If James Madison were alive today...

...he'd be clawing desperately at the lid of his coffin. Man, that one never gets old.

I'm going to try (no doubt in vain) to make this one brief, because, as they say, brevity is the soul of wit. To quote from a fellow blogger (who is an atheist) whose blog I enjoy, some people, such as Mike Huckabee have claimed that the Constitution needs to be amended to make the U.S. a Christian nation as our forefathers intended. When you think about it, "[D]oesn't that, in itself, prove that our constitution wasn't supposed to be a Christian document?"

I don't know if DocMike was the first to think of this question, and he probably wasn't (I myself have mused along those lines before), but in his little comic format, he puts it so well and so succinctly that it suddenly becomes a "Duh!" statement. Sure, there are those who wish the United States was not just a Christian nation in culture, but in law. The laws can be and often are changed, but the thing that so often bothers me is the appeal to how somehow by voiding the laws that the Founding Fathers wrote, we're actually serving their wishes.

Say what you want about how the Founding Fathers were great Christian men (and of course, most of them were), but don't appeal to them as a defense for your own moral choices as you simultaneously aim to tear down what they created. The Constitution is a living document that can be amended, and has been many, many times. If a politician wants to change it, they can freely endeavor to do so, but let's have no nonsense about what the Founding Fathers wanted but somehow forgot to put in.

For those Christians who are still not convinced (and no doubt wouldn't be reading my blog anyway), consider the position reversed. Imagine a politician taking office and making a law that Bibles printed in America be amended to say that any sexual act between two consenting adults is acceptable to God, because "We know that God is love, and therefore we know that God wants the world to have more love in it, especially physical love." That would be crap, wouldn't it? People can and do teach whatever they want about the nature of God, but would it make sense to change the words of the Bible because you feel you know that God wanted it that way, although He didn't clearly state so?

One nation, (out from) under God, part II

Those who settled in America in the colonial years have a lesson to teach us. It's a lesson that I'm afraid some people have forgotten, and it's really too bad, because it's shown itself time and time again throughout history in one form or another. Religion and political power don't mix well.

As I've so often admitted elsewhere, and maybe a few times even here in this blog, history was not one of my better subjects, so I'm bound to get some details mixed up. Still, there was one story that I remember from a junior high class about American history. A bunch of guys in England got together and said, we're tired of being told how to worship by the King. We just don't have freedom here in England; let's see if we can find freedom in America. So they got a boat and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and founded Massachusetts, where people were flogged and burned as witches and heretics if they didn't worship the way the people in charge there wanted it to be done. So, a few of them figured they weren't any better off in Massachusetts than they were in England, and they went off to found Connecticut. What did they do there? Basically they set up yet still another little pseudo-theocracy, and the cycle started again. This led to the founding of Rhode Island.

I remember being about eleven or so and thinking, what a bunch of idiots! It's like saying you didn't like being abused by your parents, so you had kids in order to abuse them and somehow even the score or something. Well, not quite. Religion and political power don't mix so well because they share many characteristics. Neither one is inherently evil, but both can be and often are used in unscrupulous manners to control people for selfish ends. And most people wielding that power of control tell themselves that they are doing it for the greater good. All of these people, including the King of England, did what they did because they believed that God was on their side. This means to me that even though their deeds were questionable, they may have at some level had quite reasonable motives.

But are motives enough? Somebody's right (maybe), and somebody's wrong, but there is no guarantee that those who are in positions of power are the ones who are right. After all, the Bible itself is full of stories of powerful men who had control over Israel but were not considered righteous in the least. If there is no guarantee for a righteous King over God's chosen people, then who's to say that we as a nation that only *assume* we have God's blessing have any sort of guarantee of righteous leadership? God loves putting the wrong people in power to teach people a lesson through having to endure bad leadership.

All that aside, let me ask my fellow Christians: what sort of Christian country would we then live in? Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton claim to be Christians, are there too many people out there that feel that both (or even either) of them was/is an ideal leader for our country? Do you think Baptists would be content with letting Catholics be in charge, or vice-versa? Look at the controversies over abortion, homosexuality, and gender roles that are tearing apart American denominations right now. Do you really believe we can hold the country together when we can't even hold our churches together?

Now does that mean that we can't allow our religious beliefs to play themselves out in the way we run our government? I don't think it does at all, but one thing we always need to remember is the "golden rule", and put ourselves in somebody else's shoes. Would we be okay with somebody else making these same decisions that we make? Somebody else running the country the way that we run it? If the theists tell the atheists that they won't be allowed to live as they see fit, then how do we know that tomorrow the monotheists won't take away the rights of the pagans and Hindus, and the next day the Christians take away from the Muslims and Jews, and the next day the Protestants take away from the Catholics and Mormons, and the next day the Baptists take away from the Methodists and Lutherans, etc. Maybe the "slippery slope" isn't considered a valid form of argument, but I just see a set of events lined up that, if we took away the religious rights of one person for an arbitrary reason, would lead to virtually nobody having freedom anymore.

One nation, (out from) under God

What with this being the closest I am going to come to posting on American Independence Day, I was planning to cover the topic of separation of church and state. There's a lot to be said in that area, and if I manage to do well in discussing the topic, I should have enough material to offend everyone.

There is a prevailing bit of conventional wisdom among Christians that America is, was, and always will be a Christian nation. I think one can definitely say that the majority of the founding fathers were Christians, although a few of the more notable ones (Franklin and Jefferson come to mind) weren't, at least in the sense we modern evangelicals like to see ourselves defined. The founding fathers most likely had in mind, among other things, the fact that Britain was a country with a state religion, and they and their ancestors had largely come to the "New World" to be allowed to worship in peace as they saw fit.

From what I do remember of the earliest settlers, there wasn't a whole lot of real religious freedom; it was more like leaving England, where one was forced to be Anglican, so that one could found a new colony where we could force everyone to be Methodist, or whatever the local majority religious flavor was. The founders must have learned something from all of this recent history, or at least they were smarter than many who had come before them, and decided that forcing anyone to have any religion was just a bad idea.

So while the Bible, which we Christians like to claim we live by, gives us Ten Commandments, the Constitution gives us Ten Amendments, a.k.a. the Bill of Rights. And looking at these side by side, it's interesting to see some startling contrasts. If the founding fathers intended the United States to be a Christian nation, they sure did a bad job of expressing it.

U.S. Constitution, Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Exodus 20:2-3
I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

Fascinating. The First Commandment regards both "an establishment of religion" (you must worship God) and "prohibiting free exercise thereof" (you may not worship anything else). Actually, concerning "free exercise thereof," we can look at the second commandment as well:

Exodus 20:4-6
"You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

See, God's not so much into that "free exercise" thing. But the founding fathers were, it seems. Something else other than religion that comes up is the whole free speech thing. The founding fathers wanted people to be able to say whatever they wanted. How about God?

Exodus 20:7
You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

Doesn't sound like it, does it?

The point here is that if you want to make Christianity the state religion, and you want to make the laws of the Bible into the laws of the land, you're going to have to toss out not just a lot of the laws that have recently been created, but many that form the bedrock of our society. While not all of the items found in the Ten Commandments (or even the rest of the Bible) conflict with existing law, many of the most fundamental precepts of both our religion and our government are at cross-purposes to each other, at least if you try to blur the distinction between one and the other.