Why Secular Government?

At a press briefing the other day, Bush's past and present Undersecretary of Agitprop, Karen Hughes, came up with a scary answer to a reporter's question. She said in part:

I had one person at one lunch raise the issue of the President mentioning God in his speeches. And I asked whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites “one nation under God.” He said “well, never mind” and went on to something else. So he sort of was trying to equate that with the terrorists’ (inaudible). So I explained that I didn’t really think that was something you could equate. And he sort of dropped it and moved on. He was one of the opposition leaders in Egypt.

Sadly, none present produced a copy of the Constitution with which to ask Hughes to point out the passage where that phrase occurs. The fact is, there is no mention of God anywhere in the Constitution. She was probably thinking of the Declaration of Independence, in which the deist Jefferson used the phrase, "...the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God..."

Our current rulers, like most modern Americans, simply don't understand why the founders, many of them devout and convinced Christians (and many not), were so adamantly determined that the new government remain entirely secular. The history of European religious wars has faded into antiquity and obscurity for us, but for Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton, those terrible events were recent, instructive, and not to be forgotten.

One of Hamilton's contributions to The Federalist is an analysis of the Thirty Years' War, ignited in 1619 when the Protestant ruler of Palatine, claiming his hereditary rights, attempted to grab the crown of Bohemia. It's enough to say, without getting into explanations of extinct German mini-states, or an anatomy of the Holy Roman Empire, that what followed was an orgy of destruction impressive even by modern standards.

Nearly all Europe became involved in the three-decade struggle which killed a third of the population of Germany, left that region a smoking, stinking ruin, was accompanied by widespread starvation and plague, and saw several of the major players, both Catholic and Protestant, cynically change sides during the struggle, some more than once. Calling attention to this war in The Federalist was Hamilton's way of saying, "This is what happens when you mix religion and government."

Even more pertinent to the founders' purposes was the example of the English Civil War, another seventeenth-century disaster, during which the Puritan Oliver Cromwell and his followers gained possession of the English government by armed force, then legally assassinated the king.

Cromwell's imposition of strict and austere religion on the masses he considered morally lax and secretly Catholic was bad enough, but his greatest contribution to the history of the perversion of Christianity and warping of Jesus's message was his invasions of Ireland, for purposes of what we today would call "ethnic cleansing." The term "genocide" had not been invented yet, but that's what Cromwell had in mind, along with the permanent suppression of Catholicism in the Emerald Isle, which he hoped to accomplish with his greatest stroke of genius, the founding of Northern Ireland.

With these shining examples to instruct their deliberations, the founders of the United States, including the most convinced and sincere followers of Jesus among them, were strongly convinced that no government should ever endorse or promote any religion or sectarian position, or require any sort of specific devotion of its citizens. Their sense of history was more acute than ours, and the satanic results of allowing God to sit in the councils of government much closer to their time than ours.

The ignorance of Karen Hughes, of most all the President's men and women, and of the President himself concerning these matters is serious business. We have worse problems to deal with at the moment, but religion in government could become a very critical problem when the Cheney Administration decides to make Pat Robertson Secretary of Christianity.