“On Faith” is a serious game. It’s a GAME, a contrived microcosm of real life. Each week a Sally-and-Jon-shaped question rains down on the roofs of us panelists and dries up or flows down on our appreciative and/or critical side. And it’s SERIOUS. The questions—on religion’s borders with all of human life--are consequential for personal and public decision-making.
That’s four possibilities. When the rain hits, (1) it dries up: the panelist feels uninvested and does not post. Or (2) the rain flows down both sides of the roof: the panelist posts a YES/NO. Or (3) the post is a NO: the rain flows down only on the critical side of the roof. Or (4) the post is a YES: the rain flows down only on the appreciative side of the roof.
Like life, this "On Faith" game is complicated and messy. Panelists and commenters are—according to their mood and situation at the moment—cool/warm/hot. And posts are off the surface or from the depths of mind (reason) and heart (feeling).
This week’s question presents a double event, namely, a prayer and a protest. My response (in light of all the above) is a double YES.
YES to the prayer-event.
1. America is religiously pluralist, and Senate-session opening-prayers should reflect this plain fact. We should be thankful for the fact, and humbly proud of this common-ritual way of living it.
2. Because God is at work always and everywhere, all religions are depositories of great prayers. “Lead us from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to Light, and from death to immortality.” That great historic utterance was the heart of the Senate’s first Hindu prayer. America, and the world, needs to hear and pray the great prayers.
3. The First Amendment speaks not to the separation of religion from politics (as our secularists claim) but to the mutual freedom of political and religious institutions (“state” and “church”). Benjamin Franklin argued that not to open government deliberative assembles with prayer would be to fail to recognize that American life is to be lived under God. To the Declaration of Independence, Congress added “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”
YES to the protest-event.
1. To the world, it was an American witness to unbloody protest-demonstrations. Nobody got shot except with words. Truth (as the protesters understood it) was spoken to power without power’s violent reaction to the protest.
2. The good gardener nurtures the plant’s roots. The roots of American democracy are not multicultural but culture-specific: Bible + Enlightenment. Bible without Enlightenment = theocracy, not democracy. Enlightenment (that is, reason) without Bible = tyranny (as in the French and Russian Revolutions).
3. Bible + Enlightenment = the American “civil religion.” All other religions are (in this specific sense) un-American (which should not be over-read as “anti-American”). Most Senate-opening prayers should be American, honoring the American heritage and nurturing America’s spiritual roots.
4. To date, none of the panelists has had any good word for the ("politically incorrect") protesters. Two generations of Americans have been public-school brainwashed to the un-American doctrine of multiculturalism, the heresy that one culture is as good as another, one religion is as good as another --a neat fit for Senate-chaplain Rajan Zed's prayer-phrase, "we are [all] headed in the same direction."
Because the increase of this sentiment correlates with decreasing personal experience and knowledge of religion, America's future as America is in doubt.
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