PATRIOTISM AND THE DECLINE OF A CHRISTIAN NATION - Part IV
One might wonder then at the alarm raised by some over the announced decline of a Christian America. Newsweek Magazine’s John Meacham called our attention to it in their April 13 edition of 2009. A new American Religious Identification Survey showed that the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990 from 8 to 15 percent.
The number of self-identified Christians has fallen from 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. Mainline Protestant churches, including our own United Church of Christ, have been losing millions of members. Alas! The number of atheists has increased from 1 million in 1990 to about 3.6 million today. That’s about three and one-half times as many members in the United Church of Christ.
Fewer people (about 62 percent) think of America as a Christian nation. 68 percent say religion is losing influence in American life. Only 48 percent believe religion can answer all or most of life’s problems. Of course we lament these declines.
That Christian principles and traditions were highly influential in the founding of our republic hardly can be denied. On almost every page of our founding father’s writings are references to God, to Jesus, to the great prophets and principles of the Bible. It was Christianity – not Islam, not Buddhism, not Hinduism, not even Judaism – but Christianity that was foundational in the formation of our country.
But it was also the Enlightenment, the belief in the God of nature and in the authority and ability of human reason to ascertain the appropriate laws and customs for a nation. Our rationalist founding fathers like Franklin and Jefferson wanted no king clothed in the erroneous notion of “divine right” to dictate to them. Nor did they want any clergyman or state church cloaked in sanctimonious piety or authoritarian self-righteousness dictating the “will of God” to the populace.
Rather, they advocated liberty, freedom of thought, debate and discourse to ascertain the best ways for our Republic. But it did not mean that God and religion were therefore to be treated as a private hobby as Yale Law School’s Stephen Carter laments in his book, The Culture of Disbelief. Churches and religions should have free access to the public square.
In his excellent book, Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith agrees. The laws and courts of the land should not thwart and restrict the free exercise of religion. Nonetheless, no one religion should gain state authority to enforce its views. In his advocacy of separation of church and state, Thomas Jefferson not only wanted freedom for religion, but freedom from religion – religion which he regarded as often tyrannical in the name of God.
Would we want a religion which had state authority to: (for example)
- prohibit the eating of pork
- prohibit the eating of meat
- prohibit any non-religious activity on Friday, Saturday or Sunday
- allow or enforce polygamy as in some forms of Mormonism and Islam
- allow stoning of a woman caught in adultery as does the Taliban
- force women to cover themselves completely and give u all rights to education and public life
- prohibit birth control, sex education and abortion in all circumstance
- prohibit the legal and civil union of same sex couples
- prohibit stem cell research
- impose stated prayers in schools
- teach only creationism in schools
- support a completely restored Israel (which would include Palestinian land) to enable the return of Christ (as did Jerry Falwell)
- support a theocracy as in Iran where one leading cleric proposed all protesters to the recent election be executed.
- support a theocracy where a fatwa (death warrant) can be issued against an author critical of the Quran (i.e. Salman Rushdie)
On and on the list goes. True patriotism, true love of our country, surely does not mean one religion should be forcefully imposed on our citizenry even though it be our own Christian religion. Nonetheless, the great liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the infinite worth of the individual, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom come out of the Bible and Western Civilization – not out of Africa, not our of Asia, not out of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, but out of Europe, America and the Bible.
(to be continued)
