Walking
a donkey into the room won’t raise nearly as many eyebrows as an
elephant. And that may be why Presidential wannabe, Rick Santorum,
trotted his uniquely pious pachyderm out into the center of the
Republican primaries. With his usual mild and self-deprecating style he
opined that John Kennedy’s 1960 assertion that church and state should
be separate made him “want to vomit.” I would be less concerned were Mr.
Santorum merely running for the office of “First Hurler,” but no, he
seeks the presidency of the United States. He wants to follow in the
footsteps of other “deciders.” Now, one would be a fool to assert that
religion played no role in American politics. It always has, and always
will. But it was usually an elephant kept behind the curtain in a vain
hope, I suppose, that we might avoid further shredding whatever tatters
remain of civil discourse in American political campaigning. But St.
Rick seems bent on washing the clerical undergarments in public.
That
is truly a shame, because nothing good will come of it. Here in the
Carolinas Franklin Graham – who sadly possesses little of his father’s
oratorical skills and seemingly none of his compassion – openly wonders
about the sincerity of President Obama’s Christianity. “The President
[pause, pause] says he is a Christian,” Graham muses, and anyone who has
spent any time in the Old North State hears in that subtle pause the
great Southern qualifier “Bless His Heart!”
The
Founding Fathers were, for the most part, men whose feelings about the
place of religion in politics had been formed by living in countries or
colonies where one stripe of belief or another was routinely privileged
over others. They had experienced theocracy first hand, lived where
your manner of prayer could be fined, land you in the stocks, or even
get you killed. It is hardly surprising that they wove into the
documents of our young nation the notion that religion should stand
apart from government. Those who tell we have “always been a Christian
nation under one god” are either ignorant, lying, or both. The blood
spilt to create this nation gave us the freedom to worship god as we
chose, or not to worship were we so inclined. Theocracy demands
religious fealty of all citizen to one faith, one god, one right, and
usually lots of wrongs.
We
must never lose sight of the fact that the history of theocracies is
writ in varying shades of blood. Ancient examples span the globe, from
the Mayans to the Conquistadors to the Crusades to the Inquisition. And
the beat goes on. Catholics kill Protestants, who return the favor.
Sunnis kill Shiite, while the Sufis spin madly around trying to keep an
eye on the Druze. Hindis and Muslims rattle the nuclear saber over
Kashmir. Generic "Christians" kill generic "Muslims" who attack generic
"Infidels." And everyone seems to attack the Jews. Humans are killed
because books are inadvertently burned. Tibetan monks burn themselves
alive to confront religious oppression. Muslim women and children blow
themselves up to fast track themselves to paradise. And now Santorum
wants the nomination because he is "more Christian" than all the other
candidates? Have we all really checked our brains at the door?
Our
government utilizes a system of checks and balances. Congress, the
legislative branch, checks on the Judicial Branch. The Justices keep an
eye on the President, who appoints the Supreme Court and must sign off
on the laws passed by Congress. Nobody has all the toys. The idea is
if we can’t have all the toys, perhaps we will be willing to share. OK,
that’s not going so well right now, but that is the idea.
These
partitioned forms of government grow out of the seemingly cynical but
ultimately truthful notion that power corrupts and that absolute power
corrupts absolutely. So poles of power must be kept at least partially
isolated. Most human cultures seem to consistently evolve four pillars
upon which society rests: Marketplace, Military, Religion and
Government. The reality of power in human society plays out through a
shifting set of alliances that form, dissolve and form again as each
pillar seeks its own advantage. We have no historic record of a culture
in which one of the pillars subsumed the roles of the other and ruled
successfully. It is true that dictators, strong men, and god kings have
seized all four pillars for brief heady bursts of absolute power. But
the Greeks seemed to have gotten that part right – those who rise to the
heights of the gods, will be cast down with a viciousness that mirrors
their meteoric rise. It seems that in addition to absolute corruption,
absolute power holds the seed of its own disaster.
Some
of my evangelical friends seem compelled to ask if I have a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ. I must reply, “No, but I am quite close
to his father.” My point, all kidding aside, is that religion is an
intensely personal aspect of an individual’s life. One should not wrap
it around you like a new outfit – “Oh, how nice! Don’t you look godly?”
“What a pious petticoat!” My spirituality is intensely important to me,
and it is utterly private. I prefer not to pray, or be prayed for, in
public, prayer should be a private conversation, not a doctrinal pep
rally.
To
pick a president, or any other elected official, on the basis of the
public fervor of their religious conviction is sheer insanity. Choosing
our elected officials is our most important public task and should be
split apart completely from the private issues of faith and belief. The
road to an American theocracy is paved with religious litmus paper
tests of the kind implied by Santorum and Graham. I encourage you to
think long and hard before you set your feet on that icy, narrow path.
Not only does theocracy lead us down the slippery slope to jihad and
crusade, to Inquisition and its secular twin, the Reign of Terror, but
it also leads us to an inevitable coalition among Faith, Government,
Marketplace and the Military. And that, my friend, is an unholy
alliance that dies bitterly and hard, sweeping the streets with the
blood of the innocents.
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