The traffic came to a standstill this afternoon on US Route 25 running north from Greenville, South Carolina, to Hendersonville, North Carolina. The holdup turned out to be a tractor trailer truck halfway off the highway and surrounded by a half dozen emergency vehicles. As I passed by the accident, I noticed two things. One, the trailer appeared intact, hardly without a scratch or dent. But the tractor cab was nowhere to be found. It had been entirely consumed by fire. All that was left was the chassis and four wheels. Everything else, gone! You don’t see that very often!!
The other thing I noticed was this: the red emergency vehicle closest to the truck. It was a medical unit, I think. Across the top and stenciled in gold letters were the words “North Greenville.” And right under those, also in gold letters, all caps, were the words “In God We Trust.”
That phrase is more common than it used to be. It now appears on public buildings, license plates, school houses, city buses, and many other places where local officials can assert their efforts to push back on the seventy year creep of secularism.
The use of those four words is a small battle in the larger struggle between, one, those citizens and elected officials including judges who understand the country as a secular democracy with a strong religious culture and, two, those citizens and elected officials including judges who see the country as a Christian nation with a long tradition of religious neutrality in the public square.
For 70 years this tug-of-war between secularists and religionists has grown in intensity and impact. Secularists fear the religious, as many Muslims fear the Taliban. Religionists fear the secularists, as Hong Kong fears the communists of China.
For years the secularists have won many battles in the federal courts. It began over the issues of race but expanded to include privacy, abortion, marriage, sexuality, and religious freedom.
I remember the days in elementary and middle school, junior high we called it back then, when the school day began with a gathering in “home rooms.” Over the loudspeaker came the principal with his announcements; then a student read the scriptures and offered a prayer. The scriptures read were always the Christian Bible, and the prayers offered were always in the name of Jesus.
When I graduated from high school in St. Louis, I was at the center of a small tempest on these matters. I had been asked to pray at the graduation ceremony in Kiel Auditorium. Others at the school protested, convinced my prayer would violate the norms of neutrality. They were sure I would pray “in the name of Jesus.”
A secularist revolution in law, politics and public policy dominated American society until recent years. The election of Donald Trump was, in large measure, a victory for the religionists. Though he himself was not a religious person, he adopted their vocabulary, approved their policies, and famously held aloft for public viewing a copy of the Holy Bible.
But the most important thing he did was appoint three people, three Christian people, three Catholic people to the United States Supreme Court. For the first time ever, perhaps, the religionists took control of the Supreme Court. The new Court, what we might call the Catholic Court, added their considerable weight to this cultural and legal tug-of-war. Already they have tipped the scales in favor of the religionists. They have pushed back when the government wanted to include church assemblies in the public health protocols during the pandemic. They rebuked the Boston city council for failing to put up the flag of a religious group on a pole available widely to community groups. And now they are poised to reverse the single most contentious cultural issue in recent American life: the right to privacy and thus to an abortion.
These Supreme Court decisions, and a thousand smaller and unnoticed acts by state and local authorities, are part of this wide-spread push back against the secularists. Religionists are determined to restore “Christian Values” to American life. They see us as, from the very beginning, a Christian nation, and they are fighting to see that it remains as such.
This does not explain, I might point out, why they support a Supreme Court decision to declare businesses as “persons” under the law, nor why they are so adamant about the unrestricted and unregulated spread of guns in the United States. Neither seems consistent with “Christian Values.” Perhaps in both cases they made accommodations for other stakeholders in their efforts to build a political coalition. If so, those negotiations offer a paradigm for civil society.
Our future as a people, the American People, will be shaped in large part by these two values: a religious nation with a powerful religious past but also a democratic nation with a commitment to religious neutrality under the law. We want to be a free and open society, welcoming to the wide spectrum of humanity including those of all faiths and those of no faiths. But we also want to be a religious nation, in keeping with our heritage, where people of faith, any faith, are free to worship, believe, teach, and practice their faith.
It is imperative that religionists and secularists (and I have a foot in each camp!!) accommodate each other, talk to each other, listen to each other, seek to alleviate the fears of each other, affirm the best in each other, and welcome each other to every table, whether of food, or policy, or just an evening of fun. This will surely be hard on many of us, but it is the only way forward as a nation, as a religion, as a people, as one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Can I get an amen?
(May 2022)
