A Godly Nation?
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 15, 2002
Reading: Mark Slouka. "One Year Later." Harper's Magazine. September, 2002
Some years ago, at the University of California, San Diego, a young woman raised her hand in the middle of a seminar I was then teaching on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian Era. She seemed genuinely disturbed by something. "I know you're all going to think this is crazy," she said, "but I always thought Jesus was an American."
A lovely moment. What she had articulated, as succinctly as I had ever heard it articulated, was the spirit behind three and a half centuries of American history: America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation. Had John Winthrop been sitting at the table with us he would have understood what she was saying, and approved of it. As would Harriet Beecher Stowe. And Ronald Reagan. And, apparently, Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Stowe herself had made it all abundantly clear in 1854: "The whole world," she wrote, "has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by God to advance a cause of liberty and religion." Others from Henry David Thoreau to the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, expressed the idea geographically, blending sacred and secular history, superimposing the religious metaphor over the actual land: America was bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium. History moved from east to west. We had escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, reinvented ourselves in the New World wilderness. Chosen for a special covenant with God, we would be "as a City upon a hill," to recall both John Winthrop's sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630 and Ronald Reagan's inaugural address from 1981. Inevitably, it was understood (it is still understood), the westward-tending tides of Manifest Destiny would carry us on till the ship of state ground ashore on the pebbles of paradise.
One of the things I do over the summer, with an eye to the fall, is to keep an eye and ear out for those events and happenings that just might provide a little grist for the sermon mill. This is not, of course, just limited to the summer. One of the occupational hazards of being in the ministry is that, whatever the season, you can't just follow a news story, or read a book or article, or go see a movie, or even take in a baseball game for heaven's sake without someplace in the back of your mind thinking "There's got to be a sermon in here somewhere." I try to warn prospective ministers about this (Good morning, Jackie) but they just go right ahead with their plans anyway, and God bless 'em for that.
Well, speaking of God, an issue arose this past June that was like having a sermon theme dropped on a plate. A United States Court of Appeals, based in the State of California, ruled that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violated the "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. I happened to be spending a couple of weeks in the State of California not too long after this ruling came down, and it certainly provided plenty of grist for the mill out there for talk radio programs, editorialists, religious broadcasters . . . well you name it. I do not intend for this sermon to be a legal brief on the matter. The ruling itself, as I understand it, is being held in abeyance while it is appealed. And given the current make-up of the United States Supreme Court, should the case ever come before that body, it will, in all likelihood, be overturned.
I've long held a concern that the "under God" clause does indeed constitute a kind of de facto, or implicit, religious loyalty oath; but from a strictly legal standpoint that may be a hard case to make. My best guess is that this ruling will be overturned on the grounds that a rhetorical reference to a Deity does not, by itself, constitute an establishment of religion, especially when there is no legal requirement on the part of any American to recite the pledge in any type of setting.
OK, I said this was not going to be a legal brief and I'll hold myself to that. I want to use this case instead as a springboard for looking at a couple of broader matters beyond the legalities involved. One positive by-product, as I see it, of this Pledge ruling is that it has cast some attention on how the Pledge itself came to be written, and by whom, and under what circumstances. This by itself is instructive when it comes to examining how we as a nation express and live out our highest principles and value. Then second, drawing on the reading by Mark Slouka that I shared a few minutes ago, I want to offer my thoughts on how this idea that we are special nation set apart from the world by Divine Will, has affected--for good and for ill--how we understand ourselves as a nation and how we perceive our place in the world. This idea of our being under a uniquely Divine, Godly mandate, calling, and mission has been a part of our cultural mythology and psyche since the day the first Europeans set foot on this continent; and it has certainly come into play as we have tried to deal with the aftereffects of the terrorist attacks upon us of just over one year ago. It is this mythology that is also at work as we, apparently, prepare for yet another war.
But let's begin with the flap over the Pledge of Allegiance. In the talk-radio blather (blather for the most part) that the "under God" ruling unleashed, the underlying theme was that this is one more instance of how "the liberals" are trying to bring down America and make of us a godless nation. I had to wonder how aware those making such charges were that the author of the original version of the Pledge was a pretty strong liberal himself, and--for a time anyway--a Baptist minister. Frances Bellamy was, and my more conservative friends may wish to brace themselves for this, a Christian Socialist who saw no contradiction in those two terms. He was an advocate of the social gospel--which was a quasi-socialistic interpretation of the life and teaching of Jesus--that found expression in the liberal wings of American Protestantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bellamy actually lost his pulpit in a Boston Baptist church due to these kinds of leanings.
