“That will set the United States’ position in this part of the world back fifty years!” I can still hear the despairing tone of an eminent scholar in the Athens Tennis Club as our conversation was interrupted by a waiter who announced that the American Marines had just stormed the beaches of Beirut. I agreed, but was wrong.

Forty-nine years later, it’s clear that our preemptive strike prevented civil war in Lebanon, splitting apart Christian president & Sunni prime minister. Conclusion: Give me 49 years and I’ll tell you whether any particular preemptive strike was a Good Idea. (Was our Army & Marine pull-out of Lebanon 25 years after our Marine invasion a Good Idea? I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.)

On this week’s question, I’m so ignorant as not even to know whether our preemptive war in Iraq was a good idea—so how would I know whether our staying in, or getting out, would be a good idea? But the question is not about strategic foreign-affairs decisions made and to be made by persons democratically empowered to make them. It’s about the moral component in the decision-making process involving all our citizenry. The question is even narrower: Can we speak of “the moral position” on the “out of Iraq” question?

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Beef tenderloin and sherry were the Wednesday-evening sacred food and drink of a religion which originated in a federal prison. Since the printed constitution of the religion was lofty in spiritual self-definition and lawyerly in tone, and the supporting letter of request was formal and well-written, the warden—wise to the fact that religion is dangerous to touch because it might go off—quickly repressed the impulse to treat this new religion with the disrespect of laughter. He passed the matter off to the chair of the prison’s chaplains, who promptly availed himself of me as a religion consultant.

My advice? The warden loved it! It was to test the sincerity of the new religion by reducing the quality of the sacramental elements. Cheap wine instead of sherry. Spare ribs instead of beef tenderloin. The religion failed the test because it revealed that the luxury food and drink, instead of serving the religion, were its purpose. And we taxpayers were saved some expense.

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“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.

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The West is in a religio-political war not of our choosing. The enemy is not Islam but a violent movement within Islam, a movement many Muslim leaders repudiate. For this movement, this week’s “On Faith” question doesn’t make sense: “To what extent are problems in the Middle East about religion and to what extent are they about politics? Does it matter?” But to us—especially to us Americans with our “separation of church and state”-- the question does make sense. And it both does and doesn’t matter.

The realities are the same whether or not one tries to sort them into separate piles marked “Religion” and “Politics,” so the question doesn’t matter. Indeed, it’s important that one view the realities binocularly before using the religion-or-politics monocles. But the secondary truth is that the sorting is an analytic necessity for understanding, deciding, and acting.

My title addresses two abiding binocular realities about the human condition and suggests the use of each to illumine the anger, anxiety, and anguish of the Middle East.

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Observation 1.....“Only in America,” as “Carolina Israelite” Harry Golden used to say. In our country more than anywhere else on earth or in human history, one’s background may not be one’s foreground. We're tolerant of jumping one ship for another. Nobody gets killed because of converting to another religion. This is my first observation on this week’s “On Faith” question:
“GOP presidential candidate John McCain said recently that he ‘admired’ Islam but would prefer a president with ‘a solid grounding’ in the Christian faith. Would you consider a candidate’s religious background in deciding for whom to vote? If so, under what circumstances?"

Observation 2....Religion is one of the story-strands in the rope of a person’s reality, and knowing this background-foreground strand is essential to knowing the person and guessing her/his performance in political office.

Observation 3.....It’s unfair to the candidates, and irresponsible as a citizen, to vote for a candidate on any single story-strand of the candidate’s reality, or any single political issue.

Observation 4.....In addition to having more differences of background than any other people in history, all of us Americans have the same background (namely, the American heritage) and the same foreground (namely, the American present).

Observation 5.....In voting today for the America we want, we Americans vote “American"--whatever that severally means to us.

Observation 6.....For John McCain and me, voting American means voting for candidates with “a solid grounding” in America’s founding religion, Christianity. The earliest Americans in the continuity of our customs and laws were English Puritan and Separatist Christians, who before landing in 1620 drafted our first founding document, the Mayflower Compact. In our documentary history, they were followed by the English Enlightenment Christians who wrote the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (in effect, 1789), and the Bill of Rights (1791).

Observation 7.....The taproot in the formation of the American mind was the American religion, a dynamic mix of English Christianity and a rationalist spin-off therefrom, namely, the English-Scottish-French Enlightenment.

Observation 8.....Since America’s Founding Fathers were scattered all along the Chrisian spectrum from conservatism to deism, we Americans today can choose our favorites among the Founding Fathers according to our own predilections, our own way of seeing and living in the world today.

Observation 9.....When I say “Vote American!” I am expressing my concern for honoring and promoting the American mind of private and public dialog between our Founders' Biblical faith and their Enlightenment reason. Only in this light, and within this very specific sense, do I view as un-American all other minds. This does not mean that those of other minds cannot be good Americans. It does mean, as historians of culture will agree, that only by the promotion of the American mind can the American heritage survive and thrive. Negatively put, America could not survive the death or even the radical re-definition of the American mind. Analytically put, ideological multiculturalism in America's public schools now threatens the American heritage/religion/mind with death by amnesia.

