Juan Cole writes today in Salon that the Press is giving the impression that America is a Christian Nation" dominated by evangelical Christians and the Christian political right. He also writes that the impression is wrong.
The public relations fiasco that attended the Republican Party's cynical attempt to play the religion card in the tragic case of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo suggests that the religious right has jumped the shark [...] Still, it has not given up exploiting God for political gain, as demonstrated by the widespread movement among American evangelicals to place the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Secular analysts cast this struggle as one between liberal and conservative principles.
There is another conflict going on here, however, between the new multicultural America of many religions (or none), and the traditionally Christian-dominated country that is fading away at the beginning of the 21st century.
In 2001, Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama had a massive two-ton granite monument bearing the Ten Commandments wheeled into the state Supreme Court building. The Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations sued to have it removed, on the grounds that its installation in this public building constituted a state endorsement of a particular religion.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This archaic phrase is now difficult to understand. In colonial times, each of the 13 colonies had an "established" religion, which was officially endorsed by the government and imposed on citizens. In Anglican Virginia, ship captains who brought Quakers into the state were fined, and dissidents were tried for heresy. The Bill of Rights was intended to ensure that the federal government of the new United States did not "establish" (that is, adopt as official and obligatory) any particular religion.
The courts ruled against Moore, but he refused to obey them, declining to mothball the monument to the Ten Commandments. A special judicial court removed Moore from his position as chief justice late in 2003. Moore complained to CNN, "Without acknowledgement of God, we have no justice system, according to the Constitution. And that, I'm sworn to uphold."
But fewer and fewer Americans are interested in Moore's God.
Since 2003, the movement to display the Ten Commandments on government property has spread faster than SARS on an Asian chicken farm. One Indiana county cleverly displayed the Decalogue as a historical document alongside other such documents, and on March 29 of this year the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld its right to do so. The day before, the Mississippi Senate had voted to display the Ten Commandments in all public buildings.
The Moore case has been taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court. Among the groups that filed a "friend of the court" brief against the Ten Commandments monument was the Hindu American Foundation, along with Buddhists and Jains.
How significant is this ranging of American non-Christians against the Decalogue? The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, discovered an America that is changing rapidly with regard to religion. In the 11 years since the first such poll (done in 1990), the number of Americans who considered themselves to have no religion increased from 8 percent to 14 percent. In real terms, these open unbelievers increased from 14 million to nearly 30 million, as extrapolated from the polls. In addition, the proportion of Americans who identified with a specific religion fell from 90 percent to 81 percent.
Despite all the thundering by the Revs. Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell about the evils of secular humanism, then, it is making rapid inroads in American society. Worse for them, the percentage of Americans who say they are "Christian" fell from 86 in 1990 to only 77 in 2001.
So if the people demonstrating outside the hospice Terri Schiavo was in appeared to be acting crazily, remember that they consider themselves and their way of life under attack. They are really desperate.
Properly so. Few of their children will remain with their religious beliefs. They see it coming, and this makes them quite desperate.
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