Nothing seems to divide people more than political and religious ideology and these days it is increasingly hard to tell one from the other. The alarming polarization of the populace, fueled by indiscrete self-interest and propaganda, is without a doubt in my opinion the greatest challenge to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. I am a religious minded individual and value all expressions of faith [even atheism is a kind of faith] and see it as a fundamental and necessary human component in any healthy society that advocates freedom. However, the ever-increasing affronts of focused extremism and conflict between church and state, and the partisan biases that accompany it, come across as banal and pointless and do little to serve our fundamental ethic of liberty and freedom of expression.
Consider the issues of school prayer and the public display of the Ten Commandments. The religious right holds the belief that without public recognition of God and His law the nation comes under judgment. In turn, the grace, blessings, and favor of God becomes somehow impotent or withdrawn. Attribute this to a rather skewed view of American history as founded on Christian principle, Manifest Destiny and favor of God, that chooses to ignore the fact that this nation was molded out of the cultural and physical extermination of the indigenous races, the exploitation of slavery and opportunism in the name of God that built our wealth. I fail to see how such measures justify our nation as "Christian" in practical terms when the concept of love of one’s neighbor was so casually cast to the wind and forgotten.
Christians are no better off now when the focus is turned outward rather than inward and they look to the state to enforce measures of public religious influence, which they alone are accountable for. The issue is not can children pray in school for there is yet nothing stopping that on an individual basis. However in a society that supposedly acknowledges religious freedom it is wrong to mandate prayer as a school function. Prayer should be the responsibility of the family and the individual, prior to even going to school, and the effective witness is better served on the inter-personal level between students rather than on the assumption of mandatory prayer.
Likewise, the public display of the Ten Commandments is not as important [in terms of religious practice] as the demonstration of the law on the personal level where it’s influence is felt and not merely seen or heard. It becomes an object of idolatry in an effort to excuse the church from not practicing what it preaches in the most fundamental sense. The church in many ways has chosen to grant authority to the state while expecting the state to welcome its bias and judgments on the rest of the populace, placing a greater burden on a system that already has more than enough to do. Jesus never asked a thing from the state and the kind of idealized utopian nationalism they wish to entertain is difficult to justify through scripture if you are a Christian. All it amounts to is passing the buck rather coyly to an institution who’s strength relies on a certain amount of objectivity in order to succeed in rendering liberty and justice to all on equal terms, and not without the compromise of ideals in a diverse society.
"Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" is a maxim that addresses not only the individual but the corporate body as well, as a whole. Just as the church lays a heavy burden on the state to enforce its will, this is also illustrated in the dependent nature of the church body in its surrender of will and consciousness to the recognized authority, be it the local pastor, the Papacy, or renegade heretic. This tends to burden the leadership with hero worship and only enforces the common neurotic impulses that weaken faith, perhaps more than it increases it, when the individual Christian fails to recognize that it is the same God working in and accessible to them that works through any man or woman of God, no matter how gifted they appear to be. The man of God who has been placed on the pedestal finds himself facing a terrible challenge not only in terms of the temptation of his vanity but also of his humility when he does fail because he is not God and has everything riding on his shoulders and the words that come forth from his lips and shelters himself behind a veil. If a pastor does not challenge the people entrusted to him to take responsibility for themselves and becomes more or less dependent upon them as well to satisfy his ego then it is a sad state of affairs for all concerned. The people shake and divide because their idol has fallen and, because of his position over them, they are rendered helpless until the next man of God comes along. The role of the pastor should be to help the people they serve to walk under their own power in God, to equip the flock for the ministry rather than expect the pastor who has identified with the spirit of God to do it for them. In summation then it could be said that the greatest weakness of the church is that it does not subscribe to the authority granted to it, corporately and individually, and has set something else in its place, and in this the criticism of the atheist is born and rooted.
There stand the atheists who, in their denial of God, see faith as a threat to liberty and reason and foolishly confuse the issue with their own abstractions and biases. For they too have as much faith in public tokens and religious ordinance as the Christians, or it wouldn’t be an issue, and the management of their cause is just as misguided and burdensome as the vices of the opposition. If there is no God then why is the pursuit of an absolute ideal or law so hated? Perhaps they merely lack a sense of humor, and are prone to take everything personally for which nihilism is a convenient escape. But don’t they see they are actually doing the Christian a favor by challenging his dependency on the state? This is the other side of the fence, the existential order, where the individual is autonomous and a law unto himself. The atheist is no less a hypocrite than the Christian is in his denial of another’s pursuit of happiness, with or without God. For in America the atheist has the same right to believe how they want just as a Christian does, but likewise he will not surrender his ideology from the domain of the state, taking personal responsibility to the extreme and alienates himself from the common bonds of mutual dependence, for our god truly is what we love or hate the most in life which takes possession of our will and action. He is right to provoke the separation of church and state, but he is wrong to deny the basic rights of free ideological association.
Is the democratic experiment of these United States doomed to fail? If it does it is not because the inspiration was faulty or impractical. It will fail when the balance between the state and the individual no longer serves the interest of the common good and the state is given far too much authority and responsibility to enforce it, when self-interest and greed rape the populace and leave us impotent and further divided from each other, when we would rather kill for our beliefs than to die for them, when the idols have grown sour to the eye and nowhere is left to turn but within, and we will have no one but ourselves to blame – God or no god.
