A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on January 18th, 2008 in Progressive Faith

Pastor Dan has, as he does so often given me a lot of food for thought. Do we have a “civil religion” in America?

I agree fully that we once did. But, like so much else, there doesn’t seem to be much that is shared universally. Mike Huckabee’s civic religion doesn’t seem to have much of a resemblance to Barack Obama’s or Hillary Clinton’s. George W. Bush’s religious script is so different from my own that it hardly could be called by the same name. I think the difference can be found in Rabbi Jill’s post in separating iconic faith, priestly faith, and public faith. Most of us are fairly comfortable with the first, the right is ramming the second at us, and causing a reaction against the last.

There are few who would grouse about the President ad libbing “so help me God” when he (or she) takes the oath of office or when they invoke “God bless America” at the close of a speech (though, as I once remarked to my brother, I think some of them would like to say “God damn the _____”). But when President Bush refers to freedom as “God’s gift to mankind”, it makes some of us pause. It’s too similar to Alan Keye’s insistance that “the Constitution doesn’t grant rights, God does.” It is a bastardization of the Declaration of Independence that says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

If there is a part of our civic religion that is most under attack by the right, it is the idea that the government exists to serve the governed. It guarantees our rights; it enforces justice; it exists for the purpose of ensuring that no person or group becomes “more equal” than the rest of us – even though we have never had perfect equality in our country, we are not relieved of the duty to work towards it.

If we have a civic religion, I believe it is a bit threadbare and ragged. Not because it has reached an end of its usefulness or its life-cycle, but because it has become simply another means of achieving political ends. But if there is hope for this country, I believe it lies in resurrecting the civic religion, shaking off the dust, mending the holes, and making America mean all it was always meant to be and has never quite become. It does not lie in destroying civic religion because of its use by Reagan or Bush or someone else. Religion has immense capacity to divide, but it has an enormous capacity to unite and heal and to make whole.

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