Georgia10's revealing and somewhat scary story includes the result of a poll that says 55%!!!!!! of the American people believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. After I got up from the floor, I thought perhaps a little more education wouldn't be a bad thing on a Saturday night. I know, I must be nuts. But the truth is I can't let this go, and there is more about religion in the background of the people and events that formed our Constitution than in our Constitution itself. And it speaks to the values we all cherish--those inclusive liberal values that used to be synonymous with American values.
Enlightenment values and ideas, not the Bible and Christian values, were the source of our American Revolution. Our Founders experienced religious tyranny and rejected it as antithetical to the understanding that we all are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." They knew that religions keep trying to sell keys to heaven, when the door is never locked. An excerpt from Jefferson's Autobiography clearly makes the distinction between established religion and the belief in God.
Parenthetically, I don't see a conflict between Enlightenment and Christian values, because the values of one include the values of the other. The only problem is that there is no vice versa. So, the choice is between a more inclusive perspective that recognizes the potential of all religions, and an exclusive perspective that believes one religion alone has the key to heaven. Our Founders experienced religious tyranny and rejected it as antithetical to the understanding that we all are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." They knew that religions keep trying to sell keys to heaven, when the door is never locked.
An excerpt from Jefferson's Autobiography clearly makes the distinction between established religion and the belief in God. It refers to the Virginia constitution, but included in the debate were a number of the Founders. That they addressed the specific issue of Christian beliefs as opposed to a more inclusive view of religion is something I haven't heard much about in the political discourse, and perhaps it's something that needs to be expressed:
The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
Can't get much clearer than that.
I also think that we need to be talking about God in an inclusive way and, at the same time, asserting the point powerfully that one's beliefs are a private matter of conscience and not a public occasion for debate. This was the perspective of all the Founders, and of all our presidents until this one, and it is the premise for freedom of religion. President John F. Kennedy probably expressed this best when he said:
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been--and may someday be again--a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.
...I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office....
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none, who can attend any ceremony, service, or dinner his office may appropriately require of him to fulfill; and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.
And I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are limited only by the depth of his wisdom and the breadth of his vision. Religious liberty does not exclude expressions of belief in All That Is, God, or Creator. But it does exclude the attempts of one perspective to discount the value of another. The truth is larger than any one religious perspective, but includes all.
To speak of America as a Christian nation is to speak of a smaller, more exclusive, more limited, more provincial nation. It contracts, rather than expands, the scope of our vision. And, while it might make some people feel more comfortable about their own identity, it squeezes the magnificent expansiveness of the idea of America into a rigid, restrictive doctrine that will stifle growth.