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Faith and public officials

Today's Seattle Times features an op-ed column by David P. Barash, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, who argues that religious faith in a candidate for public office should be seen as a liability, not an asset. It is a welcome breath of fresh air, seeing that discussion of presidential candidates has focused only on whether they are too religious, or the right kind of religious, rather than asking whether they should be religious at all.

My only niggle with the piece is that Barash uncritically refers to the assertion allegedly made by president Bush in 2003 that "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." This purported quote is of highly dubious provenance, being based on a note made by Mahmoud Abbas in Arabic, presumably based on a translation into Arabic of something Bush said in English, and then translated back into English, possibly via Hebrew. In my book, it doesn't even rate as hearsay, but it keeps getting repeated as if it were gospel. However, the precise details do not detract from Barash's point, given that Bush does emphasize his religious convictions at every opportunity.

Read the whole thing.

Conviction, consideration and (mis)conception

While browsing Richard Dawkins' site, I came across an article by Gary Wolf titled "Battle of the New Atheism," which had originally appeared in Wired magazine under the title "The Crusade Against Religion," and which I'd been meaning to read but had not yet got round to. One passage which raised my eyebrows (among other things) in particular was the following:

I return from Oxford enthusiastic for argument. I immediately begin trying out Dawkins' appeal in polite company. At dinner parties or over drinks, I ask people to declare themselves. "Who here is an atheist?" I ask.

Usually, the first response is silence, accompanied by glances all around in the hope that somebody else will speak first. Then, after a moment, somebody does, almost always a man, almost always with a defiant smile and a tone of enthusiasm. He says happily, "I am!"

But it is the next comment that is telling. Somebody turns to him and says: "You would be."

"Why?"

"Because you enjoy pissing people off."

"Well, that's true."

This type of conversation takes place not in central Ohio, where I was born, or in Utah, where I was a teenager, but on the West Coast, among technical and scientific people, possibly the social group that is least likely among all Americans to be religious. Most of these people call themselves agnostic, but they don't harbor much suspicion that God is real. They tell me they reject atheism not out of piety but out of politeness. As one said, "Atheism is like telling somebody, 'The very thing you hinge your life on, I totally dismiss.'" This is the type of statement she would never want to make.

Italics mine.

My first reaction was "Is that what atheism is like?" Upon giving it a certain measure of thought, I had to acknowledge that, given that particular wording and at least where my own convictions are concerned, the answer is yes. My next thought, however, was that this applies to some extent to every declared position with regards to religious matters. By declaring oneself a Christian, for example, one implicitly states that one "totally dismisses" the notion that the contents of the Koran were dictated to Muhammed by God (the cornerstone of Islam), that the gods of the Hindu (or any other) pantheon exist, that the Dalai Lama is the nth reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, etc. etc. Sure, many (though by no means all) Christian denominations have, in the spirit of ecumenism, toned down their doctrine over the past few centuries to the extent that they no longer hold that infidels and heretics (i.e. adherents of other denominations) are ipso facto damned to eternity in Hell, but will instead be reconciled with God in the hereafter. That's jolly nice of them, I suppose, but a doctrine that boils down to "God won't punish you for being wrong about Him" still takes as its starting point that those of other religious persuasions (or lack thereof, in the case of atheists) are wrong.

Much the same applies to any other religion. Islamic doctrine may acknowledge Christians (as well as Jews) to be "People of the Book," it nevertheless rejects the core tenet of the Christian faith, namely that Jesus was the son of God, died on the cross and was resurrected. And while the more tolerant religions may hold that, at worst, you'll look slightly sheepish after you die and discover the Truth™, atheists hold that even that won't happen, as your consciousness will simply have ceased to exist. Thus, atheism is no more impolite than any religion, and a good deal more polite than many.

Why is it then that in Wolf's fellow diners—themselves non-religious types—not only consider the mere action of openly declaring oneself an atheist to be a deliberate act of rudeness, but are also willing to say so to the atheists' faces, when in a likelihood, they do not feel the same way about professions of religious belief, and certainly wouldn't tell a religious person to his face that it figures that he's openly religious "because he enjoys pissing people off"? I can only attribute this to "the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith" (to use Dawkins' description). This principle, as it exists in Western society, is a curious hybrid of religious doctrine with Enlightenment thought, and bears a closer look.

