2004

This article captures so much of how I feel about religion in our country right now. I stopped being a practicing Christian a long time ago, although of course being raised in that faith has strongly informed the way I look at religion and the world, for better and worse. The fact that folks like the author, who have much more impeccable Christian credentials than I do (for those that it matters to), are beginning to feel their faith taken hostage by fundamentalists is cause for both hope and sadness.

I think the whole question of faith in politics and policy hinges on her question:

If someone—like me—who has worshiped as a Christian for more than 50 years suddenly feels afraid of the extremes of that religion—what must it be like for those of different beliefs, or of unbelief?

There is a reason that the architects of this country, Christians though they may have been, wrote the First Amendment into law. While speculation about exactly what they meant to accomplish with our various founding documents is exactly that, it seems clear that a common thread through all of them is a recognition that government is a human endeavor and therefore subject to error. So, we have various systems of checks and balances, we have the Bill of Rights and all of the court cases that have built upon it, and we have the power as citizens (at least nominally) to vote the ruling class out if we don’t like them. Theocracy, as government or national culture, leaves all of this aside for trust in the motives of self-declared godly people and their direct line to their god.

The line between the fundamentalists we fear and the ones we as a nation are becoming is getting thinner by the second.

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