RELIGIOUS CORRECTNESS

There is terrible religious oppression going on. Everywhere in the media last month there were stories of people not being allowed to practice their faith here in the United States. Perhaps some of these terrible incidents took place right in your own town, like when Nativity scenes were not allowed on public property!

Yeah I know, what's one more Nativity Scene? But listen to the hue and cry! "Help! Help! We can't sing hymns by the town hall!" moan the evangelical leaders. "Our free exercise of religion is being suppressed!"

I even heard one minister complaining about people greeting him with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas!" Damn dude! Now I can see how Chanukah and Kwanzaa might offend your strict interpretation, but we ALL recognize New Year's Day as a holiday, can't we simply note that there's more than one holiday in our greeting without your being offended? Maybe you would rather we just didn't greet you at all. Another preacher I saw on a talkshow complained that the African holiday Kwanzaa was made-up. Actually he's right, but then so is Christmas, they just made it up a few centuries earlier than Kwanzaa. Who cares? Oops, I shouldn't put it that way should I? Obviously a lot of believers DO care these days, but that holiday was last month and I don't really want to talk about it; I've gone into the real meaning of Christmas many times before.

What I am talking about is the misguided promotion of Religious Correctness. A few ambitious Fundamentalists are doing it in order to promote their own selfish needs for power. Like the cynical political leaders who are wrapping themselves in the flag, these religious leaders are wrapping themselves in the cross.

You'd think that the cross couldn't bend that way, but they've managed it. What the most shrill preachers have discovered is that they can brand anyone who complains about their tactics as "anti-religion". They know that few will dare speak out against anything that's been labeled the Word of God. It's a little like defending artistic nudity under Freedom of Expression after someone's branded it pornography. If you defend it they will say that you are FOR pornography, so their point wins no matter how wrong-headed it may be. Now I'm not saying that everything evangelicals think is wrong, it's just hard to have a rational discussion because their interpretation of scripture can't be questioned.

Frankly though, they don't have much to complain about. Any objective analysis will show that Christianity is very successful right now; in fact this is the most Christian this nation has ever been. A recent Newsweek poll said that 84 percent of Americans call themselves Christians. Sure, there are a few isolated incidents of a Nativity scene being blocked on public property, but you can have one anywhere on private land. With so many churches it adds up to five or six every square mile in some cities. Sounds pretty close to saturation to me! Four out five people in this country also believe in the Virgin Birth, The Devil and The Apocalypse of John. Similar numbers believe in other superstitious traditions that aren't even in the Bible at all, like the Rapture and the various levels of Hell. There are no government programs preventing their beliefs, certainly not under George Bush and John Ashcroft, yet many Christian leaders are seizing upon the slightest abridgement of their need to preach whenever and wherever they want, saying their faith is under siege by a secular plot!

I'm sure a few hymns and a Nativity scene down by city hall won't push that 84% approval rating much higher, so why are they so worried about this? Maybe that poll isn't that accurate. Maybe those people felt it was the Religiously Correct thing to say in our aggressively Christian nation.

But the United States still isn't a Christian state even if belief is at 84%. This nation was deliberately created as a secular state; we have no official religion for a reason.

In ancient times every nomadic tribe had their own name for God. Accommodating each group's special deity was one of the reasons that polytheism sprang up as these tribes gathered together in cities. All Gods were revered so that various tribes could live together without strife and over time their deities were given particular areas of responsibility. The Hindus were the best at assimilating other deities but the Greeks and Romans did a very good job of it too. It is clear in the oldest parts of the Old Testament that Hebrews knew other Gods were about and often Yahweh is referred to as one of many, but that changed. Through the story of Moses the Hebrew tradition of One Transcendent God obviously gained strength and along with it came the notion that a particular group of people is chosen to be God's Favorite above all others.

In terms of the construction of a religion, the idea of being God's Favorite is comforting but it also creates a lot of problems. Its adherents always think they are right no matter what. This idea is one of the reasons that the Middle East was party to more wars over human history than any other place on Earth. These "Chosen" people refused to be assimilated. Moreover, when they were in control, they often slaughtered tribes who would not join them. This idea of being the Chosen People runs through the entire Judaic tradition and was also brought into Christianity and Islam. Our own Pilgrims, Puritans and other early colonists certainly felt this way too.