The notion that faith is a virtue, of course, stems from religious doctrine itself. In Christianity, it's one of the three "theological virtues," along with hope and either love or charity, depending on whose version you read. Of course, historically, "faith" in this context refers only to the One True Faith™, not the "false" versions peddled by the aforementioned infidels and heretics. Frankly, I think it's more than a little transparent that an organized religion would claim that adhering to its doctrine makes you a better person, but maybe I'm just being cynical. Be that as it may, this tenet was mellowed somewhat by the notion of mutual religious tolerance, which was a necessary product of the concept of freedom of conscience (including freedom of religion) which gained popularity in the wake of the Enlightenment. The result is a widely held, if somewhat inchoate idea that religious faith is, if not a virtue in itself, the expression of a pursuit of virtue, and therefore deserving of respect.

This, however, is an illusion, tenable only in societies where the principle of freedom of religion is commonly accepted; where the adherents of all religions have agreed to play nice with each other, and ignore any bits of their respective doctrines which require them to persecute infidels and heretics. When that compact is broken by any party behaving in (what is perceived by others to be) a non-virtuous manner for religious reasons, the house of cards collapses. To expand the words of Richard Dawkins which I quoted earlier, "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers." Or, indeed, the faith of Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church. Certainly, a person may be motivated by his faith to do good works, and such a person should be accorded respect, but it should be for his actions, not for his faith.

Okay, so I've established why I don't think religious faith is ipso facto deserving of respect. But lest I be justly accused of hypocrisy, the same must apply to lack of religious faith. So why do Gary Wolf's fellow diners have my nose so out of joint? Just because I believe that religious beliefs are not ipso facto deserving of respect does not mean that I believe they are by definition not deserving of respect; to my mind, religious beliefs are opinions like any other, and deserve to be judged on their merits. Should there be compelling arguments to support an opinion, it is capable of earning respect. (A problem is that faith is all too often invoked as special pleading why an opinion should be accepted despite lacking any rational argument to back it up; this is often seen in the debates concerning such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.) I have my reasons for labelling myself an "atheist," rather than using more anodyne terms like "agnostic" or "non-religious," but Wolf's fellow diners aren't interested in hearing them: they've already made up their minds that the only reason for openly self-identifying as an atheist is to deliberately annoy the religious. It's a quite spectacular display of self-righteousness: they would never call themselves "atheists" because they couldn't bring themselves to be that rude... except to people who do call themselves "atheists." One commenter on Pharyngula put it rather well, I thought:

[...] if you believe everything an atheist believes, but reject the label, you have false beliefs about atheists. Most likely you see atheists through the caricature religious discrimination of nonbelievers has built; the zealous, unfeeling, hyper-rationalist who's unmoved by awe and incapable of appreciating beauty. That, in turn, makes you a bigot. None of this is the least bit sophisticated.

The "sophisticated" bit refers to some discussion stemming from an observation made by P.Z. Myers in that same post, which concerns Deepak Chopra's shoddy excuse for a critique of Dawkins' The God Delusion, namely that:

[Chopra's] final point is the same old excuse of theistic apologists everywhere: that Dawkins is dealing with a crude and stupid version of religion, not the sophisticated, clever, wonderfully enlightened kind of religion he practices. Someday, someone is going to have to tell me about this brilliant version of religion, because I've never found it (I've looked) [...]

There appears to be a widespread notion that self-identified atheists are unfamiliar with "actual" religious doctrines, are unwilling or unable to learn about them, and can only argue with a flawed conception of religion of their own making. This is undoubtedly a comforting thought to theists everywhere, but it is wishful thinking. Attending an English primary school, I had Anglicanism shoved down my throat five morning assemblies a week for four years. When I stayed at my maternal grandparents as a child, they would occasionally drag me to church (of a Dutch mildly Calvinist variety) on Sunday mornings. If I hold misconceptions about what Christianity is really like—that God answers prayers, and gets angry but "is never angry for long"—it's because I was deliberately misinformed as a child. I have no patience with arguments that my view of a religion is incorrect because it does not jibe with the views put forward by certain theologians, for those views are not what is being mass-marketed to the parishioners.

