February Focus Month: Separation of Church and State
“One Nation... Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
(originally scheduled for February, but delayed due to snow date)
March 19, 2006
“One Nation... Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.” Some of us may feel ambivalent about the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, whether or not they include the phrase “One nation under God.” Some of us may feel threatened by this conversation, no matter which side of the argument we might support. In my preparation for this week’s sermon I discovered that, given the scope of this conversation, whether or not we include the words, “One nation under God,” is almost a minor part of this conversation. The stakes that are currently at risk are far greater than I’d imagined.
Let me begin by sharing some excerpts from a poem that was written by Judge Roy Moore, you may remember the former Supreme Court Judge of Alabama, who by many accounts, is on his way to becoming the Governor of that state. You, of course remember him from the case of the ten ton granite memorial of the Ten Commandments in the state court building in Birmingham. I have to warn you ahead of time that the text of the poem is definitely “R” rated.
“AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL”
America the Beautiful, or so you used to be.
Land of the Pilgrims' pride; I'm glad they'll never see.
Babies piled in dumpsters, Abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty, your house is on the sand…
From sea to shining sea, our Nation turns away
From the teaching of God's love and a need to always pray…
We've kept God in our temples, how callous we have grown.
When earth is but His footstool, and Heaven is His throne.
We've voted in a government that's rotting at the core,
Appointing Godless Judges who throw reason out the door,
Too soft to place a killer in a well deserved tomb,
But brave enough to kill a baby before he leaves the womb.
You think that God's not angry, that our land's a moral slum?
How much longer will He wait before His judgment comes?
How are we to face our God, from Whom we cannot hide?
What then is left for us to do, but stem this evil tide?
If we who are His children, will humbly turn and pray;
Seek His holy face and mend our evil way:
Then God will hear from Heaven and forgive us of our sins,
He'll heal our sickly land and those who live within.
But, America the Beautiful, if you don't then you will see,
A sad but Holy God withdraw His hand from Thee.
Besides the compromised integrity of the meter, this poem raises a number of other pertinent questions. Judge Moore’s agenda, as evidenced in the Ten Commandment case, is much more than personally religious. It is quite political and he clearly intends for it to go up through the branches of Alabama government and then, he hopes, through the branches of the national government. The separation of church and state is a fallacy as far as he is concerned, and he feels the Christian Church is the rightful director of the branches of our government.
Judge Moore is closely affiliated with an extremely right wing conservative religious/political organization. The December 2005 issue of Mother Jones magazine reports on his connections with ultra-right Christian publisher American Vision and the Christian Reconstructionist theological movement. You need to know about the Christian Reconstructionist theological movement.
They are unlike the Premillennialist theological movement of the last century, a popular right-wing, group that believed strongly, “…that humanity was inevitably headed for Armageddon, which would most likely arrive with a nuclear blast, whereupon Christ would appear in the Second Coming and set things right.” (MJ)
The far out Religious Right has moved beyond pre to postmillennialism, where:
“Christ would not return until the church had claimed dominion over government, and most of the world's population had accepted the Reconstruction brand of Christianity. The postmillennial twist [offers] hope to the pious that they [can] change things-as long as they [get] organized. Reconstructionists angrily denounce end-times visions … If these are the Last Days, American Vision's website points out, "then why bother trying to fix a broken world that is about to be thrown on the ash heap of history? Why concern ourselves with education, healthcare, the economy, or peace in the Mideast? Why polish brass on a sinking ship?
“For premillennialists, Reconstruction's revolutionary philosophy [offers] an opportunity to turbocharge the religious right. Most conservative churches [oppose] abortion, for example, but Reconstruction influenced groups such as Randall Terry's Operation Rescue [are] willing to field soldiers and take the fight to the enemy. This not only [emboldens] activists, it [gives] Reconstructionists a chance to spread their organizing message: If you want to do God's work, this needs to be God's nation.
“Similarly, Baptist morality [focuses] on personal choices, such as avoiding drinking. But Reconstructionists [don't] tell believers to shun sin. They [say] to conquer it, [and not just in their own lives, but in the lives of others] even if the price [is] jail or martyrdom. Paul Hill, the antiabortion activist executed two years ago for the 1994 murders of abortion clinic workers in Pensacola, Florida, had been a minister in the Reconstruction [movement]…
“[The Reconstructionists are] busy constructing a Bible based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God…" [As one of the movement’s leaders, Gary DeMar puts it,] "All governments are theocracies... We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head." (MJ)
You may think that I’m being something of an alarmist, and that I’m talking about a small group of fringe lunatics that will never come to power. If you do, you’re right on one count – they aren’t coming into power. The bad news is – many of them are already there! Marvin Olasky, for example is one of the leading theoreticians of the Reconstructionist movement. He was also one of the major architects of President Bush’s Faith Based Initiatives program.
Among the very first days of our President’s first term of office he signed several executive orders, which were clearly a part of the Religious Right’s political agenda. Some of them were related to funding, not only to a woman’s right to choose, but even to funding for a woman’s right to receive information about birth control or even information about medical options. Though there may be some who might argue that these are not issues of separation of church and state (and I am not one who would pose such an argument), there is another area that I find most impossible to distinguish any separation of church and state. That was in the creation of the “Faith Based” initiatives.
