They probably think slavery was ended by Abraham Lincoln as a matter of conscience and scientific reason, too; with no involvement from the church based (largely Congregational, in its origins) abolitionist movement.

It's the vitriol that amazes me, though.  Even though I had a long winded post (which Pastor Dan linked to earlier) about changing politics, I still came down on the side of religion in the public square, and why I, as a pastor, have as much right to be there, as a pastor, as any religion-denying atheist.

I'm bemused that Sen. Obama's comments are so upsetting to people in left blogistan.  Go and please the world.

Just thinking.

"Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

As Obama learned running against Alan Keyes, if if one is Christian, one may never be Christian enough.

Our emphasis should be on what we believe...not on how crazy those are who believe differently.

America doesn't have a political problem. It has a moral problem. And playing glad-hand with the people who are helping to cause that problem only allows the roots to sink in just that much deeper.

My suggestion? Stop defending them. So when Obama suggests that all of socities ills can be taken care of with a little bit of prayer, and people get upset about a comment like that. Don't get offended. Don't take it personally.

You say that you're not like that? Then they're not talking about you.  

That's what bothered me the most about the speech. The story about the shooter who was only violent because he hasn't found religion. I found that ignorant, offensive and most sadly, counter-productive.

That person, his value system, his spirituality surrounds being a self-centered bastard. This person, chances are is a religious person, who uses their religious beliefs to justify their self-centered behavior.

And until this fact stops being personally offensive, and starts becoming something that we need to deal with and minimize culturally and isolate politically, progress is basically impossible.

Taking this as an opportunity to attack religion as a whole without honestly and rationally evaluating the merits of Obama's speech.

I liked his speech. I'm not afraid of good Christians--only those who want to stamp out my faith. Yes, morality needs looked at in this country. Too many live in self-centered isolation. The next generation suffers from it just as those before. I know. At my Casa, there is a 19 year old nihilist who is terrified of love, who pushes away all help, who believes he is entitled to whatever good things he can get from me and my housemates. He is callous and unthinking; he plays video games for 12-14 hr stretches every day he is here; he scorns learning; he hates work; he believes in nothing but himself, yet cannot survive alone. And I know there are MILLIONS of people out there Just. Like. Him.

How can people like him be reached? His attitude has been driving a current of disharmony here since his arrival after Katrina. We followed our faiths here, yet we will not be helping anyone on so personal a basis again. It will kill us.

If the government had acted responsibly regarding Katrina, then this would be a different post.

I pray that the religious left can gain traction enough to inform the dialog in an effort to help those who need it, and protect those like us here at Casa Fiend, from losing our will to help.

Sorry for going off on a tangent. Obama's words did not deserve the panning it got on our half of Blogistan. It makes me very sad.

<sigh>

Blessings, all y'all.

Q.

StreetProphets IS ALSO a blog with liberal responses to the Obama speech. It cannot be that THEY are liberals and we are religious, spiritual, whatever. This is not ground we should be ceding.

As for my thoughts on the Obama speech, I've got a diary up. http://streetprophets.com/storyonly/2006/6/29/04424/0247

And yes, i read the whole speech, several times. While there is a lot I like in the speech, a lot disturbed me as well. Let's shoot for some nuance here.

Obama said we should not be threatened by voluntary student groups praying in school buildings. He did not even hint at supporting organized, school-sanctioned prayers. This position is consistent with both the Supreme Court and the ACLU.

In School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), the Supreme Court ruled that a Pennsylvania law requiring Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer every morning violated the Establishment Clause even if students are permitted to leave the room during the recitation. In Engel v. Vitale (1962) and again in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Supreme Court said that even a "non-denominational prayer" is unconstitutional because government has no business writing prayers.

The ACLU was a staunch supporter, along with groups like the Family Research Council and the Christian Legal Society, of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act that was passed in 2000, as well as the Equal Access Act, which guarantees that religious groups have the same access to public facilities that any other community groups do.

In 1993, The ALCU filed briefs defending the Lamb's Chapel in support of their claim against a school district for not allowing them access to school facilities to show a series of anti-abortion films (all other community groups were allowed to rent school facilities and the Equal Access Act says they cannot discriminate against religious groups).

In 2005, the ACLU joined a lawsuit supporting second-grader's right to sing "Awesome God" at a talent show.

In 2004, the ACLU of Nevada defended a Mormon student who was suspended after wearing a T-shirt with a religious message to school. That same year, the ACLU threatened legal action against the Falmouth Waterside Park, a government-run state park in Virginia, because they had told a the minister of a local Baptist church that they could no longer baptise people in the park.

In 2003, the ACLU defended the right of an elementary school student who wanted to hand out candy canes to his classmates with a card attached that had a Christian message on it.

In 2002, the ACLU supported right of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at school.