A good example of this may be found in Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkins' God Delusion:

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. [...]

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or "existent": in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

I'm sorry, but the claim that the Judeo-Christian God is a non-"existent"  non-entity is a major departure from scripture, and certainly not a view one will find propagated from any pulpit. As Sean Carroll points out in his thorough dismantling of Eagleton's review:

If ["condition of possibility"] were really what people meant by "God," nobody would much care. It doesn't really mean anything — like Spinoza's pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it's just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Well, quite. "In the Condition of Possibility we Trust," "La Condition de Possibilité et mon Droit,""Condicio potestatis vult"? Doesn't sound very compelling, does it? Eagleton is using a tactic employed by many theistic apologists when confronted with arguments against the existence of God to which they have no answer, which is to redefine "God" as a concept which cannot be disproven simply because it so utterly vague. Of course, any concept that vague bears zero relation to the term "God" as it is actually used in everyday life, so not only are the apologists moving the goalposts, they are hiding them to boot. Needless to say, this is an act of blatant intellectual dishonesty, but God forbid atheists should be anything but respectful to such people, because even if they are obvious liars, they have faith.

Afterthoughts regarding "a Christian nation"

Pursuant to my earlier entry, there are some additional minor points and clarifications which need to be made, but which I felt would have cluttered the line of argument. As the guys at the Two Percent Company have noted on several occasions (particularly this one), there are numerous smaller trappings of (Judeo-)Christian religion littering the American political landscape, to which adherents of the "America is a Christian nation" meme will point to support their claim; taken individually, these elements are not especially significant, but collectively, they do add up to the point that the assertion starts to sound almost plausible, provided you don't think it through too hard.

The most obvious, perhaps, is the phrase, "In God We Trust." It appears on the currency, it's the national motto, surely damning evidence! Well, hardly.

The phrase first crops up, in the slightly variant form "In God is our trust," in the final stanza of the poem "The Defense of Fort McHenry," written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 after witnessing the assault on the fort (near Baltimore, MD) by a British expeditionary force in September of that year. Under the title "The Star-Spangled Banner," the poem was adopted as the national anthem—though not until 1931. The phrase's next appearance is when it starts to be placed on United States coinage during the Civil War, largely as a result of increased religious sentiment. It is not until 1938, however, that it appears on all newly minted coins. In 1956, Congress votes to adopt the phrase as the national motto, and it starts to be placed on paper money as well.

Constitutionality aside, here's the problem I have with "In God We Trust": going by historical context, it's a cry of desperation. The British expeditionary force which assaulted Fort McHenry had just returned from laying waste to Washington, DC itself. The pleas urging Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, to include God on the coinage came prior to 1864, when Grant and (especially) Sherman's offensives into Confederate territory made it clear that a Union victory was a matter of "when," rather than "if." The phrase's adoption as the national motto came a year after the formation of the Warsaw Pact, at a time when American victory in the event of an armed confrontation with the Soviet Union was considered by no means certain. In short, it's a phrase which has gained currency—sometimes literally—when Americans have had reason to fear for the continued existence of their lives, livelihood, and country. Given historical context, it may as well be read as "Save me, Jebus!" or, even less dignified (but no less to the point), "Mommy!"

