The Establishment Clause is held in league as both the most sublime and intuitive as well as the most manipulated of any Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. The lack of consensus in case law is so staggering, and the popular interpretation of the “wall of separation” doctrine espoused in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists is so juxtaposed to the former President’s original intent that one can hardly hold confidence in a fair and complete contemporary exercise of the law. Perhaps then, the answer is to peal back the layers of secularization and expose the principles of the Freedom of Religion/Separation of Church and State paradox.
The passions of men inebriated by pious conviction have never ceased to be the tool of aristocratic demigod men in the assumption, exercise, and execution of power. No witness of history can refute the atrocities which men can be compelled to commit through the manipulations of faith. No witness of history can deny the desecrations of moral, principled, honest, and ethical reasoning.
As part of the human condition, a person’s morality can be made readily relative to bounds of his belief system. And therein lays the jeopardy of state sponsored religion.
Contemporary reasoning has led judicial administrators in the elevated echelons of government to secularize state sponsored activities and displays. The removal of an Alabamian Courthouse’s exhibit on the 10 Commandments, an overtly Judeo-Christian reflection of American heritage, is but a reflection of the systemic secularization of American public life. For better or worse, the Union is caught in an unprecedented separation of state from not only institutional religious influence, but from religion in and of itself. The author’s purpose is not to make commentary on this trend, nor criticize, condemn, or censure the motives of those organizations involved in the influencing of the populace; his purpose is to issue a warning.
Men need to have faith in something. The institutionalizing of the object of that faith is what we call religion. For example, men may have faith in God; they may believe He exists, that He is aware of their state and that His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence are unique to Him and Him alone. This faith though, is not a religion. It is a belief structure. The root of human consciousness is a need to extract reason from and an explanation of the intangible, hence the consistent theme of faith in the unseen or unknown throughout all of human history. Men in times past, motivated by either virtue or self-interest (it doesn’t matter which), have packaged their beliefs and ideas into a unique whole and labeled it truth. This “truth” is the core of the institutions of religion we have seen throughout the history of human events. Through either coercion or aggressive proselytizing disciples have been converted and at times radicalized.
Again, men, by nature, are theists. The secularization of America through ephemeral but extreme application of the current “wall of separation” neo-doctrine will have an antithetical result. Those who, in fear of a theocracy, strive to emancipate religious expression from all aspects of public life will not succeed in the destruction of faith within the populace, but will shift the object of that faith from God to Government. A secular America will become a democratic theocracy. And this has never more been the case than right now.
September 11, 2001. Three thousand people are massacred in an unforgivable act of savagery against America. Under attack by an unseen and largely unknown enemy, Americans everywhere got down on their knees and prayed for help and protection. Some who lost loved ones prayed for solace, some prayed just to express their anger, and some refused to pray and harbored a cankering anger toward the heavens. No wonder September 11 is now a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. God was the object of Americans’ faith, it was from Him that we hoped to receive assistance, it was toward him that we projected our outrage. With his speech to the nation on the evening of September 11, President George W. Bush secures the highest approval ratings in American presidential history.
August 29, 2005. The strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico makes landfall on the gulf shores of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. With breached levees in New Orleans, the damages were estimated at $75 billion (2005 USD) with about 1,599 fatalities. Americans everywhere got up on their soapboxes and ridiculed the government for a blundered response. Some who lost loved ones petitioned the state for solace, some raged in the media, some suffered in a state of unnecessary dependence as their government faltered in its duties to protect its people, and their anger cankered.
The first was an act of man, the second an act of God, yet with the fundamental shift in American faith from God to Government is apparent in the reactions. In terms of death, the September 11 tragedy was twice as costly as Hurricane Katrina.
Americans now depend less on God and more on government than ever before. The state is their object of hope, their source of reason, and their entity of blame when things go wrong. The government has graduated from a deity’s embryonic state to one of infancy.
The seed are sewn for the eventual assumption of sacrosanct responsibilities by the state. It is already an object of faith; it will soon be a religion in and of itself.
The deification of the state is not wholly unprecedented in times past. Under Shinto Japan, the Emperor, or Shinto deity, constrained his followers into a massive imperialist march through the South Pacific. Encouraged by their faith, the Shinto kamikaze pilots, dubbed “Devine Wind Special Attack Units”, raged havoc on Allied transports through the Pacific. Only the retaliatory efforts of a nuclear superpower brought the faith driven radicalized Japanese to their knees. But even their faith was rooted in a person, not in a system of government. The neo-religion of the Americans, or the Orthodox Church of the government of the United States of America, will doubtless use its position as the object of faith to control and radicalize its followers. What atrocities will Americans be willing to commit when their God calls them to action?
America will cease to exist as a free, democratic society if secularization continues. The Constitution cannot withstand the criticism of a God. When our government no longer depends on a social contract to exist, but instead is self-existent by virtue of the institutionalizing of faith in the government, we will indeed be the creators of the world’s strongest theocracy. There will be no wall of separation between church and state, for the two will be one. There will be no freedom to practice a religion other than that of the state, for that would be an act of treason, punishable by death.
The very fabric of American society is rooted in virtue, but the source of that virtue is being stripped from the American experience. The answers to America’s systemic problems of drugs, terrorism, and dissolution of the family unit lay not in repression of our individual beliefs for fear of offense to the minority, but in expression of our beliefs to spread understanding. When done behind closed doors, even religion encourages intrigue, hatred, and persecution. But when it is allowed to be expressed in a free and socially responsible manner, a religion can engender understanding and respect. The censored religious expression of today will lead to the deification of state. Only free expression will save America from the monarchical rule of a state theocracy.