In 1892 he found himself the Chair of a Committee that was looking for ways for the public schools in his area to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' voyage to what became America. It was in this capacity that he wrote an early version of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, as something for school children to recite as part of this 400th anniversary celebration. The Pledge was also published in a magazine Bellamy edited called The Youth's Companion. From there it took on a life of its own, eventually gaining "official status," as it were, by an act of Congress in 1942. It was Bellamy's intent that the operative words in the Pledge be "with liberty and justice for all." Even though he had been a Baptist minister, he saw no need to invoke a Deity. He wanted the Pledge to be both a reminder and a calling to our highest and best values as a nation. And that may be more than you ever wanted or needed to know about Frances Bellamy.
In 1954, more than 60 years after the Pledge was written and well after Bellamy's death, the United States Congress saw fit to add the words "under God." (I was a nine year old fourth grader by then and had already learned the original version.) This was during the throes of the Cold War when practically all the evils of the world were summed up by the term "godless communism"; and at the tail-end of the McCarthy era when loyalty oaths were still much in vogue. By then we'd somehow made it through two World Wars, a devastating Depression, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and all the other momentous events of those 60+ years without God in our Pledge of Allegiance. But Congress nonetheless had to go and fix something that wasn't broken--which was not the first or last time that's ever happened--and here we are.
It is not--a personal opinion now--the two words by themselves that so much I object to in the Pledge so much as it is the way in which the phrase "with liberty and justice for all" has been turned into an afterthought. Its like UNDER GOD . . . and ah, oh yeah, you know, with liberty and justice for all. If I exaggerate its only a little. Next time you drive up the hill over here on Concord Street, check out the huge billboard on the side of a building with the words "One Nation Under God" (with "God" in big red letters), and absolutely no mention of "liberty and justice for all." And should any of you happen to see a bumper sticker with the words "One nation under God" on it that also includes the phrase "with liberty and justice for all," please let me know because I've yet to see one.
I'll close on this point by offering one more thought on the matter. Whatever the legal outcome of this case proves to be, let's take the whole phrase at face value for just a moment and imagine what kind of a country we'd be if we really were living under the direction of a God who demanded liberty and justice for all. How many hungry and homeless people would there be in a land under a God who demanded liberty and justice for all? How much racism, sexism, or homophobia would there be in a land under a God who demanded liberty and justice for all? How much corporate fraud would there be in a land under a God who demanded liberty and justice for all? How much disparity between the super-rich and "the least of these" would there be in a land under a God who demanded liberty and justice for all? My uneasiness at the reference to a Deity aside here, what I'd really like to see is us as a nation and as a people really take it seriously in its entirety.
Moving on now, these two short words are but one expression of a much larger mythology about we understand ourselves as a nation. By "mythology" I do not necessarily, or even primarily, mean falsehood. The mythology of a nation, like the mythology of a family or tribe, is about how it understands, tells, and carries forth its story; how it recounts its past; how it anticipates its future; and how it responds to the ways in which the movements of history impact that nation at any given time. Mark Slouka captured the essence of the American myth quite well, I felt, in the passage I read earlier. While we have massaged the language of this myth as our global awareness and sensitivities have increased, there remains within our collective national psyche this idea and conviction that we are a special nation, deliberately raised up by God for special purposes; and it is with this God that we have a unique covenant. This is all part and parcel with the idea that history, under a Divine Hand, has been moving westward from Egypt and the Middle East, through Greece and Rome, and then across Europe, then over the ocean, and finally culminating here in this promised land, this New World.
In a footnote to the passage I read, Mr. Slouka offers this additional observation : "Is all this talk of covenants and destiny mere a vestigial limb? Hardly. We need only recall the reaction to the attempts (of) the US Court of Appeals to deprive us of our divine patrimony by excising the words 'under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance to understand the power of the myth in America today."
In a number of ways we've actually been well-served by this myth. Many of the reform and social justice movements in this country have, in one fashion or another, invoked it. Their message has been that it is because we are a nation with a Divine Covenant that we must therefore be living up to our highest and best ideals; and must aspire to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." In his Gettysburg Address Lincoln reflected this myth when he voiced the hope that "this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister himself, invoked the myth in his "I Have a Dream" speech when he asked that "this nation rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed."
But there are ways in which we are ill served by this myth as well, and that's the point of Mark Slouka's article. Of all the millions upon millions of one-year-after-September11 words that have been written, it was the ones in this piece that spoke to me most clearly and forcefully. Mr. Slouka's field of expertise is literature and he writes eloquently of the horror of September 11 as well as to the heroism of those involved in the rescue efforts. He also writes of the flaws and the dangers of feeling that these monstrous attacks, and their resulting loss of innocent life, somehow set us apart from the rest of the world.
