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June 12th / 14th, 2009

"Church and State at Odds"

Late last month, Georgia Congressman Paul Broun proposed a resolution making 2010 the Year of the Bible. The resolution contained the following language:

“The President is encouraged …to issue a proclamation calling upon citizens of all faiths to rediscover and apply the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Scripture which has profoundly influenced and shaped the United States and its great Democratic form of government, as well as its rich spiritual heritage, and which has unified, healed, and strengthened its people for over 200 years”.

According to FoxNews.com several liberal members of Congress reacted strongly to Broun’s resolution, charging that it violated the separation of church and state, and that it, “advocated one book of faith over another”.

Broun’s resolution came on the heels of revelations (no pun intended) that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had approved the issuance of Pentagon briefing reports laced with scripture passages in order to influence President Bush to implement certain military strategies. Broun’s proposal may be offensive to some people, but Rumsfeld’s actions are frightening, and border on criminal, because he and Bush used the Bible to justify the deaths and murders of hundreds of thousands of people in an illegal war.

It was GQ magazine that uncovered rampant Bible-thumping by the previous administration, and since then, we are now able to better understand why George Bush kept referring to the war against Iraq and terrorism as a “crusade”.

Some of the passages included in briefing reports were pasted over photos of soldiers kneeling down to pray, and it instructs the military to “put on the full armor of God”. George Bush, a man of limited intelligence, bought into the crusade mentality, and startled some world leaders with his off-the-wall explanations for why they should join him in his mission. In his recently published book, French President Jacques Chirac recounted statements that Bush made to him in 2003 while trying to get support for an invasion of Iraq. Bush told Chirac that evil Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East, and must be defeated. “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”, Bush told Chirac. The French President was “ stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify” the war in Iraq. Chirac “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

And the Bush dogma trickled down the line. In 2005, Lt. General William Boykin compared the war against Islamic militants to a battle against Satan. It’s no wonder, then, that many peaceful Muslims feared that the war on terrorism was really a war against Islam.

Fortunately a number of respected theologians have come forward to criticize Bush and Rumsfeld for their tainted use of scripture. According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, Scott Alexander, director of Catholic-Muslim studies at Catholic Theological Union said, “As a Christian, I am deeply troubled that (such verses) are being presented as a divine call for the U.S. to invade Iraq”. And, the Rev. John Buchanan, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church where the Rumsfelds worshipped said, “It is a misuse of the Bible to take passages out of context and employ them to support one side against another”.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld propagated an unjust war on the American people which resulted in obscene death tolls. As such, a special prosecutor should be appointed to try these men as war criminals. In the meantime Congress should take a closer look at what really constitutes a violation of the separation of church and state, and how such violations might constitute high crimes themselves.

Surprisingly the Constitution only keeps the State out of the Church’s business, but not vice versa. Moreover, the founding fathers thought that Christian doctrine had a place in government. They were simply opposed to any particular denomination becoming the official religion of the State. Even so, the argument could be made that Bush and company did, in fact, attempt to establish a particular denomination as the State religion, and that they used that religion to justify and guide government policy.

I think back to 1960 when Republicans tried to smear John Kennedy by arousing fear in voters that Kennedy, a Catholic, would report to the Pope, and not to the American people. And while those fears were unjustified, we now know that it is possible for a zealot to run the government based on his own denominational leanings.

For those and other reasons, we should not support Representative Broun’s resolution making 2010 the year of the Bible, at least not until Congress and the Courts can clarify exactly what separation of church and state really mean, and until we can establish a precedent for dealing with those who violate that separation. After all, Gog and Magog might need defeating, but there are other evil creatures we need to deal with first.