On the 16th of this month (Dec’07), “The U.S. House of Representatives approved HR 847 recognizing the importance of Christianity and Christmas. Would you have voted for this resolution? How would you amend it?”
I would have voted for it without suggesting any amendment.
Attacks on this legislation will center on the claim that it violates the “no establishment of religion” clause of the U.S.Constitution's First Amendment. It does not.
1.....The clear original intent of that clause's first part was to forbid Congress from incorporating into the federal governmental structure any STRUCTURE of religion. The issue was “bodies” (organizations, institutions), and the stricture was against Congress as a political body incorporating into the federal government any religious body.
2.....That limited meaning of religion is clear from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “establishment.” To “establish” is “To place (a church or a religious body) in the position of a state church. 1558.” “A church” is not a religion but an institution (a “body”) within a religion.
3.....The founders' limited intent is even more clear in the historical context. Then (1791), more than half of the states of the U.S. had “established” churches (Protestant Christian denominations). Wisely, Congress precluded such "establishment" as a federal possibility.
4.....HR 847 affirms “the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the founding of western civilization"--so Congress “expresses its deepest respect to American Christians,” who constitute “over three-fourths” of our population, the three-fourths who celebrate Christmas as “the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ.” Christmas celebrates “God’s redemption, mercy, and Grace.” The resolution “expresses support for Christians” everywhere, “acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith,” and “rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians.”
5.....The First Amendment aims to PREVENT Congress from “establishing” any religious institution, and HR 847 aims to PREVENT the ballooning of the First Amendment to mean that Congress must not acknowledge Christianity as America’s “founding” religion. The insidious aim of this ballooning is to expand the First Amendment’s clause from the separation of church and state to the separation of religion from government, an expansion consonant with the secularist revisionist version of America’s “founding” as secular.
6.....Against HR 847’s understanding of America’s “founding,” aggressive non-Christians educe the use of “founding” in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, whose Article 11 cancels religion as a possible cause of future conflict between that Muslim nation with its established religion and our nation expressly without one. The U.S. (and its states severally) has never “entered into any war or act of hostility against any” Muslim state, and “no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony between the two countries.” The whole concept of church/state separation seemed impossible for our defeated Muslim enemy to grasp, and Article 11 does not even appear in the Arabic original (what appears instead is a letter proclaiming Allah the protector of Tripoli!).
Knowing how difficult it would be for Muslims to conceive of our world-historical unique church/state arrangement, the Treaty radically, even non-historically, dissociates religion from the origin-story of the U.S.: “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion...[and has] in itself no enmity against the...religion of” Islam. Secularist revisionists cut this statement out of its precise psycho-political-historical context in order to paste it into their documentation toward an atheist telling of America’s past in hope of an atheist American future.
7.....A half-century ago, America’s greatest public intellectual of the time, Reinhold Niebuhr, stressed the danger of a secularist take-over of America’s self-understanding, our national ID. (See his “The Christian Witness in a Secular Age,” CHRISTIAN CENTURY 7.22.53.) The ominousness of this threat to the historic America mind can be seen in the warning of a great living philosopher, Charles Taylor, in his A SECULAR AGE (HarvardUP/07), in which he says that belief in God is essential to protecting society from secularism. (As clearly visible in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, secularism’s goal is America as an atheist society, beginning with our public schools.)
America’s unique contribution to the history of government is stated in the First Amendment, which frees religion and the federal government from each other. This double freedom was an on-the-ground reality which the Amendment put into words. That reality was and is a particular unity/diversity paradigm which avoids both the inherent TYRANNY of an established religious institution and the ANARCHY of a nation severed from its historic religious rootage and center in the Bible + the Enlightenment. The Christian religion was and is an essential element in the unique mind called “American.”
This mind, the American mind, celebrates FREEDOM (so we do not exclude on the basis of religion) and ORDER (so we resist secularism as it threatens to replace our historic spiritual-intellectual unity). Increasingly, American elections will reflect this conflict between the American mind and the secularist mind.
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