Religion and Politics – Part 1

Evangelicals believe the idea of “a wall of separation” between Church and State is a product of liberal imagination because no such thing is even mentioned in the Constitution.

Neither is God.

Were the Founders anti-God? Of course not. But to them, God was a private matter, thus the private practice of religion is what is protected by the Constitution. As renowned Catholic historian Garry Wills wrote: “The American Republic is the first and only secularly based government in world history.” The legitimacy of the nation rests in the will of the people not “God’s will.”

Rewriting American history from the “Christian nation” point of view leans heavily on the Puritan era. Every schoolchild is taught that the Puritans came to the New World to escape religious persecution. The persecution they escaped however was persecution by other Christians (the state religion) not godless heathens.

Revisionist history implies that the Puritan mission in the New Canaan was to create a new religious freedom however this manifestly was not the case.

The Puritans did establish a pre-American Christian state marked by persecution inside and outside their own community (e.g. the Salem Witch Trials, Indians, Quakers, Catholics.) Colonial citizens were taxed to support the church in 11 of the 13 original colonies and there was a religious “test” for holding public office. In many cases the test was also applied to voting rights. Delaware required that public officials take an oath swearing support for “faith in God the Father, and Jesus Christ His Son and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed and forevermore.” Pennsylvania required officeholders to be Protestants who not only believed in God, but also in the “divine inspiration of the Old and the New Testaments.” Only New York and Virginia excluded the religious test. The Virginia Constitution, under the strong influence of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Patrick Henry and Washington, banned the “religious test” and became the model for the US Constitution. The New York Constitution went further:

Guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith bigotry and ambition of the weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind.

Fundamentalists like David Limbaugh today insist “that America was founded as a Christian polity which persisted until subverted by a cabal of 20th Century liberals and freethinkers who replaced it with a ‘un-American’ secular state.” Just nonsense. There was no America until 1789, long after the Puritans stopped burning “witches” and cutting off Quaker ears.

The Founders feared tyranny of all kinds, including religious tyranny to which the Puritans showed an easy propensity. As Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #10:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points…an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power…have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

In the bitter 1800 presidential campaign, Christian extremists did great personal damage to Thomas Jefferson. In an anonymous piece written for the New England Palladium:

Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is at that moment set on our whole religion; our churches will be prostrated and some infamous prostitute under the name of Reason will preside in the sanctuary now devoted to the worship of the Most High.

The religionists believed Jefferson’s devotion to the principles of reason showed “disrespect Jefferson won the election of 1800 in a tie breaking vote cast in the US House of Representatives but the damage caused to his reputation by the un-Christian Christian campaign was long lasting. FDR put Jefferson on a US Postal stamp, then the nickel, and finally, the Jefferson Memorial in 1943. It took 125 years after his death.

Because “God was ignored in America’s founding document” campaigns to “fix” this were launched six times over the next 82 years. The first campaign for the “God” amendment to the US Constitution called for a Constitutional Amendment to acknowledge “the rulership of Jesus Christ and the supremacy of the divine law.” The Christian Amendment, in various forms, was pushed with major campaigns in 1864, 1874, 1894, 1910, 1945, and 1954. The attempt to de-secularize the Constitution failed every time it was tried.

Religious tolerance is typically not found in religions themselves. As Will Durant wrote in “The Age of Faith,” “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty, certainty is murderous.”

Facts may be ignored or re-shaped in the interest of a religious political message. For example, Newt Gingrich manipulated the facts in his latest presidential campaign book “Winning the Future,” which includes a DC walking tour for Christians. In a classic misdirection, he cites a Jefferson quote engraved around the rotunda in the Jefferson Memorial. “I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” This is falsely presented by Gingrich as an example of Jefferson’s support of Christianity in government just as it was once used to rationalize racial segregation. However, the quote is from a letter Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush complaining precisely about the forces of organized religion and the clergy who tried to destroy him in 1800.

They (the clergy) believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes and they believe rightly: for I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny (i.e. including religious tyranny) over the mind of man. But that is all they have to fear from me; and enough too in their opinion.

The Constitutional Convention, after great deliberation, abandoned the Christian state model and the states agreed with them and ratified the secular Republic. The religious right is trying to overturn that vote today through propaganda because they have never had the votes to do it with the truth.

Veteran’s Day

Heartfelt thanks and respect to all of our veterans, past and present.

Less can be said the jingoistic judgments of who send the troops into harms way and the rest of us who stand by and watch it happen as if we were watching the Weather Channel.

The Class of 2010 has lived with the “War on Terror” since they were in seventh grade. Now we will be asking them to go and fight. It’s ironic that as we pay homage to our war dead and wounded, the urgent issue now is whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan.

This is not a political decision. Take it and the entire question of Wars on Terror out of politics and emotion. Place it into the barest of government questions. What is the greater good?

Over the centuries, Afghanistan has been invaded, occupied and given up by the Persians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and the Russians. And now, it’s America’s turn to prove history wrong for the first time again.

In the last two weeks I had opportunities to speak privately with a US Senator who just returned from Afghanistan and who sits on the Intelligence Committee. As well, I spent more extensive time with the retired US General who headed security in Afghanistan.

In unconnected conversations they both said to me two things almost word for word.

“We’re just blowing up rocks.”

“How can we ask Americans to sacrifice for a corrupt regime?”

H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) “the most important American writer of weird fiction since Poe” said that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Ironies and contradictions abound within us, as if our psyche were an ocean liner with guests carefully scheduled so as to never run into each other.

Who is the enemy in Afghanistan? The Taliban or is it the War on Drugs opium trade which ends up as heroin on US streets? Opium accounts for about 50% of Afghanistan’s GNP.

How is that battle for hearts and minds going? Our soldiers are handing out candy to kids while we fight to prop up a blatantly corrupt and abusive political system just because it is not the Taliban. At the same time we are trying to destroy 50% of the Afghan GDP. They gotta love us.

The war on terrorism is undeclared in the sense that there is no one to declare it against and the funding for it is “off the books,” as if it were free to wage or that the debts we pass on here are much less burdensome than the cost of say a national health care program.

MATERIAL COST

The fight over health care reform includes the stubborn issue of cost. Many Americans compartmentalize health care into a financial deficit problem while such a view is ignored when it comes to these wars. The “War on Terror” already costs Americans in economic terms alone, more than the projected costs of the most extravagant health care proposals. If they cost the same and you can’t afford both, how would you decide? Is our national health unconnected to our physical and economic security?

Regarding the national economic stimulus package it ‘s disconcerting to some that adding or retaining a job is estimated to be a one-time cost of $235,000 per job even though every dollar of that money is being invested one way or another in the American economy. It seems less alarming than the $1-million-per-soldier cost, per year in Afghanistan alone. These costs were calculated in connection with adding 40,000 new troops in Afghanistan. Is that productive? The question is not about 40,000 troops or a compromise number of some kind. It’s about whether we should be there at all given the other priorities we face.

Of course estimating costs for a war with a non-existent state, a non-standing army, a geographically indeterminate and an unknown enemy is difficult to be sure. In inflation adjusted dollars, Viet Nam cost about $400 billion to lose. It would cost the US almost $200 billion just to support the proposed 40,000 troops over the next ten years.

Another ten years of this war on terror at the current run rate will reach up to $2 trillion. It cost $2 trillion in inflation adjusted dollars to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini in half the time we have already spent on the “War on Terror.”

What conviction have we that the war on terror will ever end? Or that it will not spread to Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran or Somalia or Florida or Fort Hood?

HOW DO WE DEFINE “VICTORY” IN THE WAR ON TERROR?

If we cannot answer that then not only can we never estimate the real cost but we can never win. Do all terrorists need to come forward and surrender? Do we win when everyone likes us?

A JUST WAR?

For those of you who were in seventh grade when the war on terror was sold to the American public, you should know that an actual rationale offered was St. Augustine’s calculus of a “just war.” The absurdity of this application is immediately clear on the pivotal matter of “proportionality.” We have sent the best soldiers in the world in superior numbers, with the best training and technology in world history to fight a “war” with mosquitoes and to bomb rocks.

There are good reasons to make war decisions unemotionally and in the context of the greater good. Offering up American lives, limbs and public treasure in Afghanistan to make political points is what Spinoza called fighting:

“… as we would for salvation and will not think it is shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that a man may have a ground for boasting.”

NO MORE TROOPS. GET OUT!