TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Lloyd Omdahl,
Published Saturday, July 14, 2007

The issue of separation of church and state reared its divisive head in Fargo when the City Commission voted to move a monument proclaiming the Ten Commandments off of city property. Defenders immediately circulated petitions to initiate an ordinance that would prohibit removal of any monument that had been on city property over 40 years.

The 40-year provision will not save the monument. Court rulings have been fairly clear on the issue, requiring the inclusion of artifacts and sacred objects of other religions to demonstrate the neutrality of government toward all religions. In other words, the Ten Commandments must be secularized.

Centuries of experience with oppression arising out of an unholy integration of government and religion provide plenty of arguments for defending separation of church and state. Nevertheless, we have seen a growing affinity for integrating religion and government.

It isn’t that the merging of religion and government is something new in America. Over the past four centuries, Christian denominations have left their mark on the public square in a wide variety of ways. As a consequence, the idea of a Christian nation (perhaps an oxymoron) has grown into a civil religion.

In his recent book, Who Are We?, Prof. Samuel Huntington, a highly respected Harvard political science professor, discusses civil religion and explains that “civil religion enables Americans to bring together their secular politics and their religious society, to marry God and country, so as to give religious sanction to their patriotism…”

He saw four manifestations of civil religion in the United States.

1 The belief that the American system of governments rests on a religious base. This view is common coin among religious leaders looking for a rationale to justify a greater integration of church and state.

2 The belief that Americans are God’s chosen people. Emanating from the Old Testament, this myth has been used to justify several wars and genocide in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” (Example: Within 15 years of establishing their Godly “city on the hill” at Plymouth, the Christian colonists slaughtered the neighboring Pequot tribe for its land and praised God for delivering the Indians into their hands.)

3 Religious allusions and symbols in rituals and ceremonies are commonplace. On the political scene today, we see numerous references to God, faith and prayer, invoked to meet political and religious expectations.

4 Public ceremonies take on a religious flavor. The best examples of this characteristic are the presidential inaugurations featuring prominent religious figures invited to bless these secular events.

According to Huntington, America’s civil religion is a nondenominational, national religion that is not expressly a Christian religion, even though it is Christian in its origin. Then he offers his most compelling observation. Two words do not appear in civil religion statements and ceremonies, he says. Those two words are “Jesus Christ.”

“While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ,” he concludes.

The addition of religious symbols and rituals to the public square, such as monuments of the Ten Commandments, gives strength and legitimacy to a national civil religion that becomes a substitute for personal faith. In the final analysis, all of the meaningless religious rhetoric and trappings in the public square are alien to the teachings of the New Testament.

Omdahl is former N.D. lieutenant governor and retired University of North Dakota political science teacher.

Labels: Christianity, civil religion, Jesus, Lloyd Omdahl, Samuel Huntington, separation of church and state, Unites States