It's also dreadfully unoriginal. The motto "Dieu et mon droit" (French, "God and my right") has been part of the coat of arms of (successively) England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom since medieval times. The Republic of the United Netherlands stamped "Si Deus nobiscum quis contra nos?" (Latin, "If God be with us, who shall stand against us?" see Rom 8:31) on its coinage, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands subsequently used an abbreviated version in Dutch—"God zij met ons" (Dutch, "God be with us")—on the edge of its larger coins from 1816 to this day (it still appears on 2 euro coins minted in the Netherlands). "Gott mit uns" (German, "God [be] with us") was the motto of the kings of Prussia, and appeared on Prussian and, later, German army belt buckles until 1945. Any country with a largely monotheistic population can adopt a national motto containing a reference to God; the great thing about the original (and, in my opinion, rightful) motto of the United States—"E pluribus unum" (Latin, "Out of many, one")—was that it captured what was unique about the United States at the time of its founding. "In God We Trust" might as well be the national motto of Iran. In fact, the national motto of Iran appears to be (for all practical purposes) "Allahu akbar" (Arabic, "God is [the] great[est]"), which, when you get right down to it, boils down to the same thing.

But the overriding argument against this phrase, as against the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, is that it is blatantly unconstitutional. Yes, yes, I'm familiar with the argument that "God" is not specific to any one religion and therefore supposedly does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This is mere sophistry, as the First Amendment does not speak of "an establishment of any one religion" or "a particular religion," but of "an establishment of religion." If anyone can explain to me in a convincing manner how references to a god are not a matter of religion (not "a religion," just "religion"), I'd love to hear it.

Another argument I've heard can be paraphrased as follows: "If it really is unconstitutional, as you claim, why has it stood for almost fifty years? Why didn't the Supreme Court overturn it when it was introduced?" Simple: because that's not how the American legal system works. For all the widespread (ab)use of the term "activist judges," no court in the United States can rule on a particular legal matter unless a case is brought before it which pertains to that matter. In other words, the necessary precondition to an "activist judge" is an "activist plaintiff" (which is arguably a pleonasm); there could have been no Roe v Wade ruling without "Jane Roe" filing suit against the state of Texas. Challenging the constitutionality of a law is no trivial matter; it requires time, money, legal standing, and acceptance of the fact that you will incur the hatred of a lot of people. When one looks at the sheer amount of vitriol directed, sometimes almost casually, at Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Michael Newdow, it's clear that challenging popular (but no less unconstitutional for that) official endorsements of religion is not an exercise for the faint of heart.

Another thing religious conservatives like to point to is the purported fact that elected officials are required to swear an oath of office, concluding with "...so help me God." However, when one reads the Constitution (a novel concept for many religous conservatives, I know), one sees that the word "oath" is invariably followed by the words "or affirmation" (and also that there is no mention of the phrase "so help me God"). The same applies to witnesses in trials; the U.S. Code, and various state laws (say, the Revised Code of Washington) state that an affirmation is, for legal purposes, equivalent to an oath.

The crucial thing to understand is that the only thing that matters from the state's perspective is that the person in question utter the most solemn promise he or she can muster. That many of a theistic persuasion evidently feel they cannot trust themselves to keep their word without the aid of and/or threat of punishment by the deity of their choice (and, judging by some of the testimony given in Kitzmiller v Dover, even that is no guarantee) in no way reflects on the state's requirements; the state does not—indeed, can not—consider an oath to convey a greater degree of reliability from the person uttering it than does an affirmation, and vice-versa. Thus, both the decision to swear an oath (rather than express an affirmation) is a choice one makes, and the action of doing so is performed, as a private individual. This should seem self-evident; the president-elect doesn't become president until he has been sworn in, so technically, no president of the United States has ever taken an oath of office in his capacity as president.

Let me state at this point that I am a rampant atheist, and a fervent supporter of the separation of church and state. But I am also a proponent of individual liberties, including freedom of religion, and therefore have no objection to elected officials calling upon whichever supernatural entity they believe in (be it God, the spirits of their ancestors, the Force, you name it) to support them in carrying out their duties*. Furthermore, I think that any reasonable person who holds the same beliefs as I feels the same way.

