The American Faith I Was Raised In
this is a part of a larger article, but the section i want to focus on in this seed
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2022/08/kennedy-vs-bremerton-scotus-religion-church-state/671063/
The American Faith I Was Raised In
Caleb Gayle 9-11 minutes 8/7/2022
I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt. I imagine that my parents moved our family there because, among many reasons, Tulsa bore no resemblance to New York, the city where I was born. Tulsa’s brown, flat, predictable landscape; its many churches and Christian schools; its political leaders whose speeches sound like sermons and preachers whose sermons sound like political speeches—these features were a welcome relief to parents, not just mine, who wanted to raise “God-fearing kids” in a world that seemed ever bent on secularizing.
The Christian school I attended from sixth to 12th grade...branded itself “classical.” By classical, the school’s leaders meant that the school’s traditions were not of this age, and not of this world. “To be in this world, but not of it” is a synthesis of biblical texts formed to command followers of Christ, then and now, to realize that being in this world, involved in its cultures, is not a choice. But to become of it—for our behaviors, political leanings, and the like to resemble those one would find in the “secular world”—is a sinful step too far. So the school tried to carve its own path.
Every Christian school I had attended before this one taught mathematics, English, history, a foreign language, and, if it had sufficient budget, physical education. Those institutions also shoehorned a Bible class into the course schedule. That’s what made it a “Christian education.” But this school was of the view that education wouldn’t be Christian without a Christian worldview finding its way into every single class. In science, we learned that God created the world some 10,000 years ago. Biology was one part biology and two parts disputing evolutionary biology.
What haunts me most today, what I am still unlearning, is the school’s accounting of this country’s history. My belief now—which was my hunch then—is that the purpose of the history education I received was to convince me that God has a plan and that that plan has always included America as a shining city on a hill. Although the public fights today about whether this country’s founding was in 1619, when enslaved people arrived on these shores, or in 1776, when enslavers who moonlighted as politicians declared independence from the Crown, our school had a third view: America had been in God’s mind from before the dawn of civilization.
History class was conducted in celebration of the Founders and their Christianity. We watched videos and read pamphlets and materials by David Barton, a noted Christian nationalist whose organization, WallBuilders, promotes the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Fringe figure though he may seem, Barton’s work has been praised by major political leaders on the right, including Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. And if my tenth-grade history class was one 32-week, two-semester-long argument for why God was the true founder of America, my 11th-grade history class was a training ground for defending this view.
The book we relied on most was How Should We Then Live? by Francis A. Schaeffer. This 1976 book argued that Western thought had at one point—long ago—been rooted in Christianity and that with the decline of Christianity’s influence on the West, the vitality of Western life had been destroyed. Schaeffer examined the environmental movement, race, the emergence of hippies, the Enlightenment, evolutionary theories, art by Salvador Dalí, music by John Cage, the Renaissance, and more, only to conclude that philosophy and science were in catastrophic decline.
Schaeffer’s central thesis was simple: “When we base society on the Bible, on the infinite-personal God who is there and has spoken, this provides an absolute by which we can conduct our lives and by which we can judge society.” This fusion of a Western-oriented Jesus and the state was the only bulwark against the decline.
The West—and, more narrowly, the America that Schaeffer wanted to preserve—wasn’t just a more religious one, explicitly. It was, implicitly, a whiter one. In his book A Christian Manifesto , he wrote, “We, who are Christians, and others who love liberty, should be acting in our day as the founding fathers acted in their day,” without reckoning with the racially limited aperture through which liberty could be experienced then. To be fair to Schaeffer, he did decry the very notion of enslaving Black people. But he blamed Christians who built their justification for slavery on what he identified as secular philosophies, ignoring that many in the 19th century used the Bible, not secular ideas, to justify slavery.
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I think this is the crux of the matter. Has America been uniquely favored by God ? The Christian theocrats make this their major argument for a theocracy. In their telling America has been chosen by God to lead the way on this earth, and we need to acknowledge that fact in our government.
One question I have is does God support and favor right wing extremism? Of course not, neither does God support and favor socialism. If God does exist , it leaves these governmental philosophy questions for humans to work out through free will. God no more favors the United States than it favors Guatemala or Poland.
If one religion runs the government the other religions are by definition lesser and left out. God does not produce this result, people do.
I tend to agree with that. But sometimes one wonders. For example, I look at how close we came to losing WW-2, on both fronts, and wonder.
How different the world would have been had that happened. Hard to even imagine how much worse it would have been.
That's actually a fascinating question and is seen very differently by different generations.
I teach Sunday School in an evangelical church. One year July 4th fell on a Sunday, and I took the opportunity to discuss the idea "does God actually bless America?" The mostly liberal Baby-Boomer group dismissed the suggestion as nonsense.
The next week I was asked to fill in for a teacher in one of our oldest senior adult classes (octagenarian+ ladies). They had been children during the Depression and teenagers during WWII.
I had the lesson prepared already, and I thought it would be interesting to see how the perspective differed. When I asked the question, they looked at me like an idiot teenager and said "bless your heart....of course He does". They then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes reeling off examples of events that turned on the very slightest factors but were decisive in American history.