Let me read a bit here: "A horrible thing has occurred, certainly. And those affected, like the victims of all unspeakable things, deserve all of our compassion. But this was not London during the Blitz. Or Stalingrad in the winter of 1943. Or Sarajevo in 1994. Thousands of innocent people had died, true. But innocents had been dying for awhile now--millions of them, mostly children, as quietly as melting snow each and every year . . . (he goes on) Now I understand how we managed to endure the slow disintegration of Bosnia with such fortitude; we simply filed it, along with the events in Rwanda and Chechnya and Sierra Leone under the rubric of 'Bad Things That Occur to People Who Are Not Americans.'"
I confess to a visceral resistance to those words when I first read them--you may feel the same now upon hearing them. But, as I came to understand, the author is not trying, and nor ever would I, to minimize the pain and loss we as a nation have suffered and endured. But that pain and loss has been exacerbated, I would suggest, because it has collided head-on with the myth that we have some kind of "most favored nation" status in the eyes of God; and collided with the idea that we are not only "one nation under God" but a nation exclusively set apart by God. There was an article in this past Friday's New York Times that made a similar point. It illustrated how many of the nations and peoples of the world still share in our grief and outrage of one year ago, and how they still grant us our deserved grief and outrage; but there is also some impatience with us and exasperation at us for treating September 11 as if it were a horror unique to human history, when in fact it is unique to this nation called America.
So where does this leave us? Again, I can only offer a personal opinion. It leaves us with a choice. We can choose to treat the terror of September 11 as an event that sets us apart from the world, and that confers upon us a Divine Mandate (whether we actually call it that or not) to respond in ways largely of our own choosing. Or, we can treat our still deep pain and loss and suffering as something that joins us with those peoples and nations of the world who have also, in relatively recent years, known senseless and horrible death at the hands of tyrants, fanatics, and madmen. These are peoples and nations who are as "Godly"--or not--as we are.
Over the past year, we as a nation, have--if not haltingly--at least tried to take the latter course, and make that latter choice, of building alliances in responding to the September 11 attacks. It is well beyond the scope of what I'm trying to say today to assess all that has happened over the past 12 months under the rubric of a "war on terror." They'll be time for that. What troubles me now, and I can only briefly touch on it at this time, is that we seem to be reverting to that first approach I named. There seems to be still enough of that cultural mythology intact to keep alive the idea that this country alone has some kind of Godly mandate to both name and then eradicate evil, quite apart from whatever the rest of the world may think, or courses other nations may wish to take. I believe this is the cultural assumption behind all the rationales now being put forth for launching a war against Iraq.
I also believe the President did the right thing last Thursday in taking the case against Iraq to the United Nations. I don't believe he needs to do a whole lot of convincing either to the peoples of this country, or to the peoples of many nations of the world, that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man with dangerous means to do very dangerous things. But I have to wonder if the President has, in the depths of his mind and soul, asked himself that if Saddam Hussein has "stiffed the world" as he put it a week or so ago (and Mr. Bush gets no argument from me on that one), why are we practically the only ones in this world that's been stiffed that wants to wage an all-out war against him? There are circumstances and conditions under which I can, however reluctantly, support military action--action taken by the country of which I've a citizen all my life, and for which I have a great deal of affection. I remain far from convinced that we are at that point when in come to waging a preemptive war on Iraq. On this, too, there will be a time to speak.
I know the world is very much with us these days; and I know that one of the very real reasons for having a religious community like ours, and for having a place like this where we can gather the spirit is to offer an occasional respite from that world; to offer a place where we can simply be present with ourselves and with one another. This is part of our reason for being, and one I intend to have us carry forth. There are times as well when we cannot help but bring some of the concerns of the larger world with us. We're here for that also.
Next Sunday I'll speak to some of the personal challenges and opportunities I see before us as this church year gets underway, as well as some of the larger challenges and opportunities that the larger community and world hold forth for us a religious liberals. However great those challenges from the personal to the global may be, we hold to the faith that we can indeed, as the song we're about to sing puts it, plant the seeds of love and peace and justice-- forbidding as the soil may at times seem. The issue for me, and I believe for all of us, in not how "Godly" a nation we are, but how much hope and commitment we each have in our hearts to bring this still beautiful and fragile planet of ours at least a few steps closer to the day when "earth shall be fair and all her people one."
Copyright © 2002 by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved
