Frasch Ideas—Examine, Inquire, Explore

IS AMERICA A CHRISTIAN NATION? (part 2)

Posted by Theresa on February 27th, 2007 filed in Believe It or Not

IS AMERICA A CHRISTIAN NATION? A Dialogue On Religion And Politics In The 21st Century

Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy leads the national nonpartisan grassroots and educational organizations, The Interfaith Alliance and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, and serves as Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster (Baptist) Church in Monroe, LA.

Rev. Barry W. Lynn is Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and a member of the Supreme Court bar.

Here are some more excerpts. I will post more tomorrow:

GADDY: General respect for our first freedom persisted, with broad-based support within and outside the religious community, until about the 1960s and 1970s. Then, individuals skilled in the manipulation of religion began to attack the religion clauses in the Constitution in order to advance a very narrow political agenda. A shotgun marriage took place between ambitious politicians and religious clerics eager for more recognition and power.

Politicizing religion and religi-o-fying politics as a matter of strategy, the Religious Right launched a campaign to demonize secularism and to warn people that, apart from one particular kind of religion, the nation was in trouble.

LYNN: Perhaps two events encapsulate what Welton has just described. First, some powerful religious interest groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention, which had historically actually provided leadership to preserve religious freedom, found itself “taken over” by far-right members of its own denomination — people who were openly hostile to the separation of church and state and to governmental neutrality in matters of religion.

And at the same time, the Rev. Jerry Falwell had been recruited as the dogmatic leader of a membership organization known as the “Moral Majority,” the original lynchpin of what has become known as the “Religious Right.” The Moral Majority tried to get governments to actively promote specific religious ideas and viewpoints on a variety of contentious social issues. These included unsuccessful efforts to amend the Constitution to bring back government-promoted prayer in school and to completely outlaw all reproductive choice. Over that period of time, we also found that they were interested in censorship of books in libraries and finding ways to fund their own religious institutions.

During 2005, the ten largest Religious Right advocacy groups took in over $500 million. They continue to treat the Constitution as if it were the first draft of a freshman political science paper, and although they resist the idea that they should be called theocrats, what else do you call someone who tries to orchestrate government policy along narrow religious lines?

GADDY: Today, protecting religious freedom and guarding against entanglement of the institutions of religion and government are more important than ever. The founders bequeathed to us an absolutely brilliant formula for sustaining diversity and providing for religious pluralism without destroying freedom for or from religion.

But that guarantee is now in serious danger.

In recent years, people have sought to redefine both religion and government — measuring the authenticity of religion by policy positions on four or five issues and evaluating government by its support for sectarian views, programs, and institutions. The result has been a blurring of the lines between what is religion and what is government. As a result, we have seen threats to government because blurring those lines represents bad government and bad religion.

Ignoring religious liberty and church-state separation threatens, in the long run, to compromise the integrity of religion and to blunt the vitality of democracy — thus creating a crisis relating to our nation’s commitment to our first freedom, and raising serious concerns about our support for other freedoms and rights.

LYNN: Many of you are perhaps familiar with some of the recent efforts to use religious dogma to supplant sound science, curtail fundamental fairness in American institutions, and also intrude into deeply personal decisions from the moment of conception until the moment of death.

And here are just a few examples: In 2003, the Dover, PA, school board passed a resolution requiring that ninth-grade biology teachers provide a verbal “disclaimer” before they taught about evolution. The statement indicated that there was a so-called “scientific” alternative called “intelligent design” which was discussed in a book that students could look at in the library. Conveniently, 60 copies of that book had been donated by the local fundamentalist church.

A lawsuit, sponsored in part by Americans United, led to a decision late last year that prohibited such a disclaimer as an effort to slip religion, not genuine science, back into public school classrooms.

Second, in 2005, we issued a report demonstrating systemic religious discrimination at the United States Air Force Academy by evangelical Christian officers against cadets from other religious traditions. How bad did this get?

We found that the football coach had festooned the locker room with a banner reading “Team Jesus.” And we found a Mormon cadet who was repeatedly assigned to the lowest floors of the barracks — told in this way, he would be closer to Hell, the place he would end up anyway, if he didn’t convert to “real” Christianity.

And finally, in an issue affecting literally every American family, the Religious Right actually convinced Congress to pass legislation that would have nullified 10 years of lawsuits in the state of Florida that had finally permitted Michael Schiavo, the husband of Terri Schiavo, to carry out her wishes and remove a feeding tube as she lay in a persistent vegetative state. Wisely, the federal courts themselves ruled that Congress had no such power to try to alter the outcomes of the deliberations of these state court proceedings.