Post by AuntieSocial on Nov 25, 2003 0:15:52 GMT -5
Erasing God at our peril
Revising "Pledge of Allegiance" undercuts an acknowledgement of our religious past [/b]
Click here to read the article on the original page
By: Mary Pitman Kitch
Published on November 16, 2003
Publication: The Oregonian
This isn't just star-spangled trivia. Excising God from "The Pledge of Allegiance" would deeply offend millions of salt-of-the-earth Americans. They'd see it as a kind of symbolic vandalism -- defacing a historic monument of their faith.
And their outrage shouldn't be brushed aside. Even if we can agree that no more references to God should be added to the public square, subtracting God is a different matter. It's an insult, a slap -- a kind of demotion.
Technically, the lawsuit brought by atheist Michael Newdow would affect only classroom recitations of the pledge. But if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with Newdow when it decides the case next year -- and he has already succeeded in removing one of his likely opponents, Justice Antonin Scalia -- the ripple effects, cynicism and acrimony could be far-reaching.
Benjamin Franklin predicted America would need a "publick" religion, an overarching canopy attracting eyes toward a purpose larger than ourselves. The idea, then and now, makes many uneasy, yet history would seem to have proved Franklin correct.
Our very freedoms derive from religious ideals. We may find this repugnant, corny or simply inconvenient in 2003. But the references to God sprinkled throughout our coins and currency, national songbook and historic documents -- four references to God in the Declaration of Independence alone -- trace this indebtedness.
Should God now be rudely ditched, after bringing us this far along? Should children be protected from a patriotic ritual that contains a single echo of a faith so formative of our nation's character?
One defense for these historic references, successfully used in earlier court cases, is that they're just innocuous mentions of God in the public square -- mere mumbles, you might say, that have lost religious meaning.
This defense has been christened "ceremonial deism." The idea is that when I look at a dime, I'm not really experiencing the religious weight of "In God We Trust." I'm experiencing religion fossilized into patriotism.
This is an ingenious defense -- way too clever, in fact, because references to God really do ring with a small charge of religious meaning for Americans who love such references. And they sting atheists and others who loathe them.
Although the pledge controversy revolves around a principle most of us consider sacred -- the separation of church and state -- even the hard edges of that principle, on close inspection, soften and dissolve.
Religious belief shapes our calendar, ceremonially frames our legislative sessions, influences our tax policy, infuses our politics, historically undergirded the integrity of our court system ("so help me God") and, to this day, is instrumental in our military. We taxpayers directly subsidize military chaplains' spread of religious comfort and ideals.
And what of that illustrious "wall" of separation, cited by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a church congregation?
"The wall has been shot full of holes," says a character in Judge John T. Noonan Jr.'s fascinating history, "The Luster of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom."
Noonan fumbles for a more accurate metaphor for the demarcation and jokingly says:
How about "a sponge"? Approaching "Sheilaism" Franklin lived in the 18th century, when you were a broad-minded person if you could tolerate a spectrum of Baptists to Quakers. Today, we have pantheists, polytheists, hundreds of religions and perhaps thousands of creeds. We're approaching what sociologist Robert Bellah has termed "Sheilaism," in which every Tom, Dick and Sheila has his or her own private blend of beliefs.
The military chaplaincy, which survived its own constitutional challenge in the 1980s, has become a bubbling laboratory of such pluralism, taking the concept far beyond platitudes. A recent posting on the Military Pagan Network's Web site, for instance, praised the efforts of a Baptist chaplain to help Wicca enlistees perform the rites of a pagan festival.
"Most chaplains that I have been in contact with have been open-minded and helpful, and curious about pagans," this soldier enthused.
Ideally, the U.S. Supreme Court would show us where the proper wall of separation between church and state lies, but past rulings have left us with a jumble of judicial tests. Endorsement of religion is wrong. Coercing religious minorities is wrong. Ceremonial mentions are OK.
The court's rulings on the proper mix of church and state read, at moments, like a parent's adjustments of the national thermostat, turning it up to suit one argument, then down to suit another. The pledge challenge suggests only one setting is permissible, the cold-comfort of atheism -- zero tolerance of God in the public square. The sharp edges, too
OK, I have to admit it. If Newdow wins, it won't be the first time atheists have forced their fellow Americans to live up to the sharp edges of the Constitution.
"I grew up in a (public) school where we said the Lord's Prayer in the morning," recalls Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Ellen F. Rosenblum, who is Jewish.
I grew up in the same kind of public school, where daily rites took place that, in hindsight, can be described only as what they were -- Christian worship services. In my fifth-grade class, we sang hymns, read the Bible and recited the Lord's Prayer, and I still remember the Catholic children falling silent before the end of it. They said a shorter version.
