Anyone trying to insert his or her bible among the articles and amendments of the Constitution of the United States must explain why our founding fathers -- nearly all professed to be devout men -- wrote a purely secular document.
America's theocrats ignore what is written in the Constitution and, instead, see the authors' religious uniformity as evidence for a United States of Christianistan. How laughingly absurd. Read the document. It's obvious that the authors left their religion at the door. God is nowhere in our Constitution. The word religious appears just once. It is in Article IV, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." The word religion is found only in the establishment clause of the first amendment. Jesus, divine, divinity, Christ, Christian, holy, pray, prayer, hymn, psalm, crucifix, and cross are all, like God, excluded from the basic law of the land.
Imagine a group of believers for whom God is a constant part of their lives. These men see God's hand in everything from the magnificent to the mundane. Then, they gather to create the fundamental guiding law for a new nation. The men argue, cajole, and compromise. They pray for guidance and inspiration. They write, argue, and edit. They pray some more. Finally, the Constitution is completed and signed, and it is a godless document. Do not for an instant believe that God and religion are omitted by accident. These religious people have chosen to create secular government.
Theocracy usually implies to me Muslim mullahs or America's wannabes. This week, just in time for the Blog Against Theocracy, the Vatican demands its seat at the table. I have to respond with a forehead-smacking, "Of course!" How could I have so long overlooked the west's richest and most respected theocracy? Silly me. Because the Vatican screams out that religion and politics should not mix. Both get hurt. Both are degraded. Both are compromised. I give to you the Pope and his minions as this year's poster boys for the Blog Against Theocracy.
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Do not for an instant believe that God and religion are omitted by accident. These religious people have chosen to create secular government.
ReplyDeleteExactly. And Jefferson and Madison worked hard to clarify the lines shortly after the Constitution with the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.
We should be clear about what the Founders were up to. They didn't exclude religion so much because of a high-minded desire to keep religion out of politics for the good of the people of their new country, as they did it to eliminate a contender for power.
ReplyDeleteThese men had the very unique chance to set up the rules for a new game, and they wanted those rules to favor them and people like them: Rich, White, and Male. The last thing they wanted was to have their authority challenged by either of the two historical power centers of national governance, the military and religion.
The militarists and religionists have been trying ever since to take over, and it is well that they don't because either one alone or both together can only exist in charge as totalitarians. For the nation our Founders envisioned, a certain amount of structured freedom - more for some, less for others - is needed to give the citizenry something valuable to cling to, as a way to keep the other two contenders for power at bay.
Properly managed, limited freedom serves to maintain power where the Founders wanted it to be and where it still is today two centuries on - held by rich white men. Those old boys knew they were laying down tracks for history so the words and concepts are all quite eloquent, but the nuts and bolts of the thing show that they were not the ethereal idealists we have been taught in school to imagine them as being but rather very cold-hearted, practical realists, who used those high-minded concepts to build a structure that would secure in perpetuity their own class dominance.