That is why I choked on certain parts of a speech given by Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) last June regarding the interaction of religion and politics. Specifically, I took umbrage at the following paragraph, in particular the first and last sentences:

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As I argued in my earlier post, American law is not in any meaningful sense "grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition" but, rather, in Germanic tribal custom and the legal code of the Roman republic (both of which predate the spread of Judaism and Christianity beyond the Levant), and the supreme law of the land repudiates numerous elements of that same "Judeo-Christian tradition."  Then there is the characterization of what "secularists" (are wrong to) demand of "believers." Earlier in his speech, Obama speaks of how "Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait" when conservatives characterize progressives as being overtly hostile to religion. Incredibly, he completely misses the fact that by unquestioningly parroting the conservatives' rhetoric as if it were an accurate portrayal of the situation, he has himself not merely taken their bait and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, but is actively squirming to impale himself on the fishing rod.

The word "secularist" alone smacks of pejorative labelling, just a short step away from "atheist" and "socialist," both of which practically put you in bed with Stalin, or so the religious conservatives would have you believe. I can only assume that what is meant by the term is "proponent of the separation of church and state," though the way Obama uses it, it also seems to mean "non-religious person," as if the two were interchangeable. That is a mischaracterization conceived and propagated by the religious right, as is the notion that "secularists" are asking—nay, demanding—that "believers [...] leave their religion at the door." At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, the obvious reason for disseminating these misrepresentations is to drive a wedge into the social liberal camp, splitting the religious from the non-religious so that, deprived of each other's support, they can be defeated piecemeal by marginalizing the non-religious, and browbeating the religious into submission. Divida et impera. And judging by Senator Obama's words, this tactic is having the desired effect. He has bought into the notion that "there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical," and he admits to being troubled by the claim made by Alan Keyes, his erstwhile opponent, that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama," implying that Obama is not a "proper" Christian.

Isn't it remarkably convenient how, for religious conservatives, people like Barack Obama do count as Christians for the purposes of claiming that "America is a Christian nation," but as soon as they fail to toe the party line, they cease to be true Scotsmen Christians? Mr. Keyes, being a Roman Catholic, could do worse than to realize that many of his fellow self-described "true Christians" feel the same way about him. Another thing that's remarkably convenient is how, when large numbers of the innocent are killed and made homeless by natural disasters, or small children are afflicted with gruesome and terminal diseases, "the Lord works in mysterious ways," but when it comes to His hypothetical voting preferences (I think I can confidently state that Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub that is called the Christ is not legally registered to vote in the state of Illinois, or indeed any other state), His precise intent can be divined accurately and effortlessly. The fact of the matter is that religious beliefs all too frequently do manifest in ways which are irrational and intolerant, even if we accept that these are not traits which are inherent to religion in general.

Still, Senator Obama acknowledges there is a gap to be bridged, and munificently proposes that believers take the first step towards compromise, namely by urging "that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values," and "that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason." I will not dispute that these are eminently reasonable suggestions, but they do not actually serve any compromise, for two reasons.

As I said earlier, the notion that "secularists [...] ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square" is a gross misrepresentation. An overwhelming majority of "secularists" are accepting of—or, at worst, resigned to—the fact that many people rely on their religious beliefs to provide them with a foundation upon which to build their system of values, or a more salonfähige** justification for values (for want of a better word) they hold for other, less palatable reasons. What secularists will not accept is the adoption of any public policy on the basis of "religion-specific values" alone. In other words, they have long held the position which Obama considers to be a "compromise." That having been said, the distinction I made earlier with regards to oaths of office, namely between a believer expressing his religious beliefs in the public square as a private citizen, or in his capacity as a government official; the former should be accepted, the latter should not.

But even if "secularists" and people like Obama can find common ground—and I'd like to think that is quite possible—it all matters little if more hard-line religious conservatives are unwilling to go along with the reconciliation, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that such a rapprochement is in the works. Regular conservatives and neo-conservatives alike claim their moral values are "absolute"; thus, they make it clear from the outset that none of "their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason." After all, you can't reason, let alone compromise, about "moral absolutes," so anyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto morally deficient (which is why "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama"). If non-believers and other "secularists" seem unreasonable at times when engaging religious conservatives, it because the latter have already made it abundantly clear they will not be reasoned with, and the former have become fed up with trying. To counter the claims of "absolute" values based upon a particular interpretation of the bible, secularist groups like the ACLU and AU present their reading of the Constitution as absolute. In doing so, the secularists' position is significantly stronger.