In retrospect, this infliction of Protestant Christianity on public schools is appalling. Lawsuits filed, in part, by atheists helped spark the pivotal 1962 and 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that scoured public schools of such worship. And thank God for that change.
But minimal and historic references to religion are different. Trying to remove them could be sadly polarizing. Even many ardent civil libertarians worry that a ruling in Newdow's favor could spark a red-white-and-blue revolt, congressional backlash, even a god-awful constitutional amendment. This could enshrine God in the pledge, invite other clumsy religious meddling, even open the door to reversals on school prayer.
"Every one of us devoutly wishes this case had never been brought," says attorney Marc Stern, an expert on church-state controversies with the American Jewish Congress. "Newdow might be right in (an absolute) sense . . . but in the messy world in which we live, it's hard to see how any good can come of it."
By seeking to purge a single religious reference, Newdow could wind up undoing the 20th-century milestone of religious freedom atheists helped establish. Far from strengthening the wall, Newdow's quest could weaken it. Invoking the deity There are undoubtedly atheists in foxholes -- as the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers boasts -- but few atheists emerge at the helm of global crises. However vague or unconventional a president's beliefs may be when he enters office, the job converts a president into chief petitioner for divine guidance.
George W. Bush is not the first commander-in-chief to frequently call on God, and he won't be the last. The pledge itself echoes "this nation, under God" in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
It's true God was a late insertion to the pledge, added during the Cold War to contrast the United States with the Soviet Union. But at that time "under God" was truly emblematic of religious liberty. The phrase telegraphed a stark contrast with the Soviet Union, which had abolished Sundays as a day of worship, set up a Ministry of Atheism and was avidly persecuting believers.
The very success of religion in America -- the wild explosion of creeds -- for some argues that a scouring of religious references is long overdue. But in a society of such fabulous diversity, where some individuals are almost a religion in themselves, we need "publick" faith even more to pull us together.
Its scriptures are The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. Its songs are "America the Beautiful" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." Its deepest, and most neglected, ritual is voting. Its symbols are the flag and the pledge.
And God -- a very generic God, I grant you, a God recognizable in many languages, many faiths and through many centuries -- still presides in some mysterious way over our nation's future.
Or so we hope, and pray. [/I]
Revising "Pledge of Allegiance" undercuts an acknowledgement of our religious past [/b]
Click here to read the article on the original page
By: Mary Pitman Kitch
Published on November 16, 2003
Publication: The Oregonian
This isn't just star-spangled trivia. Excising God from "The Pledge of Allegiance" would deeply offend millions of salt-of-the-earth Americans. They'd see it as a kind of symbolic vandalism -- defacing a historic monument of their faith.
And their outrage shouldn't be brushed aside. Even if we can agree that no more references to God should be added to the public square, subtracting God is a different matter. It's an insult, a slap -- a kind of demotion.
Technically, the lawsuit brought by atheist Michael Newdow would affect only classroom recitations of the pledge. But if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with Newdow when it decides the case next year -- and he has already succeeded in removing one of his likely opponents, Justice Antonin Scalia -- the ripple effects, cynicism and acrimony could be far-reaching.
Benjamin Franklin predicted America would need a "publick" religion, an overarching canopy attracting eyes toward a purpose larger than ourselves. The idea, then and now, makes many uneasy, yet history would seem to have proved Franklin correct.
Our very freedoms derive from religious ideals. We may find this repugnant, corny or simply inconvenient in 2003. But the references to God sprinkled throughout our coins and currency, national songbook and historic documents -- four references to God in the Declaration of Independence alone -- trace this indebtedness.
Should God now be rudely ditched, after bringing us this far along? Should children be protected from a patriotic ritual that contains a single echo of a faith so formative of our nation's character?
One defense for these historic references, successfully used in earlier court cases, is that they're just innocuous mentions of God in the public square -- mere mumbles, you might say, that have lost religious meaning.
This defense has been christened "ceremonial deism." The idea is that when I look at a dime, I'm not really experiencing the religious weight of "In God We Trust." I'm experiencing religion fossilized into patriotism.
This is an ingenious defense -- way too clever, in fact, because references to God really do ring with a small charge of religious meaning for Americans who love such references. And they sting atheists and others who loathe them.
Although the pledge controversy revolves around a principle most of us consider sacred -- the separation of church and state -- even the hard edges of that principle, on close inspection, soften and dissolve.