Providing federal funds to a religious organization for the purpose of providing social services – according to and guided by the tenets of that faith community – is a total rupture of the wall that separates church and state. The political objectives of this federal sortie on the religious realm are thinly veiled. In one stroke, the government undermined its own social services structure, a goal which was long an objective of the neoconservatives. It did so by allocating to the religious sector, already limited social service funds, reducing them even further. The Religious Right was well positioned and ready to step into this windfall following this disaster of democracy in much the same way the Halliburton Corporation has been mysteriously positioned to receive unexpected government contracts following natural disasters. And the Religious Right has received the lion’s share of the faith based monies. Other religious organizations have been left scrambling for the remainder, with the attitude that if this is the new game, they will need to learn to play it – no sense letting the others get all the goodies!
I remember early on in this program being invited to a Faith Based information breakfast in Newark. I asked Frank Rennie, who runs our After School Program, to come along with me. We came away from this exceedingly slick event feeling very uneasy about it. In the world of good touch-bad touch, it felt very much like a bad touch. It was easy to see where Head Start, childcare, counseling service, family aid, even education funds were going. They were going to conglomerate, conservative religious businesses. Frank and I agreed that we didn’t want to participate in such a venture that took money from those who need it most, and provided it for the use of those who would claim it in God’s name. Their God, of course.
Some of you may be aware of an executive order that was signed by the President and issued by the Whitehouse just two weeks ago. It was entitled: “Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with respect to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.” If you aren’t familiar with it, you should be. It’s rather scary!
It establishes a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security. The Center is to be supervised by a Director appointed by the Secretary of the department, who will consult with the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives prior to making such appointment.
The purpose of the Center will be to coordinate agency efforts to eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the provision of social and community services. Its responsibilities are to:
(a) Conduct, in coordination with the White House Faith-Based Director, a department-wide audit to identify all existing barriers to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the delivery of social and community services by the Department, including but not limited to regulations, rules, orders, procurement, and other internal policies and practices, and outreach activities that unlawfully discriminate against, or otherwise discourage or disadvantage the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in Federal programs;
(b) Coordinate a comprehensive departmental effort to incorporate faith-based and other community organizations in Department programs and initiatives to the greatest extent possible;
(c) Propose initiatives to remove barriers…including but not limited to reform of regulations, procurement, and other internal policies and practices, and outreach activities;
(d) Propose the development of innovative pilot and demonstration programs to increase the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in Federal as well as State and local initiatives; and
(e) Develop and coordinate Departmental outreach efforts to disseminate information more effectively to faith-based and other community organizations with respect to programming changes, contracting opportunities, and other agency initiatives, including but not limited to Web and Internet resources.
In other words, our President wants to be sure that, whatever disaster may befall our nation, whether – we might add – it is a natural disaster, one caused by our government or one exacerbated by it, that religious institutions will be unimpaired in spending federal dollars not only for relief efforts to the victims, but in the revisioning, and restructuring of the disaster areas and the social institutions that will reweave their fabric. There is no place like Ground Zero for the laying of a new order.
So, let’s try to add this all up. There is a religious movement in our country, whose avowed purpose is to create a theocracy based upon an ultra-conservative view of Christianity. Actually, it’s unfair to align this movement with conservatives. It’s not as though Reconstructionists are conservative; that’s just where they’ve found the easiest place to glom on. In fact, political conservatives are beginning to speak up against this theft of their own political agenda, as evidenced by such publications as, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, by Pat Buchanan.
If you want a good reference for further reading, another recent publication, more in the mainstream, Why the Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State, is by award-winning journalist Rob Boston. Boston criticizes the Religious Right for spreading misinformation about the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state and describes how a band of ultraconservative religious groups with a political agenda is conducting a systematic war against separation of church and state. The tactics of these groups, he says, are designed to exploit unfounded fears and turn the American people against the separation principle. They will not rest, Boston says, until the United States has become a theocracy.
So there is a religious movement afoot, whose purpose it is to create some kind of a peculiar form of a Christian theocracy in the United States. Its purpose is to rid the world of moral inferiority, as it deems it, in order to bring about the second coming of Christ. This religious movement is closely linked to our administration, even a part of it. It has already begun to undermine our American form of democracy by systematically dismantling the government’s system of delivery of social services, creating a financial dependency of the churches on the government, and seriously breaching the wall of separation between the institutions of church and state. And none of this even mentions the further dismantling of the separation through the appointment of Reconstructionist minded judges to the courts.
What are we to do? What does it mean for us to be religious persons in a religious community that has a very different view of religion? What do we come here to do? What are we in the world to do?
As I have said before, we would do well, as Unitarian Universalists, as this debate heats up, we would do well to be prepared to state for the world how our religious principles help us to respond to these and other issues; how they help us to respond to a very needy world. We would do even better to act on our principles in ways to meet those needs. And then after we have done all of that, in a very religious, always humble, strident if necessary, and yet still determined way, to go into the public place and through civil conversation, through public protest, go about demanding that our government not sponsor or favor any religious tradition over another, or even favor religion over non-religion.
There is a religious war going on in our country! We did not declare this war, but it has been declared on us. Just as our Unitarian and Universalist forebears were part of the framing of our constitution, we are now called upon to defend it. We need to maintain our religious principles in response to this war, and we need to decide how we are going to defend not only our religious way, which is no more than grist for the mill of the Religious Right, but how we are going to defend our constitution and our democracy. The future of our nation depends on it. The future of our nation, once again, depends on us.
Perhaps we will need to take this struggle for freedom to the streets, perhaps we will need to take it to the editors of our media services, perhaps we will need to take it into our own campaigns as some of us recognize a call to run for public office. (I’m wondering if anyone in this room might hear such a call!)
Surely we will need to take this struggle for freedom to the public debate and to the voting booth.
One Nation, under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All.
One Nation... Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.
Either way, the future of our one nation is at stake. |
