A Christian nation — so what?
By Félix Alfonso Peña
© 2008 Félix Alfonso Peña
All rights reserved
17 March, 2008
According to a recent poll, 65 percent of Americans think the country’s Founding Fathers intended that the United States would be a Christian nation.
So what?
The same poll, by the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, said that 55 percent of Americans believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation.
So what?
Now, that’s not a chip-on-the-shoulder question, daring you to knock a secularist’s block off because he doesn’t subscribe to your particular version of the Religion of Peace, Love and Understanding.
It’s a serious question. Asking it immediately leads you to a series of important questions.
To begin with, the poll surveyed Americans at large, the same Americans whose knowledge of Britney Spears’ troubles likely overshadows their knowledge of the forces that shaped this country, and those that almost undid it some four score and seven years later.
They are also the people have long lamented that they have not taught the young about history, according to an article by Sam Wineburn, a professor of education at Stanford University.
This brings us to the first question: Should we trust these people to make national policy through the polls? Some folks would argue that Americans do enough damage in the voting booth without running the country via multiple-choice answers provided to pollsters.
A second serious question, which ignores the complex debate over whether the Founding Fathers were mainstream Christians, Deists or Christians with a secular agenda, is about how much weight the founders’ intentions should carry.
Remember that, wise though they were, the founders had to add 10 amendments to the Constitution two years after it was ratified.
And remember that in the Constitution, they allowed slavery. Clearly, it was their intent to sanction slavery as an institution. We now see slavery as immoral and horribly unjust. This should cast at least some shadow on whether the founders’ wisdom was absolute or tarnished by self-interest.
Which brings us back to the original question: So what? What exactly are we supposed to do with this information provided by the pollsters?
If we’re supposed to be a Christian nation, who is going to decide exactly what that means?
Will we follow the dictates of the fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, who believe that every word in the Bible is unquestionable truth? Will the agenda of the liberal Christians, the Bible as allegory crowd, rule us?
And who’s a Christian, anyway? Do you have to take a test, or do you have to just want to be one? Will there be a national registry?
Are Catholics Christians, icons and all? Are Quakers Christians? Are Unitarian Universalists Christians? And what about the followers of Rev. Fred Phelps, the putative Baptist minister whose Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, pickets military funerals, displaying signs saying that the death is punishment to America because God hates fags — are they Christians?
If you answered yes or no to any of these questions, it begs another question: Who are you to decide? Who gave you the authority?
And here’s another very interesting question: If we’re going to be a Christian nation, will it be a Christian nation that follows the precepts of Christ, stressing mercy, justice and forgiveness, or will it be the Christian nation that saw fit to enslave millions for the sake of profit and slaughter or imprison countless others in order to take their land?
And if we do decide that we’re a Christian nation, what do we do about the First Amendment? It says clearly that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ….”
This brings to mind yet another question: Does the First Amendment grant religion the right to exercise the government?
And now we’re right back where we started, which was questioning just what it means to be a Christian nation.
But really this round robin of questions is aimed at the shallowness of polls that reduce complex issues to the ridiculous by using yes/no or multiple-choice answers.
In the end, they tell us nothing about what we need to know and leave us wondering, so what?