its citizenry and making America the truly free state it was intended to be.
Yr fthfl bddy,
Mike
Nice essay,
I think that one little ‘factoid’ I like to point out is that the last time church and state were truly “married” was what historians refer to as “The Dark Ages” and all the cool stuff that came afterwards was people pulling away from Religious rule.
Just look at what the Taliban and other religious rulers do to their countries. I’d be first to start speaking Canadian and moving north if we started moving towards a religious state-run society of state-dictated morality.
My favorite little “morality” play is that I like telling Christians that they got exactly what they wanted in 2000. They hated someone lying about blowjobs so they got someone who lies about war and kills people. Totally Christlike, because blowjobs are the root of all evil, apparently.
(You know, most people forget that Clinton’s blowjob scandal came on the heels of him being acquitted of all evil in the Whitewater scandal.)
Maybe….
As you said, “the last time church and state were truly “married” was what historians refer to as “The Dark Ages” and all the cool stuff that came afterwards was people pulling away from Religious rule.”
While I agree with your sentiment, I think your logic falls victim to a causal fallacy. The implication is that the cool stuff happened because people were pulling away from religious rule.
I would argue that the ideas of individual rights and the concept of personal liberties were the mechanisms behind society extricating itself from religious rule as well as leading toward the creation of the cool stuff we enjoy today.
It should come as no surprise that the folks who founded our country, as well as the other great thinkers of the Revolutionary period, were inventors, businessmen, and artists of considerable talent. Someone like Ben Franklin would not have flourished quite so much during the middle ages.
Admittedly, this could be a causal fallacy as well: Franklin and the other grand mamajamas of the Age of Enlightment benefitted from the work of those during the Renaissance. (And they benefitted from the folks in the middle ages, and so on.)
Ultimately, though, it is the fundamental right of the individual to be individual that gives us the abilities to be creative, spiritual, enterprising, and basically groovy. Any infringement on that right not only binds the individual, it binds the greater society in a far greater ratio due to the collective loss of free will.
– m
Re: Maybe….
Well said, and though I mentioned in on the phone, I’d just like to document it here (for anyone else who reads it…including the “…mutual friend of our’s. This friend is a big Christian. Giant Christian. 6 feet 6 inches tall. Red hair. Seven hundred pounds. 7 feet tall. Flaming red hair. Laser beams shoot from his eyes. 9 feet tall, hair of fire. Etc.” friend…) that is wasn’t by said red-haired uber Christian…though the blog was by someone he and I both knew at Va Tech.