First, unlike the Bible, the Constitution was originally written in English, and even though that leaves plenty of room for argument over interpretation, at least everybody's working with the exact same text. By contrast, Biblegateway.com lists twenty different versions of the Bible in English alone, not all of which say the same thing. For example, while Leviticus 20:27 clearly calls for the immediate execution of, among others, Allison Dubois, Sylvia Browne, John Edward and James Van Praagh in the New International Version, the same verse in the King James Version leaves a bit more wiggle room. Not all that absolute, then.

Second, the secularists are consistent; the ACLU is as zealous about taking the government to court over "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion as it is over anything which smacks even slightly of governmental "establishment of religion." By contrast, opponents of same-sex marriage ultimately rely on Lev 20:13 to justify their homophobia, blithely ignoring the many references in that very same chapter which indicate that, according to the Torah, marriage does not equal "one man, one woman," but instead "one man, one or more women," thus demonstrating that the concept is by no means immutable. Similarly, many of these same people have no problem eating pork (prohibited by Lev 11:7) or shrimp (Lev 11:10), or getting a haircut and a shave (Lev 19:27).

The secularists' advantage in adhering to the Constitution, rather than the Bible (or, for that matter, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or any other piece of scripture), as the basis for formulating public policy in America most readily explains the insistent adherence to the fiction that America is a "Christian nation": because the majority of Americans are Christian (even when they're not "true Christians"), the Constitution is less important than "(Judeo-)Christian values." This is nothing less than a tacit admission on the part of religious conservatives that, constitutionally, they don't have leg to stand on. If only the Obamas of this world would understand and accept that.

* - Provided, that is, that two things are understood: first, that the invocation of the supernatural entity in question reflects upon the person holding the office, and not upon the office itself; and second, that the invocation is ancillary to the content of the oath itself. By the latter, I mean that the fact that a person elected to Congress has invoked God is considerably less important than the fact that he has sworn to support the Constitution.

** - Salonfähig: a German term which is perhaps best translated, albeit somewhat freely, as "acceptable in polite, cultured circles." It can be applied to modes of dress, behavior and language, and in the latter case often refers to euphemisms. The term Antisemitismus ("anti-Semitism"), for example, was coined to be more salonfähig than the more direct Judenhass ("hatred of Jews"). Similarly, "family values" is more salonfähig than "bigotry."

Belated Independence Day thoughts

It had been my intention for some time to write a post like this one, but an entry by Orac finally provided the impetus for me to actually do so. Orac examines the claim that the United States was "founded as a Christian nation," as is so often contended by social conservatives. A variant of this claim is that the the US was "founded on Judeo-Christian values"; this has a more ecumenical ring to it, and accordingly finds more currency with neoconservative Jewish commentators such as Charles Krauthammer and Dennis Prager (who would presumably prefer not to be relegated to ghettoes, excluded from performing trades or holding public office, periodically subjected to pogroms, and generally treated as third-class citizens overall, as their ancestors all too often were in "Christian nations" of yore). The self-styled Ten Commandments Commission asserts that the Ten Commandments, "and all other references to God, have served as the moral foundation" of the United States, and "have had a major influence in shaping our laws and freedoms." The general tenor of this argument is clear, namely to provide justification for dismantling the separation between church and state, and fostering (as the Ten Commandments Commission puts it) "recognition, acceptance, adherence and submission to an absolute authority," i.e. the Biblical God. Pronouncements of this nature, however, regardless of the precise wording, do little more than illustrate a stunning ignorance on the part of the speaker of history (that of America, law and Christianity), the contents of the Constitution, and elementary logic. Precisely how stunningly ignorant is illustrated by the fact that more than one opponent of the separation of church and state with whom I have debated the topic was, it emerged, unaware that the Pilgrim Fathers and the Founding Fathers were not the same people. Similarly, the Concerned Women for America's Director of Government Relations stated last month that:

Our country's founding fathers were men of faith who intentionally included the phrase 'under God' in an oath that serves as a symbol of loyalty and patriotism to our great country.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892, decades after the last of the Founding Fathers was laid to rest, and the phrase "under God" was not inserted until 1954, another sixty-two years later. (Moreover, in common American usage, a pledge and an oath are not synonymous; both are a "solemn, binding promise," but the latter requires the invocation of a deity to witness its making and to assist in its fulfilment, as in "so help me God.")

