The county resolution recognizing God is silly
by Barry Henderson
A County Commission resolution recognizing God as the foundation of American heritage and government is poised to pass next week. Why? County commissioners have no more business in the larger matters of God and country than they have in determining that the original ice cream was vanilla and recognizing it as such.
As a point of history, He doesn't need you commissioners to point out the obvious. As a point of American tradition, God belongs in religious belief, not in government resolution. The whereases of the resolution, that He is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and on U.S. currency are all true. Is that not enough? What possible justification is that for challenging the doctrine of separation of church and state? What reason is there to make an official statement that appears to be exclusive of other beliefs?
It makes as much sense, as one county official says privately, to discuss the adoption of a resolution that proclaims that white people are the foundation of American heritage and government. That may be historically true as well, but it is irrelevant today, and it is patently offensive to non-whites and to most whites. It would not be considered, would it?
Yet proclamation of the Judeo-Christian influence in our heritage and government seems acceptable, just because a majority of Americans and residents of Knox County may be so inclined.
The current fever among local governments to establish God in their jurisdictions is a reaction to current reaffirmations of the doctrine of church-state separation. Recently, the upheld objections to religious symbolism in local governments and on public property and the squabble over the wording, "under God," in the Pledge of Allegiance have brought on the fundamentalist response that God and God's name should be government-issue, doled out along with the rights granted under the Constitution. That idea should be as offensive as it sounds.
"Under God," was added to the Pledge to differentiate us from the "godless Communists" in the unpleasantly chauvinistic era of McCarthyism in the 1950s. It is not necessary to utter those words to pledge allegiance to this country and its flag. The idea of it originally may have been to differentiate among religious and irreligious people, but in practice it differentiates among religions and the people who practice them. That is not acceptable, and it was not acceptable to the founding fathers.
Oliver "Buzz" Thomas, the East Tennessee educator, former lawyer and former Baptist minister, is considered one of the nation's most respected advocates of church-state separation. He has studied the issue from all sides, and he likes to point out the irony in the American "arrangement," as he calls it. "There are lots of things about America that have been duplicated [elsewhere] or have been designed in other places, but as best we can tell, Rhode Island in the 17th Century, under Roger Williams, was the first place on earth to have real religious freedom ... where your standing in the civil order is not contingent upon your standing in a religious order or church," Thomas says, "We tend to think that conservative religious people are really not believers in church/state separation and real religious liberty...but the fact is that the whole idea of church/state separation sprang from the mind of America's first Baptist. Roger Williams started the first Baptist church in Providence, R.I., in 1636."
The church-state separation doctrine that eventually prevailed in most of the Colonies was the basis for the First Amendment's prohibition of the "establishment of religion." It has been tested often, and it still prevails in these United States, regardless of the pressures it occasionally receives from purveyors of evangelism or temporal sentimentality.
There is a purposeful and persistent undercurrent in America today that amounts to an unmistakable attempt to establish the majority religion as the one true religion—the one that calls God, God, as opposed to the one that calls the same God, Allah. And the devil take those who ascribe to a different god or spirituality, or to none at all.
Any religious group—and especially one that finds itself in the majority—may fall victim to such a fallacy, but to aggrandize or make "official" one religious faith is to demean them all, just as to aggrandize one race is demeaning to mankind in all its wondrous diversity. And when the question is reduced to the resolution of a body such as a county commission, which may favor God and His religious followers by a vote of 14-5, or 10-9, or whatever the outcome if this proposal is not withdrawn, it is an exercise that is not only offensive, it's as silly as it sounds.
November 13, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 46
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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