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Thy True Religion in our Hearts Increase: A blog for the celebration of our Independence Day
My title comes from a hymn sung in our church over the Independence Day weekend. In contrast, that same weekend, our local paper carried an entire front section final page ad for Hobby Lobby—a hype for one of their favorite causes, propounding that America is a Christian country, doomed by those “pagans” among us who can’t see the wisdom in Hobby Lobby’s vision of a theocracy.
Apparently the sad history of theocracies does not deter them from longing for one that would be especially favorable to them.
And apparently Kierkegaard never came up on the Hobby Lobby reading list, or they would have some sense of the sheer impossibility of there being a Christian country, a truth to which the facts of our tragic past would attest.
The advertisement consists of an assortment of quotes, the assortment itself not only misleading but, in its own unintended way, quite odd.
First there are a number of quotes from people who had strong religious beliefs who happened to be prominent political figures. They tell us of their personal convictions, with which I have no desire to quarrel and with many of which I would agree.
Second, they site a number of opinions that this is or should be considered a Christian country—ignoring equally prominent founders who found that idea to be anathema. None of these quotes, of course, explain what we would do or not do—how anything would be different—if we were to say “America is a Christian Country.” And none of them take into any account the reasons, historical and philosophical, that we separated Church and State.
It is ironic that proponents of the “Christian Country” idea are often the same people who champion the supposed rights granted by the murky language of the Second Amendment but wish to deny the relatively clear language about separation of Church and State.
The ad continues with statements embracing the inclusion of religious instruction in major educational institutions without any mention that, at the time, these were religious schools, on quite a different footing from the multicultural and secular schools they have subsequently become.
But the most interesting inclusion of all—a gaffe for sure given the purpose of the ad—is an 1853 quote from a Senate Judiciary Committee, which makes it very clear that we are only a Christian people so long as personal choice leads us to embrace a Christian faith and makes it doubly clear that this in no way is something “the law demands” or in any way would mean that Christians would “gain exclusive benefits or avoid legal” requirements.
That goes against the very thing Hobby Lobby wants. They want to make the law demand what it does not demand, to gain an exclusive benefit for themselves, to avoid the requirements of the law they don’t like. For Jesus, it was enough to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s; for Hobby Lobby, apparently, that isn’t good enough. You would have thought they might have been decent enough to note their own conflict of interest here, to tell readers how they are litigating this very point in an effort to gain special privileges because of their so-called Christian belief.
The sort of thoughtless religion that abounds in the advertisement and is at large in America today has, without doubt, driven countless numbers of thoughtful people away from Christianity altogether. In response to every “mega-Church” with thousands of members, thousands of others have opted out of faith communities altogether. This phenomenon is rarely the rebellion of the Godless and much more commonly the revolt of folks who find little to embrace and much to abhor in the most touted so-called Christian preaching.
This, it must be said, is as much the fault of the silence of “contemplative” Christians, even of mainline denominations, as it is of the strident messages of many churches and preachers, messages whose popularity is that they promise God’s own supposed endorsement of our ego-driven desire for power, prestige, and popularity, God’s own supposed sanction of pitiless brutality, God’s own supposed abhorrence of human reason.
If you don’t recognize those behaviors, you have not been listening closely enough to Pat Robertson or Jack Van Impe or a host of others, not been crowding the drink-cup seating in vast auditoriums to hear the local champions of the televangelistic rhetorical arts.
Ironically, given a combination of freedom of expression and the power of deep pockets, Hobby Lobby is free to run pretty much whatever commercial it likes. Were they challenged, they would quite rightly be defended by the ACLU. And the newspaper, that thrives on its advertising budget which alone allows it to be a free press, is quite right in not arrogating to itself the right to refuse such a lucrative advertisement.
Those are the rights and freedoms we enjoy; even a token amount of matching responsibility, however, might have identified dozens of local needs to which those advertising dollars might have been better directed.
The hymn we sang over the Independence Day weekend expresses a much sounder theology in its petition, “thy true religion in our hearts increase, thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.” If most practitioners of the Christian religion (or, for that matter, any religion) lived out that simple prayer, they would not have to worry about the fate of their neighbors or their nation, and they could devote the energies and resources to really helpful or at least less self-serving ministries.
July 3, 2016
capeek 