It is undeniably true that an overwhelming majority of the (non-Native) American population is—or at least professes to be—some variety of Christian, and that this has been the case since the first palisade was constructed at Fort James almost four hundred years ago. It is equally indisputable that some (though by no means all) of the English colonies which were to become the United States were founded by certain Christian sects as places where their particular brand of Christianity could be practiced without outside interference; notably, the New England colonies (of which the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first and preeminent) were a bastion of Puritanism, while Pennsylvania was founded as a "holy experiment," where the religious and political principles of Quakerism could be put into practice. The key phrase, however, is "particular brand of Christianity." Christianity has been prone to factionalism since the division of the Roman empire into its Eastern (Byzantine) and Western halves in 395 CE, and inter-factional rivalry was never more violent than during the 17th century. Even as the wars of Reformation pitted Protestant against Catholic, in areas where Protestanism had managed to establish itself relatively securely, infighting rapidly ensued. The persecution that the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of the Delaware river valley famously sought to escape did not occur at the hands of non-Christians or Catholics, but at those of Protestants of other denominations, including those that had adherents in other colonies in North America. Thus, during the Colonial Era, the colonies which were to form the United States by no means formed the basis for a homogenous "Christian nation"; they were patchwork of (mostly Protestant) denominations, each of which regarded many (if not all) of the others as heretics. There was no question of mutual tolerance, and the animosity between Patriots and Loyalists during the Revolutionary War was fuelled as much by religious differences as it was by political ones, despite the fact that both groups were overwhelmingly Protestant.

The Founding Fathers of the nascent United States realized better than anyone the challenge that faced them in trying to forge a single country out of disparate religious groups who had shown themselves quite prepared to torture, mutilate and kill each other's members in the past, and were likely to do so again now that their common foe had been defeated. In arguing over whether or not the United States was founded as a "Christian nation," much ink has been wasted concerning the Founding Fathers' personal religious beliefs to support or refute the notion. Such discussion is entirely beside the point. Whatever the framers of the Constitution may have personally thought regarding religion, they understood that religious differences could, if left unaddressed, all too easily tear their fledgling nation apart. Their solution was to set up a government on an entirely secular basis, one that was prohibited from basing policy on any purely religious consideration, and would therefore not be allowed to infringe upon the freedom of religion of any of its citizens by imposing upon them by law a tenet of anyone else's religion, except if such a measure was necessitated by a secular purpose.

The meme that the Ten Commandments form "the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States" (as the Kentucky state legislature claimed when requiring the Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom in the state; see Stone v Graham, 449 U.S. 39), or words to similar effect, holds a tacit acknowledgment of the secular nature of American government. If America had truly been founded as "Christian nation," it would not matter if the Ten Commandments held no other significance than a religious one; thus, the only reason to make the claim is in attempting to circumvent the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Moreover, it is a complete fabrication, as even the most cursory reading shows. There are, in fact, multiple versions of the Ten Commandments, but for this purpose, I will refer to the set listed on the Ten Commandments Commission's website, which is the Protestant reading of Exodus 20 (NIV).

The first three Commandments, prohibiting the worship of other gods, idolatry and the misuses of the proper, ineffable name of God ("Yahweh"), respectively, all stand in direct contradiction to the First Amendment, which prohibits the state from infringing upon its citizens' freedoms of religion and speech. Laws prohibiting "Sabbath breaking" and adultery (fourth and seventh Commandments) have been struck down as unconstitutional in such cases where they did not demonstrably serve a secular purpose distinct from any religious one (in the case of the former, see McGowan v Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, in which the Supreme Court "concluded that, as presently written and administered [i.e. in 1961], most of them [Sunday Closing Laws], at least, are of a secular rather than of a religious character, and that presently they bear no relationship to establishment of religion, as those words are used in the Constitution of the United States"; emphasis mine).

