Dear Rep. Bachmann,
I never thought you and I would have something in common, but appears that we both have prominent roles in prayer groups in our respective political homes. Speaking on behalf of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, you chided the President for not using the word "God" in public addresses abroad.
Though our respective theologies are most likely incompatible, I felt a responsibility as a person of faith, and as the coordinator of the Daily Kos prayer group, Brothers and Sisters at DailyKos, to respond to your letter (Warning: PDF!).
First, the document President Obama's job it is to uphold, the United States Constitution, First Amendment gives him plenty of warrant for omitting references to God in his speeches.:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
As President of the United States, he represents a religiously diverse nation, including a growing number for whom religion and faith are not tenable. It is his responsibility to represent them as much as anyone else. It is not the government's job to enforce religious speech. Furthermore, enforcing religious speech in the public sphere would render null the free exercise of religion, making it instead the compulsory exercise of religion.
In your speech in Indonesia, you mentioned being united under one flag. The Pledge of Allegiance to our flag says that we are "one nation under God."
I would like to take this moment to remind you that the original Pledge of Allegiance did not contain reference to God, a reference that was added to the Pledge in 1954. The Pledge's author's family says he would not object to the removal of the phrase. This historical fact means that the Pledge shows competing notions of church/state relations in U.S. history - the history of the Pledge then testifies to a heritage of argument, not consensus. Given that the author of the Pledge, Francis Bellamy, was an outspoken socialist, I find it odd, moreover, that you hold up the Pledge as an example of the religious heritage of the United States while attacking President Obama's (distinctly non-socialist) policies as a socialist threat. Does not the Pledge testify much more to the heritage of American radicalism than it does to the heritage of American religion?
I have been unable to find a response from the Congressional Prayer Caucus to this incident*:
Your objection to Obama's lack of reference to "God" in conjunction with your silence on the disruption of a Hindu prayer in Congress makes clear that it is not "America's religious heritage," but a narrow notion of Christianity that you are concerned to defend. Our nation, however was not founded as a Christian nation, as neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution contain reference to Jesus Christ. A close look at the context of the Second Continental Congress's approval of Bible printing makes clear that the Founders did not intend for the nation to be a Christian nation, a fact unequivocally reasserted by the Treaty of Tripoli.
Furthermore, United States policy has generally impeded the religious liberties of Native Americans. I urge you to look carefully at the diaries of Ojibwa and Winter Rabbit for perspectives that call the United States to repentance with regard to its stand on religious liberties, rather than pride.
As a theologian, there is nothing more important to me than my faith. However, faith is a personal matter. It is meaningful because it is a matter of conscience, not convention. It is not the job of the president to enforce the conventionality, and ultimately banality, of religious expression. It is his job to uphold the constitution, which provides a space for religious and non-religious alike to work together for a more perfect union.
* UPDATE: Upon further research, I learned that the heckling came from
visitors in the gallery, not members of Congress, so the double-standard isn't quite as stark as I'd thought. Still, I do think the Congressional Prayer Caucus did have a responsibility to use it as a teaching moment, which they clearly did not.