Religious belief shapes our calendar, ceremonially frames our legislative sessions, influences our tax policy, infuses our politics, historically undergirded the integrity of our court system ("so help me God") and, to this day, is instrumental in our military. We taxpayers directly subsidize military chaplains' spread of religious comfort and ideals.
And what of that illustrious "wall" of separation, cited by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a church congregation?
"The wall has been shot full of holes," says a character in Judge John T. Noonan Jr.'s fascinating history, "The Luster of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom."
Noonan fumbles for a more accurate metaphor for the demarcation and jokingly says:
How about "a sponge"? Approaching "Sheilaism" Franklin lived in the 18th century, when you were a broad-minded person if you could tolerate a spectrum of Baptists to Quakers. Today, we have pantheists, polytheists, hundreds of religions and perhaps thousands of creeds. We're approaching what sociologist Robert Bellah has termed "Sheilaism," in which every Tom, Dick and Sheila has his or her own private blend of beliefs.
The military chaplaincy, which survived its own constitutional challenge in the 1980s, has become a bubbling laboratory of such pluralism, taking the concept far beyond platitudes. A recent posting on the Military Pagan Network's Web site, for instance, praised the efforts of a Baptist chaplain to help Wicca enlistees perform the rites of a pagan festival.
"Most chaplains that I have been in contact with have been open-minded and helpful, and curious about pagans," this soldier enthused.
Ideally, the U.S. Supreme Court would show us where the proper wall of separation between church and state lies, but past rulings have left us with a jumble of judicial tests. Endorsement of religion is wrong. Coercing religious minorities is wrong. Ceremonial mentions are OK.
The court's rulings on the proper mix of church and state read, at moments, like a parent's adjustments of the national thermostat, turning it up to suit one argument, then down to suit another. The pledge challenge suggests only one setting is permissible, the cold-comfort of atheism -- zero tolerance of God in the public square. The sharp edges, too
OK, I have to admit it. If Newdow wins, it won't be the first time atheists have forced their fellow Americans to live up to the sharp edges of the Constitution.
"I grew up in a (public) school where we said the Lord's Prayer in the morning," recalls Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Ellen F. Rosenblum, who is Jewish.
I grew up in the same kind of public school, where daily rites took place that, in hindsight, can be described only as what they were -- Christian worship services. In my fifth-grade class, we sang hymns, read the Bible and recited the Lord's Prayer, and I still remember the Catholic children falling silent before the end of it. They said a shorter version.
In retrospect, this infliction of Protestant Christianity on public schools is appalling. Lawsuits filed, in part, by atheists helped spark the pivotal 1962 and 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that scoured public schools of such worship. And thank God for that change.
But minimal and historic references to religion are different. Trying to remove them could be sadly polarizing. Even many ardent civil libertarians worry that a ruling in Newdow's favor could spark a red-white-and-blue revolt, congressional backlash, even a god-awful constitutional amendment. This could enshrine God in the pledge, invite other clumsy religious meddling, even open the door to reversals on school prayer.
"Every one of us devoutly wishes this case had never been brought," says attorney Marc Stern, an expert on church-state controversies with the American Jewish Congress. "Newdow might be right in (an absolute) sense . . . but in the messy world in which we live, it's hard to see how any good can come of it."
By seeking to purge a single religious reference, Newdow could wind up undoing the 20th-century milestone of religious freedom atheists helped establish. Far from strengthening the wall, Newdow's quest could weaken it. Invoking the deity There are undoubtedly atheists in foxholes -- as the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers boasts -- but few atheists emerge at the helm of global crises. However vague or unconventional a president's beliefs may be when he enters office, the job converts a president into chief petitioner for divine guidance.
George W. Bush is not the first commander-in-chief to frequently call on God, and he won't be the last. The pledge itself echoes "this nation, under God" in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
It's true God was a late insertion to the pledge, added during the Cold War to contrast the United States with the Soviet Union. But at that time "under God" was truly emblematic of religious liberty. The phrase telegraphed a stark contrast with the Soviet Union, which had abolished Sundays as a day of worship, set up a Ministry of Atheism and was avidly persecuting believers.
The very success of religion in America -- the wild explosion of creeds -- for some argues that a scouring of religious references is long overdue. But in a society of such fabulous diversity, where some individuals are almost a religion in themselves, we need "publick" faith even more to pull us together.
Its scriptures are The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. Its songs are "America the Beautiful" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." Its deepest, and most neglected, ritual is voting. Its symbols are the flag and the pledge.
And God -- a very generic God, I grant you, a God recognizable in many languages, many faiths and through many centuries -- still presides in some mysterious way over our nation's future.
Or so we hope, and pray. [/I]