In the American year, Thanksgiving is the only day officially converging the Christian mind and the American mind—two minds, independent though inseparable, neither to be captive to the other.

Another convergence on this day: the universal human impulse to give thanks and the universal celebration of harvest as expressive of this impulse. And one more convergence: as a universal festival with historic and geographical particulars, Thanksgiving is implicitly an occasion to give thanks for all festival comminglings of universals and particulars.

Now to the “On Faith” question: “In a world torn by religious, ethnic and geopolitical conflict, what can we be thankful for this Thanksgiving?”

1. We can be thankful for the increasing global recognition that our humanity is common. In 1943 I read Wendell Willkie’s just-published “One World.” How prescient he was! For failure to join the human race, the cost to individuals and collectivities is increasingly steep, and the nudge to unity is increasingly strong. Much that in the past motivated division is losing persuasive power, and much that the strong considered weakness is gaining in respectability—though we still have far to go before, in Jesus’ words, “the meek inherit the earth.”

2. We can be thankful for the increasing rapproachement between those historic sibling rivals, faith and reason. As religion has become stronger, atheists have become louder; but some prominent ones among them have surrendered their atheism. In 2003 prominent British atheist Antony Flew signed the atheist “Humanist Manifesto III,” which teaches evolutionism (“unguided evolutionary change”); but subsequently he has come to believe in a cosmic guidedness, a universal purpose verifiable by science. We may be witnessing the slow emergence of a common mind in our common humanity.

3. On this Thanksgiving Day, we Americans can be thankful for the freedom of religion from government interference and the freedom of government from dominance by any particular religion. And individually, we Americans can give thanks for the freedom to make our own mix of meanings, our own list of things to be thankful for, and to chose who shall be the Recipient of our thanks.

But instead of extending this list, I want to sketch the two minds in this entry’s title.

THE AMERICAN MIND can be glimpsed through our formative political documents and our rituals, both formed over against historic and contemporary alternatives. Communism was the most threatening alternative to our way of life when in 1954 President Eisenhower and Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. In contrast to atheist regimes and secularist philosophies, America was founded and continues to see itself as “under God,” though wisely the Constitution forbids any religious test for any political office.

The ritual (official wordings) of Thanksgiving Day reveal the American mind as theocentric, centered on the biblical God, thankful to him for life, liberty, and hope. Though our population is the world’s most multi-ethnic, England is the mother country of our predominant religion and our predominant language. Our earliest thanksgiving ritual is in the 1619 English Virginia-colony charter stipulating the annual celebration of landing-day as a day to be “kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Two years later, English separatist Christians (who came to be called the Pilgrims) held a three-day thanksgiving of feasting, dancing, and merry-making with the Amerinds, whose farming skills had helped them survive their first winter. In the telling of the American Story, “Mayflower 1620” is the founding event, and the Mayflower Compact “in the name of God” is the earliest founding document. The other strand in the American mind is the Scottish-English Enlightenment, which added critical and structural reason to the biblical faith.

Both strands of the American mind are in our founding documents and in the presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving Day. Here, I’ll indicate only that “thanksgiving” was understood as a liturgical word, a word technical to worship. It was not “being thankful” in a global-vague sense. It was one dimension of prayer.

So our first president (in 1789) called for “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” And our now most honored president, Abraham Lincoln, proclaimed (in 1863) “a prayerful day of Thanksgiving” for “his [God’s] Providence.”

While in population America is overwhelming a Christian country, we are by wise design not a Christian nation: we believe that for their best flourishing, religion and politics need structural protection from each other. But protection does not mean total non-influence. Thanksgiving Day is fundamentally a religious holiday, and our presidents have used “church” language in giving it “state” recognition: no impenetrable “wall of separation between church and state.”

Finally, how does THE CHRISTIAN MIND differ from the American mind in answering this “On Faith” question, “what can we be thankful for?” I began a list of what the American mind is thankful for this Thanksgiving Day. The biblical mind’s answer is simpler: We should live lives of gratitude to God, thankful for everything—God’s dark gifts as well as his bright gifts.

When Job had nothing after having had everything, he said (Job 1:21) “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” First Thessalonians 5:16-18 has the same triumphant transcendence: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Life, the whole of it, is a gift of God by nature; and the new life in Christ is God’s gift of grace, which rejoices that God has come to the world not only in Jesus but as Jesus, who accepted the dark gift of crucifixion and received the bright gift of resurrection.

For the Christian mind, every day is thanksgiving day, and all acts of compassionate service to humanity and the good earth are return-gifts to the Giver of all.

We Americans are predisposed to kick or kiss political candidates before they open their mouths, and they know it. Clearly, Mitt Romney knew it as he was writing the speech we “On Faith” panelists have been asked to comment on:

“What did you think of Mitt Romney’s speech about religion? What would you have told him to say?”

