Church and State in America: Cracks in a Wall Just Repaired?

HAF Blog (Jun 5 2009) Separation of Church & State

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Topics: Human Rights, Interfaith, Proselytization, Separation of Church & State, Terrorism, Yoga
  1. Church and State in America: Cracks in a Wall Just Repaired?

    A few weeks have passed and so has the much vaunted National Day of Prayer.  President Barack Obama followed tradition set not during the Bush II years, but Truman years, and issued a proclamation on May 7, calling for Americans to observe the day and remember the "Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth." 
     
    In refusing to host an exclusive, and very likely unconstitutional, Christian-only prayer service in the East Room of the White House, President Obama broke with George W. Bush's eight year long tradition and incensed a coterie of evangelicals.  Right-wing legislators, including Minnesota's own Michelle Bachmann, reacted by introducing their own "Bible Bill" into the House of Representatives on the very same day.  
     
    The National Day of Prayer Task Force, an NGO (despite its official-sounding name) run by Shirley Dobson, wife of the zealous Focus on the Family's James Dobson, enjoyed easy access to the White House and writ large as the gatekeeper of the prayer celebration that was originally conceived as a nonpartisan affair.  Dobson required Task Force volunteers to affirm Biblical inerrancy and allow only evangelical Christians to conduct prayer services.  

    Prayer being prayer, with an integral role in all religious traditions, the contradiction was clear: You believe in prayer; but you are not Christian; you are not welcome.  Hindu Americans found this out firsthand in no uncertain terms.  The Hindu American Foundation (HAF), the largest Hindu advocacy group with offices in the D.C. metro was rebuffed when it asked to join the Task Force in offering prayers at local venues where the nation's nearly two million Hindus comprise a substantial minority.  At the White House too, HAF leaders were invited to hear President Bush offer a Christian prayer, but none of the plurality of the great global religious traditions represented in the United States--the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and others--were asked to offer paeans in their own dialects of devotion.

    There is no doubt that prayer is integral to the lives of Americans subscribing to all major faiths, but many rightly argue that marking a day of prayer truly belongs to the realm of personal faith and spirituality, and not anything validated by an extraneous, symbolic proclamation. 
     
    But then affirming a public spirituality seems to be an anachronous obsession for votaries of the idea of a Christian America.  And while the Christian Right continues its public show of introspection as to its post-election loss of influence, there seems to be no understanding of the changing religious demography of this country that, according to the Pew Forum's 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, found that the greatest increase for any religious category was "unaffiliated."  The same survey found significant increases in the Hindu and Muslim populations while reporting that this traditionally Protestant country is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country.
     
    Blithely ignoring these realities--blinders intact--Minnesota's own Michelle Bachmann and John Kline even co-sponsored reactionary bills introduced into the House of Representatives, visibly to affirm their concept of a Christian nation.  Randy Forbes (R, VA) was joined by Bachmann, Kline and nearly fifty other members of the House on a resolution that reproduced various quotations from previous House resolutions dating back to the nation's founding--all given without context--implying Christian origins to the Constitution and Biblical inspiration to American law, seeking to create an "America's Spiritual Heritage Week."  Nothing in the resolution evinces any interest in including other religious traditions within this spiritual heritage.  Not to be outdone, Rep. Paul Broun (R, GA) waited for the National Day of Prayer this year to introduce his own "Bible Bill," co-sponsored by Bachmann and a dozen or so other Republicans, calling for the President to designate 2010 as the "Year of the Bible," in recognizing its primacy in the national narrative.   
     
    Hindus, Muslims and many others that comprise the minority faiths, find it particularly galling that the Dobsons, Bachmanns, Forbes and Brouns--insistent peddlers of the "we are a Christian nation" ideology--will proffer dozens of references to "faith", "the Creator," "God," "spiritual" and the like in documents such as their likely doomed House resolutions, and insist that these references are somehow exclusively Christian.  That our founding fathers used specifically vague references presciently allowing room for interpretation escapes these demagogues who fail to realize the universality of spiritual beliefs, worship of God, Truth, Creator, or whatever term one applies to the omnipresent and omnipotent power to which we, as believers, submit.  A Hindu's appellation for that same Creator may be Shiva; for a Muslim, Allah; and Yahweh to the Jews.  
     
    This is not an argument advocating for the stark secularity of Europe or the muddled minority religious appeasement of an India where the government actually privileges non-Hindus.  To the contrary, Hindu Americans and others prosper in the United States as a religious people; as a people with a deep and abiding faith in the Supreme.  In denying the dignity of any living tradition, whether it prays to a God or not, but insists that its adherents walk the path of a noble life of sacrifice and virtue, belies a narcissistic insecurity on the part of the religious right, appealing only to the crass populists seeking a rift to exploit.
     
    In ignoring the divisive entreaties of the National Day of Prayer Task Force and its ideological bedfellows, President Obama rightly recentered this nation as a pluralistic, tolerant society so eloquently envisioned by George Washington as he wrote in his letter to the Jews of Rhode Island in 1790, "for happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens."   

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