The Puritan colonies of New England had laws providing for the punishment of children who physically or verbally abused their parents. These laws were unquestionably based on scripture—the King James bible, to be specific—but the first of these, in Massachusetts, was not adopted until 1648, eighteen years after the founding of the colony. Such laws were not found in the colonies outside New England, nor were they sufficiently commonplace in any western European culture to support the notion that the (fifth) Commandment to "honor your father and your mother" is part of "the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States."

It had been my intention, within the context of this post, to refrain from delving into the nature of the Commandments themselves, and restrict myself to pointing out their irrelevance to western legal codes in general and that of the United States in particular, but the tenth Commandment demands some exposition. Exodus 20:17 (NIV) reads:

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The crucial word here is "covet," which is used in almost all English-language versions of the Bible, but very likely fails to convey the implications contained in the original Hebrew. The folklore of many Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, including the Jewish one, contained the notion of the "evil eye"; the idea that by gazing with envy—with covetousness—upon the possession of one more fortunate than oneself, one could cause misfortune to befall that possession, even inadvertently. The belief is common to this day among Arabs, Turks, and Ashkenazi Jews. It is, however, not native to the Germanic cultures of northern Europe. Though the concept was introduced there in the Middle Ages, northern Europeans never thought of the "evil eye" as something any covetous person could bestow, but considered it an act of witchcraft, attributed in periodic bouts of mass hysteria to gypsies, Jews and, of course, witches. As a result, northern European cultures have never adopted laws specifically outlawing "coveting," as they did not believe that a "normal" person could inflict harm upon another by doing so.

The ninth Commandment, which prohibits bearing "false witness against thy neighbor," has been credited with serving as the inspiration for laws against slander, libel and perjury. However, such strictures were also adopted by the Roman republic, as part of the Twelve Tables (see in particular Table VIII, items 5 and 23), in 450 BCE, some two centuries before the Torah was first translated from the original Hebrew. The Twelve Tables also prohibited the unlawful taking of life or property (the subjects of the sixth and eighth Commandments, respectively), and were considerably more explicit in defining what was unlawful and what was not. The long and short of it is that only three of the Ten Commandments—the sixth, the eighth, and the ninth—bear any relevancy to the "laws and freedoms" upon which America was founded, and since there is abundant historical evidence that similar prohibitions were developed independently by other cultures, the significance of the influence exerted by those Commandments is dubious indeed.

In fact, the Bible as a whole bears little relation to American law. In continental Europe, the Common Law system is generally referred to as "Anglo-Saxon law," for that is where its origins lie: with a code which Germanic tribes had developed long before they were ever Christianized. That cornerstone of the American legal system, the right to be tried by an impartial jury (as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution), is not derived from any Judeo-Christian tradition—the word "jury" does not appear in the Bible—but from a pre-Christian Germanic custom. The aforementioned Roman Twelve Tables also form a major influence, particularly in the handling of civil litigation (tort law).

But there is another word of even more fundamental importance to the United States, and it, too, cannot be found in the Bible; that word is "republic." The only system of government that merits serious mention in the Bible is the monarchy, from Genesis 10:10 to Revelations 19:16. According to the gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, part of Jesus' significance is that he is directly descended in the male line from King David (Matthew 1:1, Luke 1:32), and thus the rightful claimant to the throne of Israel*. The Founding Fathers, by contrast, decided to reject monarchy in favor of a republic. The president holds his office by the grace of the electorate, not that of God.

Much as religious conservatives may wish it otherwise, the political and legal structures of the United States owe nothing to the Bible, and any claim to the contrary is, to put it bluntly, a lie. Individual Americans are free to live their lives according to (their interpretation of) "Judeo-Christian values" if they so wish, but they are not allowed to impose their values system upon their fellow citizens. To do so would be to violate those inalienable rights, to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And what could be more un-American than that?

* - Both gospels go on to say almost immediately that Jesus is also not the son of Joseph (Matthew 1:18-25, Luke 1:34-35), something which believers in Biblical inerrancy prefer to ignore.