“Our founding fathers understood that [private property] was a very important part of the pursuit of happiness. Being able to own things that are your own is one of the things that makes America unique. But I happen to think that it’s in jeopardy. It’s in jeopardy because of taxes. It’s in jeopardy because of regulation. It’s in jeopardy because of a legal system that’s run amok. And I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God and say, ‘God, You’re going to have to fix this.’ ”
Texas Governor Rick Perry in Longview, Texas, on May 23, 2011
The small points here are that in America, pursuing happiness requires that we are able to own things, and that taxes, regulations and the law jeopardize that.
Governor Perry's larger points: God belongs in government and He will fix these particular parts of it because that is what God wants for us.
The document in our history that provides the structure of our government and sets forth its rights, duties and obligations is the Constitution of the United States.
No where is God mentioned in our Constitution. True believers insist that He needn't be. (For them, God is almost invariably a He. When it comes to God, there is not much room in the Bible - which was written, edited, redacted and approved by patriarchs of churches over the ages - for any other gender.) Historians do not seem to know whether that omission occurred because the drafters deemed it not necessary to put God there or whether it was thought at the time to be inappropriate. The omission does seem to be intentional rather than an oversight for the simple reason than many – if not all – of those who drafted the Constitution and debated it in the summer of 1787 said they were religious men. That they were men of several religions whose beliefs were at odds with some of the others may explain why God is not mentioned.
For if He had been, as Robert Ingersoll, passionate advocate of the separation of church from state, wrote in “God in the Constitution” (in The Arena, 1890):
... [I]f there is to be acknowledgment of God in the Constitution, the question naturally arises as to which God is to have this honor. Shall we select the God of the Catholics – he who has established an infallible church – presided over by an infallible pope ... Is it the God of the Presbyterian with the Five Points of Calvanism ...? Is it the God of the Puritan, the enemy of joy? Of the Baptist ...?
... What God is it proposed to put in the Constitution? Is it the God of the Old Testament, who was a believer in slavery and who justified polygamy? ... Are we to have the God who issued a commandment against all art – who was the enemy of investigation and of free speech? Is it the God who commanded the husband to stone his wife to death because she differed with him on the subject of religion? Are we to have the God who will re-enact the Mosaic code and punish hundreds of offences with death?
What court, what tribunal of last resort, is to define this God, and who is to make known his will? In his presence, laws made by men will be of no value. The decisions of courts will be as nothing. But who is to make known the will of this supreme God? Will there by a supreme tribunal composed of priests?
Thorny questions, to be sure, and worth thinking about.
If as Governor Perry seeks, God does fix this mess we are in concerning the right to own property, will it be self-evident to everyone that it was God who did it? If the fix is something that some people don’t like, who will tell them that God did it, so settle down and live with the result?
What if it’s Barack Obama who God inspires to implement his solutions for this mess? Or Bernie Sanders?
Just to raise such questions may seem sacrilege to some, perhaps even anathema to believers of many faiths, including those who might make war against infidels to enforce the beliefs they have learned from their religious teachers about their God. There are such believers.
Ingersoll felt that belief in God was just and only that - a belief. Like Ingersoll, need we be agnostics to be opposed to Perry's plea? No, I answer as a believer who is skeptical about religions but not about God.
If Rick Perry's plea was for wisdom, I might have bowed my head with him. But Perry was pleading for a pony, for a particular set of results for him and his followers. That the President or prospective president is a religious person - that he or she believes in a higher authority, one that might hold them somehow to account in this life or another - is a good trait, it seems to me, to have in an elected leader.
And if a President calls upon God to produce a particular set of results in private, that's necessarily his business between him and Him. But when a President or Presidential candidate does so in public and wants to hand over to his or her God the governance of the United States, I become very afraid of such a leader and the particular results he or she seeks.