When Fundamentalists say that most of the founding Fathers were "Christians" it's true, but that term is so general as to be meaningless. Oh and by the way, anyone who says ALL the Founding Fathers were Christian hasn't read Thomas Paine. In any case, the reason we have separation of Church and State is because the Founding Fathers feared religious persecution BETWEEN CHRISTIANS. They wrote the Constitution in the late 18th century but they remembered what happened in the 16th century when Martin Luther encouraged most of Northern Europe to break away from Mother Church. The split that created Lutherans, then Episcopalians, Calvinists, Huguenots, Presbyterians and others caused terrible wars with Catholics that rolled across Europe again and again; many of the original colonists were refugees from that conflict. The Founding Fathers knew that more strife was possible if any one of these groups gained control of the new nation, so they made sure government was not allowed to support or repress any of them.

Still, it's clear they were not antagonistic toward religion either. Their explicit creation of Freedom Of Religion not only allowed different denominations to live side by side, it also allowed the creation of new religions with different answers to the questions of faith, like the Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists.

They probably didn't realize the full implications of what they did, but like Thomas Jefferson said in the Foreword to John Stewart's America The Book, the Constitution was never considered PERFECT by the Founding Fathers. (That was TJ they channeled from the spirit world to write that, wasn't it?) That's why they instituted the systems of constitutional amendments and why they wrote the first 10 themselves. But they also left us with phrases like "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" and "In God We Trust" scattered through their works. When they say "religion" it's fair to assume they meant a Christian Church, but they didn't specify which denomination on purpose because they knew they would get in trouble really quickly.

What, you think our various Christian churches would never cause that kind of trouble these days? You need a ticket to Northern Ireland, my friend. Or maybe you should just make school prayer legal! Can you imagine all the Religiously Correct trying to get their own special twist in on something as seemingly simple as a Universal Prayer? And no, the Lord's Prayer wouldn't work. Our Father? Wasn't God supposed to be a Trinity? What if God is female? Or what if God actually likes the name Ahura Mazda? Or Ganesh? Or maybe Allah?

Our nation is composed of more than just Christians. Because of the Bill of Rights, we now have strong communities of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu and others plus quite a few agnostics like myself and more than a few outright atheists that did not exist in the 18th Century. We are all Americans too.

The Religiously Correct believe they have a mandate right now because of Dubya's election and they will try to make the world perfect according to their own Church's teachings. You thought Political Correctness was fun but you haven't seen anything yet. They will start stepping on others' toes and sooner or later they will be treading on other Christian toes too. Remember, some of these people still believe in witches; don't think that new Salem trials are impossible.

It's a shame some people feel they have to be so intolerant. I don't think Jesus was like that, but then his Churches really aren't in the business of tolerance. For every group of Chosen, conversely there's always a group of Non-Chosen created. Every religion teaches that they have the real inside scoop and they can't all be right. That's why I try to take the agnostic approach to each and see the good things each view has to offer. I think the Founding Fathers felt that way too. Maybe that's why their time was called The Age Of Reason.

Personally I don't agree with such a strict separation of Church and State that prevents folks from singing hymns at city hall. Let 'em! But if you do let Christians go caroling there then be prepared to have Hare Krishna chanters there too. Likewise we don't have to be so strict about Political Correctness either, like that school district in Cupertino, California, that banned study of the Declaration of Independence because it contains religious references. Ridiculous! Religion is part of this country's history. Let's just have a rational discussion about it.

Sorry if this seems like a December column but these feelings hit me too many times over the last month. Like a Christmas gift certificate with a dollar fifty left on it I just wanted to cash them in. Actually, I think I do have some un-cashed gift certificates from last year somewhere here in the Closet; I'd better go back in right now and root them out. Thanks for reading and until next month, the Closet is closed.

© 2005 - Rusty Pipes