One nation under God?
Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.
The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction and public argument. The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”
Conservative Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the veto of “private” conscience. Alan Sears, president of the legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom, sees an unprecedented threat to religious liberty in the harsh fines facing employers who refuse to cover contraception in their insurance programs. “It is a death penalty. It is a radical change,” he told me. “It’s one thing when you’re debating about public space, but it’s another when you say, if you don’t surrender your conscience, you’re out of business.”
Blowback
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The question is not what this one nation is “under”, but rather whether or not this is one nation. It’s a question I feel everyone should answer for themselves.
ernesto on December 23, 2012 at 6:02 PM
The answer is obviously no, this is not one nation. Liberals have divided everyone. Divide and conquer.
darwin on December 23, 2012 at 6:06 PM
Ding ding!
njrob on December 23, 2012 at 6:11 PM
there is no god!
nathor on December 23, 2012 at 6:13 PM
Islam isn’t a religion – it’s a political ideology at its core, and Judaism certainly does accept that distinction between internal conviction and public argument. In fact, Judaism goes even further in that context as Judaism doesn’t try any sort of proselytization which means that Judaism remains, for its adherents, intimately private and, while not averse to public discussion, most definitely against any attempts to convince anyone of it in the public sphere. That said, Jews (who have been in America since the very beginning, though in small numbers) have never had any problem with the fact that America was founded and built by Protestants, almost in total, and that American culture was deeply related to Protestant culture and dependent on it.
Islam, while not a religion, also has the distinction of never having anything to do with America as the number of muslims here has almost always been right around ZERO. Except for having to fight off wars that muslims love to start with us (from back at the beginning with the Barbary
terroristspirates to this very day). Islam has never contributed anything to America other than as a violent, insane, primitve external enemy. It is only in the past few decades that we have started importing muslims into the US as if they were going out of style (which they certainly should). The laughable claim by Barky and others to try and twist Americans into thinking that muslims have always been here is beyond offensive. We have had arabs here for quite some time but they have almost all been Christian arabs who were chased out of the middle east by the muslim arabs – as muslims are wont to do wherever they are.ThePrimordialOrderedPair on December 23, 2012 at 6:17 PM
One nation under God – welcome to Obamaland
In the meanwhile, figure this out.
Schadenfreude on December 23, 2012 at 6:17 PM
Before all your gods are ‘killed’, your guns are all confiscated and the middle class is all poor/harlots on the dole, the leftist Utopia is not finished.
As a consequence, if you believe in gods or not, look around what a world it is. Charlatanic chaos rules and will only get worse.
Obama has killed the last shred of decency in the world.
The vulture feeds on carrion, then flies to HI.
Suffer fools. He ain’t godly and he laughs at all of you.
Obama is an atheist who lies to any audience in front of him, no matter their religion/non-religion.
Schadenfreude on December 23, 2012 at 6:20 PM
Speechless.
Ladysmith CulchaVulcha on December 23, 2012 at 6:21 PM
There is a God and you’re not Him.
Skywise on December 23, 2012 at 6:29 PM
Speechless? Why?
All life has free will, some more driven by others through self-preservation. The one form we know who exercises it is human life, and possibly, to some extent, animal life. So why is it so surprising that “God is not going to go where he is not wanted.?”
Personally, I have no idea where ‘God goes.’ For myself, that’s His biz, not mine. I only know I hope He hears me when I speak to Him. The last four years must’ve been an ear-bender to Him!
jersey taxpayer on December 23, 2012 at 6:42 PM
It’s no one’s fault, really. It’s hard to argue that this was ever really one nation, given the definition of the term.
ernesto on December 23, 2012 at 6:50 PM
Fixed it for the author …
“The proletariat, whose state of wage-slavery is international, whose class enemy is international, whose liberation conditions are international, has no country. It will reach genuine freedom by gaining internationalist communist class consciousness and forming its international unity of struggle. Marxism, revealing that national borders are reactionary, that emancipation of humanity is possible only by abolishing nation-states by proletarian revolutions, aims at reaching the synthesis of world citizenship via voluntary fusion of nations.”
/Honest Obama voter (assuming you can find one …)
ShainS on December 23, 2012 at 6:51 PM
That’s retarded.
ThePrimordialOrderedPair on December 23, 2012 at 6:51 PM
Why? Is what separates say, Colombia and Venezuela really all that greater than what separates New York and Alabama, or Oklahoma? Let alone Hawaii, Texas, or California.
ernesto on December 23, 2012 at 6:54 PM
Uh … yeah. Obviously. But your argument is silly. Determining whether some nation is “one nation” has nothing to do with trying to find two different nations that are very much alike. They’re still two different nations. I don’t know what goes through your mind to come up with these nonsensical points. Two unrelated people can look and act more alike than two siblings but that doesn’t mean that the siblings aren’t siblings.
The United States that used to exist (not the current American Socialist Superstate that shall soon split) shared a governmental structure and a governing architechture that was unique in the world. There were regional variances, of course, as that was part of that structure (the part that leftists like you worked so hard to kill to make Washington a national government rather than a federal government) but that doesn’t mean that we were not one nation. We certainly were. We no longer are, but we were.
Now, we have too many America-hating leftists who share nothing with Americans and hate the very idea of America – enough to twice elect an ineligible, retarded, dog-eating Indonesian retard who had no connection to American culture, at all, save his hate of it. Those people are not my countrymen and I want to have nothing to do with them. So, at this point this nation should split into two. The leftists should stew in their own totalitarian hell (that they yearn for) and I should be free to live in a nation that carries the American creed into the future, as I was born into America, not the American Socialist Superstate that I have no desire to be bound to in any way, nor those idiots who killed America to bring the A.S.S. into being.
ThePrimordialOrderedPair on December 23, 2012 at 7:06 PM
You wouldn’t want some teacher reading the Koran to your kid.
Why is it so hard to understand that religion should be taught at home? Let school teachers teach readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.
The hacks using this situation for their agendas deserve a beatdown.
Moesart on December 23, 2012 at 7:15 PM
Moe, the ‘hacks’ are the libtards who are using the murder of innocent children as leverage to destroy the 2nd Amendment.
No matter how much you or the Lady are offended by the very idea, the hard truth is God will not come to save people who outright reject Him. Or NATIONS, for that matter. The entire message of Christian salvation is that you have to start by asking Him “I’m sorry for all I’ve done” before he can forgive you.
Even saving faith is no guarantee that you’ll die peacefully in your bed; the blood of martyrs would fill the Atlantic. How much more do you think people – an entire culture, even – that spits in His face can always count on Him to come save them from villains like some cosmic Batman?
MelonCollie on December 24, 2012 at 12:41 AM