[Vision2020] The God Glut

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 10, 2012
The God Glut By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

Bob Kerrey’s political career spanned four years as the governor of
Nebraska and another 12 as a United States senator from that state, during
which he made a serious bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. In
all that time, to the best of his memory, he never uttered what has become
a routine postscript to political remarks: “God bless America.”

That was deliberate.

“It seems a little presumptuous, when you’ve got the land mass and the
talent that we do, to ask for more,” he told me recently.

But there was an additional reason he didn’t mention God, so commonly
praised in the halls of government, so prevalent a fixture in public
discourse.

“I think you have to be very, very careful about keeping religion and
politics separate,” Kerrey said.

We Americans aren’t careful at all. In a country that supposedly draws a
line between church and state, we allow the former to intrude flagrantly on
the latter. Religious faith shapes policy debates. It fuels claims of
American exceptionalism.

And it suffuses arenas in which its place should be carefully measured. A
recent example of this prompted my conversation with Kerrey. Last week, a
fourth-year cadet at West Point packed his bags and left, less than six
months shy of graduation, in protest of what he portrayed as a bullying,
discriminatory religiousness at the military academy, which receives public
funding.

The cadet, Blake Page, detailed his complaint in an article for The
Huffington Post<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-page/west-point-religious-freedom_b_2232279.html>,
accusing officers at the academy of “unconstitutional proselytism,”
specifically of an evangelical Christian variety.

On the phone on Sunday, he explained to me that a few of them urged
attendance at religious events in ways that could make a cadet worry about
the social and professional consequences of not going. One such event was a
prayer breakfast this year at which a retired lieutenant general, William
G. Boykin, was slated to speak. Boykin is a born-again Christian, and his
past remarks portraying the war on terror in holy and biblical terms were
so extreme that he was
rebuked<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/world/bush-says-he-disagrees-with-general-s-remarks-on-religion.html>in
2003 by President Bush. In fact his scheduled speech at West Point was
so vigorously protested that it ultimately had to be
canceled<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/us/lt-gen-william-boykin-known-for-anti-muslim-remarks-cancels-west-point-talk.html?ref=williamgboykin>.


Page said that on other occasions, religious events were promoted by
superiors with the kind of mass e-mails seldom used for secular gatherings.
“It was always Christian, Christian, Christian,” said Page, who is an
atheist.

Mikey Weinstein, an Air Force Academy graduate who presides over an
advocacy group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me
that more than 30,000 members of the United States military have been in
contact with his organization because of concerns about zealotry in their
ranks.

More than 150 of them, he said, work or study at West Point. Several cadets
told me in telephone interviews that nonbelievers at the academy can indeed
be made to feel uncomfortable, and that benedictions at supposedly
nonreligious events refer to “God, Our Father” in a way that certainly
doesn’t respect all faiths.

Is the rest of society so different?

Every year around this time, many conservatives rail against the “war on
Christmas,” using a few dismantled nativities to suggest that America
muffles worship.

Hardly. We have God on our dollars, God in our pledge of allegiance, God in
our Congress. Last year, the House took the time to
vote<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/us/house-of-representatives-affirms-in-god-we-trust-motto.html>,
396 to 9, in favor of a resolution affirming “In God We Trust” as our
national motto. How utterly needless, unless I missed some insurrectionist
initiative to have that motto changed to “Buck Up, Beelzebub” or “Surrender
Dorothy.”

We have God in our public schools, a few of which cling to creationism, and
we have major presidential candidates — Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick
Santorum — who use God in general and Christianity in particular as
cornerstones of their campaigns. God’s initial
absence<http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-change-platform-add-god-jerusalem-211928130--election.html>from
the Democratic Party platform last summer stirred more outrage among
Americans than the slaughter in Syria will ever provoke.

God’s wishes are cited in efforts to deny abortions to raped women and
civil marriages to same-sex couples. In our country God doesn’t merely have
a place at the table. He or She is the host of the prayer-heavy dinner
party.

And there’s too little acknowledgment that God isn’t just a potent engine
of altruism, mercy and solace, but also, in instances, a divisive,
repressive instrument; that godliness isn’t any prerequisite for
patriotism; and that someone like Page deserves as much respect as any true
believer.

Kerrey labels himself agnostic, but said that an active politician could
get away with that only if he or she didn’t “engage in a conversation about
the danger of religion” or advertise any spiritual qualms and questions.

“If you talk openly about your doubts,” he said, “you can get in trouble.”

To me that doesn’t sound like religious freedom at all.

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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