The pledge and "under God."

Obama said he didn't think non-believers should take offense, because they're not being brainwashed by these words. Unfortunately, he misses the point that some of us are offended because of the passion of our religious belief. We do not wish to either have our religious language watered down to meaninglessness or pay homage to some empty, nationalistic diety.

Let me explain (I'm not the origin of these thoughts):

The Supreme Court's recent ruling on whether "under God" should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds, but if we consider Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the "God" Americans are to pledge their nation to be "under" is at worst an idol and at best the true God's name taken in vain.

Although the court did not officially rule on the pledge's inclusion of the God-phrase, some justices took it upon themselves to argue in favor of it anyway and their reasonings are theologically telling.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist's opinion summarizes the basic attitude underlying the theologically germane aspects of the government's argument and the court's response. Mindful of legal and constitutional precedents, Rehnquist knew that the God-phrase must be stripped of theological content to qualify as an admissible declaration in a government-sanctioned pledge. He asserts bluntly that the pledge, with the God-phrase, is not a "religious exercise." The pledge instead "is a declaration of belief in allegiance and loyalty to the United States flag and the Republic that it represents." As a "commendable patriotic exercise," the object of the pledge is to unify and otherwise promote the good of the nation.

It is not just that the pledge as a whole is something other than a "religious exercise"--no part of it, including the God-phrase, can be a religious exercise. Rehnquist writes, "The phrase `under God' is in no sense a prayer, nor an endorsement of any religion . . ." In reciting the pledge, "participants promise fidelity to our flag and our Nation, not to any particular God, faith, or church."

However the chief justice's reasoning stands up legally, it is incoherent as a theological statement. Along with the other monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam, albeit in its unique way, Christianity professes that there is only one true and real God. To cite or refer to a "God" who is not the subject or object of "any religion," who is not the "particular God" of any given faith or church, is to introduce a "God" additional to and apart from the "particular" living God of the Christian church. This puts Christians (and other monotheists) in an awkward position, since we worship and acknowledge the existence of one God and one God only.

A related aspect of Rehnquist's opinion is more coherent but hardly theologically satisfying. He declares that the God-phrase in the pledge is a recognition of America's history, a history that demonstrably includes, time and again, reference to "God" (Christian or otherwise). As he parses it, "under God" is not in any sense a current, efficacious act of religious devotion; it is rather a historically "descriptive phrase," taking account of the attitudes and beliefs of our ancestors.

The solicitor general who argued the case on behalf of the U.S. government, Theodore Olson, mounted a vigorous case for retaining the God-phrase. Its theological assertions and implications are quite significant.

He argued that "under God" has no faith or religious content. He is explicit that it does not even affirm "monotheism" but declares only a "belief in allegiance and loyalty to the United States flag and the Republic that it represents." As such it serves--"clearly" and "solely"--a "secular purpose." Citing former Supreme Court opinions, Olson declares that the reference to the deity "may merely recognize the historical fact [that the U.S.] was believed to have been founded `under God.'"

In short, the God-phrase in the pledge is not a matter of theology but of historical sociology. It makes no reference to the true or any actual God, but only to the deity (or deities?) Americans once believed in.

Furthermore, the brief makes it clear that the God-phrase does not intend or attempt "communication with...the Divine... The phrase is not addressed to God or a call for His presence, guidance, or intervention." In other words, if this "God," who is met in no monotheistic faith, who serves a "solely...secular purpose" and is located only in the past should somehow attempt to be present, to guide or to intervene in the affairs of those reciting the pledge, that "God" (who sounds rather like the God of the Bible and Christianity) would be distinctly unwelcome.

Note that this is the case put forward by the representative of a strongly "conservative" administration, one deeply sympathetic with American evangelicalism and at least some form of Christian orthodoxy. It is not the argument of an administration indifferent or inimical to traditional faith. Yet the best case it can make for keeping "under God" in the pledge clearly empties the phrase of any substantive theological content. It makes "God" a museum object confined to the dead past and effectively (if inadvertently) posits polytheism in place of monotheism. Not only that, it makes clear that the deity cited in the pledge is appealed to instrumentally, in service of the flag, and has no presence and may offer no guidance. God is put at the service of the flag, not the flag at the service of a real, present and intervening God.

In her opinion Justice Sandra Day O'Connor underscores how the deity is emptied and instrumentalized in and for the pledge. She says the phrase is a "simple reference to a generic `God,'" and is "inconsequential" in any religious weight or effect. Citing formerly wrought judicial language, she calls the reference "ceremonial deism" and pointedly insists that it does not intend to place the speaker or listener in "a penitent state of mind," create "spiritual communion" or invoke "divine aid." The speakers of the pledge refer to a "generic deity" without any expectation or concern that it or any other deity will actually interfere with their own purposes.

