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JULY 12, 2002  - Brunswick Maine Town Record

Editorials

Can Americans handle God?

By Robert Klose

But, in contrast to the ancient Israelites, Americans have never found it difficult to assume both intimate knowledge of the nature of the Creator and familiarity with his will, both present and future. They also seem to have a clear impression of his actual appearance. I once had a student who fully believed that God, being the template for her own creation, po­ssessed blood, bone and functioning internal organs, including, she pointed out, a pancreas. 

Is it any wonder that the recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Court declaring the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance to be uncon­stitutional has brought the faithful up from the rivers to call for the head of the man - Michael Newdow, an avowed atheist in California - who pushed the suit onto the court's docket? When one assumes that God is on one's side, one concludes, ipso facto, that one must be correct. Bitter though the pill be, Mr. Newdow's point is well taken. The United States must accom­modate both the believer and the un­believer The bedrock documents of the Republic - the Declaration of Indepen­dence and the Constitution - are marvels of inclusiveness, mansions roomy enough for all to rest comfort­ably upon their tenets and precepts. The Founding Fathers, mindful of the mire European states had constructed by virtue of their entwinements with establishments of religion, took pains to outline a clean separation of the two: Let the government pursue its business, and allow the churches to peaceably go about theirs, and never the twain shall meet.

The insertion of "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance is a recent invention, introduced only in 1954 in a fit of anti-Communist fervor, to re­inforce the American view that the Soviet Union was Godless while the United States, by contrast, was God-ful. There has probably been no other presumption in the history of human­kind which, time and again, has proven so tragic. Witness the Crusades. Witness the Middle East. Witness planes being commandeered by Islam­ic militants shouting "Allah Akbar" (God is Great). 

In fact, radical fundamentalism is the purview of the devout. Propelled by fits of righteousness, fundamental­ists - be they Islamic, Christian, or Jewish - have carried out the most invidious crimes, after which they have gone home to sound sleeps. To my knowledge, an atheist has never lynch­ed a black man, blown himself up in a Jerusalem marketplace, or set off a bomb in Belfast. It seems that, without God as co-pilot, there is little lust for such crimes.

If a constitutional convention were to be held today, there is little doubt that the masses would press for a hybridization of church and state, for the longing to convert America from a democracy to a theocracy is unrelent­ing. It has erupted in the form of the Klan, in the courts as the Scopes Trial, in Republican ranks as attempts to insert prayer into the schools, and at presidential inaugurations where the name of Jesus Christ is invoked as "our Lord" when there are millions of Americans for whom this does not hold true.

The original purpose of the sep­aration of church and state was not only to be able to conduct government without undo influence from establish­ments of religion, but to allow the free flowering of religion as per people's wants and desires. In this sense, it is a genius of policy; one which, in the 1830s, led de Tocqueville, in Democ­racy in America, to write, "The relig­ious atmosphere in America was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States."

It is a fundamental strength of American political philosophy that the citizenry is free to trust in God (as per our currency), and that citizens have, as individuals, every right to pro­nounce that they inhabit and support a republic "under God." But, as individ­uals (and the premise of America is that it is a country of individual - and not group - rights), we make these decisions for ourselves. When it comes to beliefs as personal and private as religion, there is no rule of the majority, there is to be, as the founders put it, no tyranny of the majority.

The Pledge of Allegiance will survive, but it is up to each of us to decide whether or not faith in God plays a role in such devotion to country.

ROBERT KLOSE is an essayist for the Christian Science Monitor and teaches at University College of Bangor.