Religion in American politics: Happy Yom Chechecheche!

A couple of weeks ago, the governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, who is a Republican, said the following loudly and boldly (in his Martin Luther King Day message):

anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

That puts to rest any thought that discussions on the separation of church and state ended with the defeat of Christine O'Donnell, who famously raised the question "Where in the constitution is the separation of church and state?"

Let us check in with Texas to see what they think about non-Christians:

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Jewish Speaker of Texas State House
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Obama invokes Jesus more than Bush

As president, Barack Obama has mentioned Jesus Christ in a number of high-profile public speeches — something his predecessor George W. Bush rarely did in such settings, even though Bush’s Christian faith was at the core of his political identity.

Obama’s invocation of the Christian Messiah is more overt than Americans heard in the public rhetoric of Bush in his time in the White House — even though Bush’s victories were powered in part by evangelical voters. ...

“I don’t recall a single example of Bush as president ever saying, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ,’” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Christian group Family Research Council. “This is different.”

To Perkins, Obama’s overtly Christian rhetoric is a welcome development from an administration that he largely disagrees with on the issues, though Perkins sees a political motive behind it, as well.

“I applaud that. It gives people a sense of comfort,” Perkins said. “But I think it’s a veneer, a facade that covers over a lot of policies that are anti-Christian.” That includes, in his view, Obama’s stance in favor of abortion rights.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, the executive director of the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, doesn’t like the trend with Obama: “I don’t need to hear politicians tell me how religious they are,” Lynn said. “Obama in a very overt way does what Bush tended to do in a more covert way.”

I wonder how the secular and atheistic supporters of Obama will respond to this report from Politico .....

Church and State: Do not tear down that wall

Susan Jacoby, author, most recently, of The Age of American Unreason, has a powerful op-ed in the NY Times, about the systematic chiseling away of the separation of church and state. She notes that it started with President Clinton, was massively expanded by President Bush, and is being continued on by President Obama. Jacoby writes:

President Obama might also take a moment to reread the religious freedom act passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, with strong support from both Baptists and freethinkers. That law, which prohibited tax support for religious teaching in public schools, became the template for the establishment clause of the First Amendment and also helped establish our American tradition of government freedom from religious interference and religious freedom from government interference.

Yet we are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past. If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back. In place of the First Amendment, we will have a sacred cash cow.

Separation of church and state in the US: a facade?

"[India has a] Hindu woman for President, a Muslim as Vice-President, a Sikh as Prime Minister, a Dalit as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and an atheist as Speaker of the nation’s Parliament. That’s apart from the fact that the leader of the country’s ruling party is a Christian. As complex and confusing as it gets. Though perhaps logical when politics is seen as a mix of so many diverse streams. In the U.S. — the first modern nation to legally separate the church and the state — it’s different."

Practically everybody in India walks around clearly presenting their religious faiths. Which is not something that appeals to me when I visit India. Though, as problems go, it is not even a blip in the radar compared to how the poor live.

As the writer points out, it's different here in the US. But, the difference--according to me--is that here in the US, we pretend that we live and operate with a wall that separates church and state. Humbug! It is a mere facade. I way prefer the what-you-see-is-what-you-get of religious fundamentalists for that reason. Maybe, that too is a reason why it is easier for me to work and interact with people who wear their religion on their sleeve than with those pretending that they approach pubic interactions and policies devoid of their biases.

The Pastor Rick Warren exam at Saddleback

Kathleen Parker has a good argument in her WaPo column:

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
It is also un-American. ...

Her closing lines are great ...

For the moment, let's set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our Founding Fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.
By today's new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson -- the great advocate for religious freedom in America -- would have lost.