Like Rehnquist, Olson and O'Connor would retain the God-phrase in the pledge. But they can do so only by expressly denying that the God here referred to is the God of Israel, met in Jesus Christ. And they can do so only by admitting outright that for such a pledge they want an amorphous "God" who is always and only on the side of the flag and the Republic for which it stands. They frankly argue not for a Christian (or Jewish or Islamic) monotheism, but for henotheism, that is, loyalty to the "god of my country over all others."

Henotheism in premodern times, centered on clan or tribe. Its pervasive form in the modern world is nationalism. Henotheism is not the theism of any stripe of serious, intentional Christianity--especially not after the German church's experience under Nazism. What Olson and O'Connor propose at worst is idolatry--if they mean to posit a henotheistic and false "God" of the American flag in addition to the one and true living God. At best, if they mean merely to allow or encourage professed Christians to confuse the Living God with the "generic God" propping up the pledge's "ceremonial deism," they propose a taking of the Lord's name in vain. Either way lies serious theological error and offense.

Newdow exposes the theological incoherence and dubiousness of "ceremonial deism" in its many forms. American civil religion, and its construction of "God," has necessarily always been a vague, makeshift affair. Though many early Americans surely heard patriotic and public references to "God" as a reference to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of classical Christianity, it is clear that Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin intended the word less specifically, regarding "God" as a more removed, impersonal and deistic entity. The unfolding, increasing pluralism of the U.S. population has meant that national, official references to "God" have had to become more and more plastic and elusive. In today's America, the word must be stretched to include not only Protestants, Catholics and Jews, but significant numbers of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other citizens representing various world religions. If that is not enough,official references to "God" must be capacious--or insignificant--enough not to disenfranchise those citizens who are not believers of any sort.

Many of us who love God believe that we are on much more solid theological ground if we recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Saint Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God's will in history. The church stretches throughout the world and is its own "public," crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as "citizens with the saints," Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.

This means many things. In the case of the pledge it means that many faithful and thoughtful Christians can also support returning the pledge to its pre-1954 form, and thereby end any pretense of embracing a henotheistic God or cheapening our own faith language.

I agree that many of the blog posts criticizing the speech ignore passages like the following:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Nonetheless, I have several problems with the speech.

Take this quote:

... but it won't have an impact if we don't tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.

I believe he's setting up a false dichotomy. The question of whether a person is religous or not is completely orthogonal to the question of whether our laws and government should be secular. As the poster above illustrates, the ACLU is decidedly secular, and not at all anti-religious. I happen to be an atheist, but it is my belief in religious freedom, and its expression in the Constitution, that makes me want religion out of government and government out of religion.

This quote is even worse:

Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, some liberals dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word "Christian" describes one's political opponents, not people of faith.

This is not a presentation of the best and worst positions Democrats can take, it's an acceptance of the Republican frame, and a presentation of bad  and worse positions for Democrats. Constitutional principles don't "tie our hands", they free us! At best, we are honest about our own faith or lack thereof, accepting of other people's faith or lack thereof, and committed to the position that in order to ensure religious freedom for all, our public policy is based on secular reasoning, not on religious teachings.

He says:

We first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than do those who believe in evolution.

"We" already understand this. These statistics are completely irrelevant to the question of whether we should be teaching evolution in public schools, posting the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, or requiring our children to say "under God" every weekday morning.

My final complaint is with this quote:

But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God;" I certainly didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs - targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers - that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.

These three things are not all in the same category. I'll save the Pledge for last.

When it comes to allowing or funding school groups, the decision should be content-neutral. Any serious believer in secularism should agree.

Faith-based programs are trickier, because it's hard to strike the correct balance between avoiding having the government pay people to preach and having the government discriminate against an organization for being religious. Certainly the Bush administration's position of actively promoting (Christian) faith-based organizations over other non-religious organizations is wrong, as is the policy of denying federal funding to relief organizations that have anything to say about birth control.

On the Pledge, who on earth does he think he is to judge whether children feel oppressed or brainwashed by the Pledge (or whether their parents agree with it), and how is the fact that he (who describes growing up slightly religious) wasn't offended relevant? What (secular) government interest is served by having the phrase "under God" in the Pledge? None at all. There is no possible non-religious justification for its inclusion. By Obama's own standard discussed above, it has no place in the Pledge.

Was this too long for a comment? Should I have added yet another diary on this issue?

I have stopped leaving comments on a few of the most popular blogs, because nearly every time I have made a religious reference, I have been hammered, and I figured, "Hey, I don't need that."  I'm not trying to convert them or impose my beliefs, but just a mention of faith or religion sends some of the other commenters into orbit

To see some of the extremely negative reactions to Obama's speech here at SP is quite surprising to me.