They talked about everything from the 4 bullet holes in Washington's coat at the Battle of the Monongahela all the way to the chance encounter of a lone scout plane that turned the Battle of Midway. They talked about Reagan surviving the gunshots and Hamilton not surviving, and a host of other people who barely escaped death before they went on to change the world.
In their minds, there was absolutely no way all of those things worked out exactly the way they did by chance. Any idiot could see that God's hand was at work...or should be able to see it.
Looking back at it years later, I think a big difference between those groups was that the Boomers had never lived through a time when the very existence of America was in doubt, while the older ladies remembered such a time vividly.
Let's assume that the Christian God exists and this is 'God' below.
We can point to the prosperity of the USA as evidence that God favors the USA. The logic of course is that if God favors the USA then He will 'do things' to help His favored nation. So God may have stepped in to give us the edge in our Revolution and every event since then that we view as critical to our current state.
Of course, God allows bad things to happen to the USA as well. So the evidence suggests that God steps in just enough to keep the USA on track (i.e. remain a free nation based on democratic principles).
One could also look at all the bad turns and argue that God is letting us fend for ourselves; that God does not favor the USA. Maybe God favors Sweden.
POINT: The evidence we have does not identify God as an agent. The agency of God is mere speculation. To ascertain if God favors the USA, we would first need to have some way of determining that the critical events of our analysis truly have the hand of God on them. I see no way to do that.
Wow. And Desantis thinks explaining why one of your classmates likes to dress like a girl is abuse.
Funny how people speak of God's plan yet nobody actually knows what God's plan is. One cannot turn to the Bible since the Bible is routinely interpreted to fit whatever scenario one wishes it to fit. And, of course, that presumes God is that described in the Bible. Maybe Allah is a closer approximation and Sharia is how God (Allah) wants us to live our lives (and that is interpreted in many ways). Maybe the Hindus have it correct. Or maybe God is really more like that of Buddhism ... close to nature itself.
Or, God might just be a concept of that which enabled our existence and nobody really knows what God really is. That is my take. Based on the evidence so far, something has enabled our existence. That something is not necessarily sentient and 'it' did not necessarily 'create' the universe or have any intent to do so. In fact, we have no idea what properties apply. All that we can say is that this something (this God) pre-existed us (our universe) and is that which enabled our universe to form.
Like the US Constitution.
True to a point, but the CotUS is substantially more constrained than the Bible.
Has to be as it's considerably shorter than the Bible.
One of the reasons.
Since nobody can possibly have the actual answer to our existence, let me throw in a theory. The Sci-Fi novel "To Serve Man" may actually be the real story, and the aliens created us for their own purposes, and the Americans' trend towards and rationalizaiton of obesity is music to their ears.
It is possible that our existence and that of the entire universe for that matter is the creation of super-capable aliens. Of course these aliens need some explanation for their existence so we can kick the can and speculate that a sentient creator (God) created them (and of course we then presume God always existed).
Since nobody knows and there is no guiding evidence, we are free to speculate. Pretty much what we appear to have done in all recorded history with our plethora of gods (thousands) and their associated stories.
Assume there is no deity, then it all gets much easier to understand.
There is no evidence of any type of "creator"
Or, better still, simply do not assume (either way). When we do not know something it is best to accept that situation and deal with it head on.
There could be a creator. Then again, our universe might simply be the result of energy interacting over time ... possibly a tiny fraction of a greater reality where universes come and go just like stars come and go. Basically energy causing forms to emerge which then eventually lose their integrity and return their elements which then become part of future forms.
We do not know; let's run our lives based on that.
I thought that before the Big Bang, there was no space or time. If so, there was no universe in which that cause could have existed.
Space and time, as you are using the terms, are defined within our universe. There is no scientific reason to exclude a substance outside of our universe which undergoes change.
Absent any evidence that "energy interacting over time ... possibly a tiny fraction of a greater reality where universes come and go just like stars come and go", you can speculate.
Avoid that rabbit hole Wry.
It’s just not worth it.
Good advice, keep that meta away from my quantum physics.
I did not say that is what happened or that we have evidence. I stated there is no scientific basis to presume that the universe emerged from a literal nothingness and that, in consequence, there is nothing outside of our universe.
I didn't say or think that you did.
You might be interested in this recent book:
An Infinity of Worlds
Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe
By Will Kinney
Although the public fights today about whether this country’s founding was in 1619, when enslaved people arrived on these shores, or in 1776, when enslavers who moonlighted as politicians declared independence from the Crown,
Someone hates America.
Tell the truth:shame the Devil. What's wrong with that?
This article is not about whatever you want it to be about, it is about the attempted effort to subvert separation of church and state.
No it isn’t.
Show me where the federal government has established and supported a state religion/church and/or restricted others.
Church and state still separated......
his article is not about whatever you want it to be about, it
I quoted the article because it shows how out of touch and biased the author is. If that's how they frame American history, they aren't to be taken seriously.
Talk about out of touch. I am sorry, but you can't just come in here and ignore real history for an idea about history. This country of ours does an immense amount of good in this world and for it we are all to be applauded—generally. Do not get it twisted: Our country has done a great amount of evil internally to its own member groups, in spite of the aforementioned good. And for that it is difficult to note where the balancing of scales lies.
One thing for sure, we can talk about goodly things our country does in hope of more good forthcoming; we can address this country's bad practices openly and honestly in hope and intent of never doing those things again—ever.