Sorry about the offensive title, but I myself find the behavior that provoked it about a thousand times more offensive than that common vulgarism. If you haven’t heard, a trio of Christian whack-jobs disrupted the opening prayer on the floor of the Senate yesterday because they thought having it delivered by a Hindu — a historical first, by the way — was an “abomination.” Now, leaving aside any personal beliefs or questions of theology or “truth,” this sort of thing is quite simply rude; shouting down a soft-spoken man who’s just trying to say a few nice words that he was invited to say is a rotten thing to do, and no amount of bone-headed posturing about “gross idolatry” can excuse that. If you watch the video of the incident, the poor Hindu guy looks absolutely mortified, not to mention a little bit scared. These moronic fundamentalist protesters — who strike me as the moral and would-be practical equivalent of the dreaded Taliban — are entitled to their opinions and beliefs, of course, but their actions are totally unacceptable under those circumstances, little different than walking up to some guy who’s minding his own business and poking him in the eye. Their actions are also, in my book, bigoted and un-American.
Look, let’s run through it again for the slow-witted kids in the back, shall we? The United States is not, never was, and (I hope) never will be a Christian nation in the sense that those jokers mean. The founding fathers represented a spectrum of attitudes toward religion and God; many of them were Deists, an eminently rational belief system that holds that there is a God, but that He doesn’t involve himself in the affairs of we puny humans. (For the record, I count myself as agnostic, i.e., officially undecided on the God issue, but on my more spiritual days, I tend toward a Deist perspective.) Certainly they were not born-agains, or Dominionists, or any other kind of “Christian” that those people in the Senate yesterday would recognize as legitimate.
In the centuries since the original European colonies were established on these shores, this country has drawn all varieties of Protestants, as well as Catholics and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and, yes, even Muslims. And we’ve cooked up some home-grown faiths of our own, including my own locally dominant church, the Latter-Day Saints (who, I understand, the Christian whack-jobs loathe and fear as much as those scary foreign Hindus and Muslims).
The motto “In God We Trust,” which appears on our currency and which these “Christdicks” — as John Scalzi has dubbed them (and from whom I ganked the image above) — get so defensive about, was coined (forgive the pun) in the dark, communist-fearing days of the Cold War. But a much older and more accurate motto for these United States is “E pluribus unum” — “Out of many, one.” That one first appeared on our money in the year 1795, and it’s been on The Great Seal of the United States since 1782.
To get, at long last, to my point, this country is a diverse one, and it always has been. The Founding Fathers realized this; they acknowledged it right there in the earliest days of our nation, even before the Constitution, by scribbling that little bit of Latin on our Great Seal. It’s the thing that first made America great and unique in world history, and I suspect Thomas Jefferson would’ve been thrilled to see Chaplain Rajan Zed on the floor of the Senate yesterday, if for no other reason than he would’ve been intellectually curious about the man’s beliefs. And he would’ve been positively incensed at the discourteous, uncivil, boorish behavior of these so-called Christians (who I don’t believe Christ would be too happy with, either, since the whole point of Christ’s teachings — as I understand them, anyway — was to be respectful of your neighbors).
Now, you can certainly argue that the U.S. is predominantly Christian, in the generic sense of that word. It undeniably is. You can also argue over what is and is not “true,” and what is and is not acceptable for display on the floor of the Senate. But I don’t see how you can justify behaving like such ill-mannered asses in the name of religion, in a country that has enshrined freedom of religion as one of its primary tenets. I also don’t see how you can logically insist that any faith that exists in this wide country of ours should not be represented in “the people’s house,” i.e., the Capitol Building. Common decency and good manners demand that we give respect to our fellow citizens, regardless of their beliefs, even if we disapprove of those beliefs.
If, however, you just can’t help but be offended at the thought of a representative of a particular faith — be it Hinduism, Mormonism, or even Scientology — delivering the prayer that precedes a Senate session, then maybe the best solution to the problem is not to try to exclude specific faiths from doing the job, but rather to do away with prayer in the Senate. Make the government religion-neutral and relegate matters of faith entirely to the personal sphere instead of the public one. Then there will be no possible chance of “gross idolatry” in that setting.
But that would probably make too much sense, wouldn’t it?
