Patriotism and religious devotion

Susan Jacoby, Newsday

One of the most untouchable issues in American politics -- and so far campaign 2004 has been no exception -- is the damaging proposition, deliberately fostered by government leaders, that religious devotion and patriotism are inseparable.

This largely unexamined subject, which lay at the heart of the case challenging the recitation of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, scares Democrats to death.

Indeed, the question of whether God has really blessed America scared the Supreme Court so much that the justices chose to duck the issue entirely by declaring that the plaintiff, Michael Newdow, lacked standing because he did not have full custody of his daughter.

Democratic Party officials were privately delighted with the decision, because it relieved John Kerry -- who, even though he is a Roman Catholic, has already been tarred with the scarlet "S" for secularist -- of any obligation to take a stand on the case.

But the pledge is only one symbol -- though symbols are important in themselves -- of a deeper and more damaging assumption, promulgated aggressively by the Bush administration, that the only true patriot is a religious patriot. The triumphalist melding of religion and patriotism that permeates much of American society not only undermines the American social contract at home but runs counter to U.S. interests throughout the world.

What could be more unseemly in the eyes of the world than trumpeting our oh-so-superior religious values at a time when the U.S. military is implicated in a general abuse of Iraqi prisoners that also incorporated specific insults to the Muslim faith.

In Muslim culture, which does not even tolerate casual locker room nudity among men, forcing prisoners to strip naked and simulate homosexual acts is an even graver insult than it would be in other societies.

At home, the equation of religion and patriotism it exclusionary -- whether it comes from top government leaders or teachers in elementary school classrooms. Not only atheists and agnostics, but religious believers who also cherish the separation of church and state, are being told that their convictions count for nothing in public life.

Like most Americans, I responded to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with an immediate wave of anger and grief so powerful that it left no room for alienation.

Walking around my wounded New York, as the smoke from the ruins of the World Trade Center wafted the smell of death throughout the city, I drew consolation from the knowledge that others were feeling what I was feeling -- sorrow, pain and rage, coupled with the futile but irrepressible longing to turn back the clock to the hour before bodies rained from a crystalline sky.

That soothing sense of unity was severed for me just three days later, when the president presided over an ecumenical prayer service in Washington's National Cathedral.

Delivering an address indistinguishable from a sermon, replacing the language of civic virtue with the language of faith, the nation's chief executive might as well have been the Reverend Bush. Quoting a man who supposedly said at St. Patrick's Cathedral, "I pray to God to give us a sign that he's still here," the president went on to assure the public not only that God was still here but that he was personally looking out for America.

"God's signs," Bush declared, "are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own. ... Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, can separate us from God's love. May he bless the souls of the departed, may he comfort our own, and may he always guide our country."

Bush would surely have been criticized, and rightly so, had he failed to invite representatives of non-Christian faiths to the ecumenical ceremony in memory of the victims of terrorism. But he felt perfectly free to ignore Americans who adhere to no religious faith, whose outlook is predominantly secular and who interpret history and tragedy as the work of man rather than God.

According to a religious identification survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, more than 14 percent of Americans -- a much larger minority than any non-Christian group -- describe their outlook as "entirely or predominantly secular."

There are more secular humanists than there are observant Jews or Muslims -- but one would never know it from the makeup of supposedly ecumenical civic rituals that are ecumenical only for those who believe, to paraphrase Bush, that God is at the helm of our country.

Bush's very presence in the pulpit represented a significant departure from the behavior of other presidents in times of crisis. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not try to assuage the shock of Pearl Harbor by using an altar as the backdrop for his declaration of war, and Abraham Lincoln, who steadfastly refused to join any church even though his political advisers urged him to do so, delivered the Gettysburg Address not from a sanctuary but on the battlefield where so many soldiers had given "the last full measure of devotion."

The merger of religion and patriotism is especially dangerous in wartime, because it leads naturally to the conclusion that God is on our side. And if God is on our side, it isn't hard to figure out who, with two little horns protruding from his head, is on the other side.

Last year, Army Lt. General William G. Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, explicitly told an audience of evangelical Christians that the war against terrorism was a battle against Satan.

Boykin deserved a public reprimand from his superiors for statements that should never be uttered by a military officer representing the U.S. government.

Bush has spoken proudly, on many occasions, of America's religious liberties as one of the factors distinguishing the U.S. from radical Islamist states -- but he does not respect those liberties, which flow from the separation of church and state, at home.

What a great and welcome contribution it would be for John Kerry to step forward and proclaim a love of country based not on dreams of a supernatural Christian government but, as the Constitution's preamble asserts, on the authority of "We the People."

The framers knew what they were doing when they declined to write, We the People under God. It is simply disgraceful that modern politicians run away from the noble secular heritage that they should embrace.

The writer is director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.