For some background, I was born into, and baptised, and confirmed, and eventually walked away from the Roman Catholic faith. My connection to the almighty is not healthy and it's probably a good thing my arms are to short to box with god. I have no issue with how anyone chooses to worship the god(s) of their choice, so long as they don't try to push it on me. Many years ago some poor fool once got in my face and demanded if I "accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior" at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. That got ugly. The airport police had to separate us and I was, politely, escorted to the car rental desk.
The growing evangelization of the United States has been troubling me for decades. I do not understand it. Thomas Jefferson clearly delineated the "wall of separation" in a response to Danbury (Connecticut) Baptists in 1802. His reasoning is the foundation of Supreme Court decisions such as Reynolds v. United States (Jefferson's comments "...may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the First Amendment.") and Everson v. Board of Education (Justice Hugo Black: "In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law as intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state.").
Most of the Founders were religious or deists and had ample opportunity to include their beliefs into written, legal, fabric of the new Republic they were creating - and they chose not to do so. So when evangelicals state that this always was and will always be a Christian nation, I have to wonder if they've ever read their own history.
With that in mind I would like to call your attendtion to The Evangelical Rejection of Reason, by Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, op-ed piece printed in the New York Times on October 17.
Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change. They have been scarred by the elimination of prayer in schools; the removal of nativity scenes from public places; the increasing legitimacy of abortion and homosexuality; the persistence of pornography and drug abuse; and acceptance of other religions and of atheism.
So what I'm getting from this op-ed is the minority of fundamental evangelicals in this country are driven by fear of losing a nation that never really was what they think it was. And its own mythology is changing what the United States really is - a highly disfunctional, multi-ethnic, multi-denominational nation - into their version of what is a Christian nation.
Can someone explain to me what the difference is between the extreme, fundamental right-wing of Islam and the extreme, fundamental right-wing of Christianity? Because they both look a lot a like to me.
I am tired of hearing politians discussing their faith in public where it does not belong. Faith, or lack there-of, is personal and should remain so. Politicians are kowtowing (in fear) to a tiny minority who think being Christian is the most important issue and that anyone who is not Christian, in their narrow definition, should not hold any office.
How far we have fallen since Presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association over 50 years ago:
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 helped lead 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 at a time of great national peril.
More than 50 years later those of us who are not what the minority of fundatmental evangelical Christians consider to be Christians are under fire and not trusted to lead, to rule, unless we change our ways and convert to theirs. This is based on the fears of a small group of people who see a way of life that never really existed slip away. I don't know how to change that, how to make them less fear-filled, except to quote Franklin D. Roosevelt:
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
But the rest of us have to be aware of their growing power.