Or, a secularist America is an America true to its roots
In a nation such as Iran, indeed even in a nation such as Great Britain, where there is a direct connection between State and Church (the reigning Monarch is equally Head of State as well as Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England) I would be considered a heretic, an apostate, and a rebel.
In America I'm simply a legal resident with a personal and peculiar take on religion. Naturally, since I've no desire to be tortured into recanting my faith by a modern-day equivalent of the Catholic Inquisition; or to be tortured into recanting my faith by some modern-day equivalent of Bloody Mary's secret service (Bloody Mary being the name given to Elizabeth 1s sister who attempted to return England to the Old Faith after the death of Henry the Eighth) I think this is a very good thing.
My freedom to worship the God of my conviction derives from the Constitution of the United States of America which, contrary to my original understanding (bear in mind I'm English by birth), establishes the USA as a purely secular state, guaranteeing to its people the right to worship according to their consciences alone, free from interference by the powers of the state. My confusion arose because of my misunderstanding of the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Like most Europeans who have any interest at all in such matters I'd thought of the Declaration as being a kind of preamble to the Constitution and therefore taking part in its legal powers - so that the positive language regarding God in the Declaration led me to believe that the inalienable rights with which the Creator is said to endow Its creature, Man, formed part of the legal foundation of the Union. There was a further element of confusion involved, inasmuch as I was completely unaware that the Founding Fathers were, almost to a man, Deists rather than 'Christians' in the way that term is currently understood. In the interest of a complete catalog of the sources of my confusion I ought also to mention the words 'under God' contained in the Pledge of Allegiance (I was not aware that until 1954 these words had not been a part of the Pledge) and the motto 'In God We Trust', not a part of paper currency until 1956. Further, until today I had not been aware that the words E Pluribus Unum were the original motto of the USA, chosen by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.
I had thought, in my ignorance, that the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]") was a derogation from the original intent to found a Christian nation, rather than a clarification and further statement of the intent to do just the opposite and create an entirely secular state in which the freedom of conscience of the individual was protected.
My confusion has been further enhanced by the plethora of statements in the press and on TV by primarily Rightwing commentators, which deliberately give the impression that a native Christianity, a Christianity which was part of the intent of the Founding Fathers, was under threat from an American secularism which took root as part of the 'degeneracy' of the late 20th century.
As I discovered today, through casual surfing and link-hopping, nothing could be further from the truth. There is a legal document, the "Treaty of peace and friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, of Barbary," also known as the Treaty of Tripoli (apparently little known even to American scholars), which gives the lie to the impressions I was under (Link). This Treaty was ratified by the Senate and signed into law by John Adams on 10th June 1797. Its eleventh Article reads -
"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
There can be no clearer declaration of the secularity of the United States either in its legal structures or its political intentions. Such a statement, and the tradition of thought and practice it exemplifies, explains very clearly and completely justifies the antipathy of organizations such as the ACLU to any suggestion of the promotion or establishment of any religious imagery, any religious artifact, or any religious institution, by any organ of the state. A typical example being the recent (minor) controversy over the creation of a religious icon (in this case Christian) in a part of Louisiana, intended as a memorial to the people of St. Bernard's Parish killed by Hurricane Katrina (Link).
The ACLU has taken issue with the memorial because of the possible involvement of local government in the decision to create it (the memorial itself is completely innocuous), the involvement of local government employees in its creation, and the use of public land as its site. Parish officials say the labor involved was donated voluntarily, that the welder who created it is no longer a Parish employee, and that the money and land involved in its creation are alike private.
The Parish President dismisses the concerns of the ACLU out of hand. For him it's not an issue that has anything to do with religion per se, but a memorial to the dead of St. Bernard's Parish. For the ACLU, it's not an issue over Christianity per se, but a question of the involvement of government in the creation of religious iconography which, so they say, makes the statement that only Christians are welcome in the Parish involved.
To me it seems that the ACLU is fighting a battle and ignoring the war. The monument in St. Bernard's Parish; the controversy over a plinth engraved with the words of the Ten Commandments being housed in a Court complex; these are matters of cosmetic appearance. What's of far deeper concern is the degree to which Christianity (Christianity being still the religion of the majority of Americans) has colonized - perhaps infested is a better word - the politics pursued at the very highest levels of the state through the agenda of the Christian Right and its embodiment in the person of the current President and his immediate predecessors since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.
The language of Apocalyptic Christianity is now the language used to describe political projects and policies - the 'axis of evil' being only the most notorious example - and the unthinking and uncritical sponsorship of the mad dogs of Israel being only its most current and egregious manifestation. I don't suggest that the President and other senior Officers of the Republic be denied their rights to the free practice of religion and the free exercise of their consciences: but I do suggest that the overt capture of the state and its hijacking to serve what are avowedly religious purposes be considered as 'high crimes and misdemeanours' and as grounds for impeachment and prosecution.
If I in my work can separate the practice of my faith from my conduct of my employment - as can millions of other Americans - I see no reason why the President and other Mininisters of the Republic should not be required to do likewise. There is no requirement upon me to do so, of course, nor upon any other American citizen. But then the likelihood of my conduct of my employment having consequences, beneficial or otherwise, for every other American is non-existent. Europeans generally view the increasing religiosity of America's political actions in the world with a combination of horror and disbelieving amusement. They consider America to be the natural home of a messianic apocalypticism which is slowly (and, in recent days, not so slowly) contaminating the rational and public space of politics which has been created since the advent of the European Enlightenment - the Enlightenment, and the break with Absolutism and Theocracy, that lies at the heart of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Until my discovery of the intended secularity of the Republic I would have argued against the political theologians who now possess the Republic on the purely practical ground that such political theologism has demonstrated its destructive and anti-human effects both in recent history through the horrors perpetrated by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and in its reductio ad absurdum in the entire course of the history of the former USSR. What I would not have done is argue that the superheated ideology of politically activist Christianity was a direct attack upon the founding principles of the American Republic - which, I now see, is exactly what it is.
NB: because the USSR was formally atheistic does not mean that its ideology and action did not constitute a religion - its God was the State, its Redeemer the Revolutionary Proletariat, and its Heaven the achievement of 'True Communism'.
The religious conscience of the private man is one thing, and its freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution. To turn that freedom into the guiding principle to which American citizens are perforce subject is another thing entirely. It can't be said that America is a theological autocracy; it can be said however that the creeping Chritianization of American politics, and the capture of the highest Office of the state by a messianic theologian of dubious intelligence and proven incompetence, is an insidious and deeply dangerous attack upon one of the freedoms that are unique in the history of the world; a freedom that is one of the elements that constitute the truly American character of America.