According to The New American Center in Esquire, a USA Today-esque blur of infographics about what the majority of Americans believe, the center feels that religion should have no role in public life. Of course, the poll question is in nearly absolute terms, so, it's difficult to answer or say where you lie if you believe in a more nuanced version than yes or no, but, I digress.
Let's begin by dismissing entirely that this country is, or was ever meant to be a Christian country. There were settlements by religious groups on this continent which would later become states, and some of those were founded by members of particular religions, such as the Puritans and the Quakers. However, to say that those individuals define the intent of the founders when creating the nation that followed them is like saying that Samuel Morse's intentions when inventing the telegraph is the best way to look at the intended uses for the internet.
I understand that John Adams was very much a Christian, and he wrote some of the Federalist Papers. But I also understand that Thomas Jefferson was a diest, and he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Things get even more awkward when you consider that Thomas Paine, who never held public office in the US greatly affected the founders and their philosophies. Paine was an atheist. He believed there was no G-d. Some letters between Paine and Jefferson suggest Jefferson may have been an atheist also, but he may have just been trying to influence his friend through empathy.
Additionally, one of the first treaties ever passed by this country after the ratification of the Constitution was an overture to a group of Muslim Pirates, and began with "Whereas the United States is, in no way, a Christian nation." I also understand that, at this point in history, several states had official religions, and they did, but not all of them did, and none of them required actually attending services or similar. And, even if they did, the intentions of one or some members of a group of thirteen groups isn't really indicative of the intentions of all of them.
But I digress. The Religious Right in this country, and some portion of the Gospel Left, feel that we have lost our way. They feel that religion should have a greater role in public life. I use the language above because the Religious Right is a group defined by a particular ideology, whereas the Gospel Left is more of a philosophy that plays out in practice very differently from place to place. But, what I will say, is that in both groups, Churches are very political places.
I don't mean that Priests and Ministers in both groups tell people whom to vote for or discuss ballot measures from the pulpit, but, there is a huge difference between not endorsing a candidate and not talking about religion, there is also a lot of time spent at churches in both groups that isn't listening to the sermon.
Firstly, Churches are important to these groups because church is where the entire community gets together, meets up, and talks about life. If politics is a tool we use to solve our problems, church is one of the tools those groups use to define their problems. Further, politics is tied up in complicated ideals, big words with capital letters like "Justice," "Freedom," "Truth," and "Morality." For a lot of people, those words are deeply tied to religious concepts. Religion both gives us a sense of what those words mean and define our takeaways.
Let me provide an example: Most everyone knows the story of Sodom and Gammorrah, two cities that G-d decided were awful places. Because G-d (hereinafter G) hated the two cities he told Abraham (hereinafter Abe) that he wanted to destroy them. Abe then challenged G to prove that there weren't ten good men between the two cities, and that, if G did, he had to save the cities. G admitted that he may have jumped to judgment, and he'd give them a test.
G sends to angels (hereinafter Bill and Ted) disguised as men to visit the cities. Sodom has a law prohibiting taking in strangers, which seems pretty intense to me, but G doesn't smite whole cities for nothing. Bill and Ted go to Sodom where Lot offers them a place to crash with his family. Bill and Ted go to Lot's house and then all the men in the city besides Lot come banging on the door demanding Bill and Ted perform sexual favors upon them. Lot says, don't take my houseguests, take my teenaged daughters instead, which also seems pretty messed up to me, but, maybe there was something else going on. The crowd demands Bill and Ted. Bill and Ted invoke divine power to destroy the city.
Lot, his daughters, and his wife flee the city but are told they can never look back. Lot's wife does, dies in a biblically horrific manner, and no one else is caught thinking about the good times they had at some point in their homes. Lot's daughters then decide on their own that Lot should have sons because he's such a badass, so they rape their own father and become pregnant.
The takeaways from this story are myriad and varied. A friend of mine once said the only moral lesson he understood was "the oldest gets to ride daddy first." There is a large portion of American Christianity who believes the story is an admonition against homosexuality. When I studied the Torah, we discussed the idea that the story stands for the importance of standing against law to serve justice. The first thing you read isn't about Lot or Sodom, it's Abe and Big G and Abe telling the creator of all things, and eternal badass that he's being a dick, and then Big G says, "you might be right." So there's a lesson there, that even G-d can make mistakes, and it's isn't wrong to make them, but it's wrong to stand by them when you know they're wrong.
The story of Lot, Bill and Ted, his daughters, and a big stack of dead neighbors is, in Torah study, usually seen as a story about hospitality, there's a numerical equivalence that's significant as well, but very boring to explain. Some Jews say that Lot was wrong to put his own daughters in harm's way to save two strangers, maybe there's a lesson on hospitality there, or maybe that just justifies his own daughters raping him.
But, again, I digress, the point being that this one story, told badly and in three paragraphs is a potential repository dozens of possible interpretations, and we haven't even discussed Lot's wife yet. But, whether you believe it's a lesson about civil disobedience, homosexuality, or that G-d is a total dick will probably affect where you stand regarding a demonstration by homosexuals demanding their right to be married and recieve all the tax benefits of that. So, I'm not convinced you can meaningfully divorce religion entirely from politcs, because religion will always enlighten politics.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that there's a prayer that opens every day of congress, thought, I really dig the chaplain who used that opportunity to admonish the right wingers who refused to fund government. I'm a little uncomfortable that most federal swearings-in involve a bible. I'm tired of the Religious Right going off on the war against the most popular holiday of the year, the amount of talking heads who feel that G-d has a place in the legislature, or that religious freedom means the right to impose you will on someone else's internal plumbing.
But, I still feel that all those statements are different than, "I don't think religion has any place in American Public Life."
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