“Presidential” is my answer to the first question. “Nothing he didn’t say” is my answer to the second question. That’s it? Not quite. My critical consciousness would leave me feeling guilty if I gave it nothing to do. Besides, I’m a Democrat.

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On a New York City subway earlier this month (Dec. ’07), a Jew was assaulted for yelling “Happy Hanukkah!” after somebody yelled “Merry Christmas!” Out of the ensuing melee, the police arrested ten. Somebody said let’s celebrate and somebody—with equal right—killed the intended joy by responding what do you mean “we”?

“We” minimum is two, maximum is everybody. In between, one’s social identities are GIVEN by blood in time and space; CHOSEN (one’s choice may be cultural [saying yes to the blood-gifts], rebellious [living marginally to one’s birth-culture], or conversional [saying yes to another social identity]); or DENIED (saying yes to nothing except one’s personal choices).

Now let’s apply that matrix to the current “On Faith” question:
“Britain’s equality chief says ‘It’s time to stop being daft about Christmas. It’s fine to celebrate and it’s fine for Christ to be the star of the show’ in all public celebrations. Are we being too politically correct about Christmas?”

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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.

1.....“INTEGRITY” is the answer I got from everyone I asked, “What is the most important quality we need in our next president?” I was interviewing in preparation for answering the “On Faith” questions “What should we be looking for in a presidential candidate? What do we need to know about the moral values and religious beliefs of a candidate?”

Instead of “integrity,” cynics might answer “celebrity.” Too bad, but non-celebs are “unelectable,” and it would be unwise to thrown away one’s vote on any of them. In the present media-besotted, entertainment-dulled, sports-mad American psyche, celebrities are the divinities. Hollow divinities: contrived celebrity is fame fed only by being famous. To gain the White House, the present president first bought a baseball team and became famous for managing it.

“What we should be looking for in a presidential candidate” is someone with more integrity than we the people now have. We need a president morally superior not only to the president we have but morally superior to us. But does the devious process of candidacy—the process of inducing the morally inferior to vote for the morally superior--discourage persons of integrity from candidacy? Power corrupts: Is the process of seeking power so corrupting as to fatally compromise the integrity of the candidate? Indeed, is the very desire to seek power fatal to integrity?

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Visible from any angle within my father’s courtroom, and situated between the judge’s bench and the witness stand, was a small BIBLE. It was the cynosure of solemnity, both symbol and sacrament. Symbol in that the sessions of this New York court were conducted under the Judge of all the earth (“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” [Genesis 18:25]). Sacrament (Latin for “oath”) for the hand of the witness, about to be judged on veracity by both the Court of heaven and the court of earth.

Now to the question: “Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says ‘we...need to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.’ What do you think?”

I think that statement delivered a knockout blow to Huckabee’s hope of the White House.

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The reason secular ideas are “getting shorter shrift” in this year’s presidential campaign is that the people are scared and angry that secularism has taken over so much in American life, especially public education (beginning with the [1933] Humanist Manifesto campaign). Sang Wordsworth, “Let heart and mind, according well, make one music....” But the critical mind, honoring reason above faith, has sidelined God and religion.

A two-string lyre cannot be played on one string. The fundamentalists—on the right, religious; on the left, secularists—are wrong. The universe is two-string: computers [the digital age] and the human mind are binary.

Human beings need to be APART: we have individual minds, able to distance us from all else. This critical (no-saying) consciousness is secularism’s string on the lyre. But we need also to be A PART of some whole: we need to be together. This social (yes-saying) consciousness is faith’s string on the lyre. It is our trust, which makes possible both community among us and communion with the transcendent (“God,” for short).

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The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?

Jeremiah Wright and I are retired clergy in America’s most liberal Christian denomination, and “inflammatory” remarks can be clipped from our archives depending on what the clipper wants to burn up. Currently, what the Wright clippers want to burn up is a former parishioner, who is said to be guilty of inflammation by association.

1. NONinflammatory speech gets nothing burned up, nothing cauterized, nothing welded. From Public Speaking 101 in 1935, I remember this: “Start Slow: Speak Low: Rise Higher: CATCH FIRE!” Without such oratory, nothing changes in religion or politics. “Tongues of flame” are associated with the birth of the Christian Church (Acts of the Apostles 2:1-4). From Wright, Obama caught the fire of the Gospel and became what he is today, a devout and faithful Christian.

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The Question: John McCain's spiritual guide, televangelist Rod Parsley, calls Islam a "false religion" that should be "destroyed." Should McCain renounce Parsley? Will Islam be an issue in this year's U.S. presidential election?

I am pleased, amused, and worried about all this media-chatter about the putative influence of “spiritual guides” on presidential candidates.

What PLEASES me is that most of my long life has been spent in the profession of “spiritual guide” - being one, helping to prepare hundreds for the work, and teaching clergy on the job (continuing education). It’s nice to feel important (though with a tinge of guilt) after feeling too little important (with a larger dollop of guilt).

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