Founding Thought in Action
Jonathan Rowe on May 18th 2007
World Magazine Blog links to a story on the increasingly generic benedictions given at college campus graduations. Some orthodox Christian ministers refuse to play ball and won’t deliver such addresses when invited. For instance, John Parker and the Medical University of South Carolina. Parker believes such inclusive prayers dishonest and nauseating.
If the prayers are offered at a private religious college, it makes sense that they would be doctrinally specific depending on the school’s creed, i.e., Jewish prayers at Jewish schools, Catholic prayers at Catholic colleges, etc. etc. However, if the schools are public and secular and if they are to have prayers at all, they should be as generic and inclusive as possible.
This is exactly what our key Founders did when they made public supplications to God. After all, they weren’t speaking for a particular Church, but for the entire country/federal government. If you look at the systematic way that the first four Presidents spoke of God, it was invariably generic and philosophical. Even Justice Scalia recognized this. And indeed, they believed that all religions about which they were aware were valid ways to God and that included not just Christianity, but Judaism, Deism, Unitarianism, Islam, Hinduism, Native American Spirituality, and Pagan Greco-Romanism. God is Jehovah to the Jews, Allah to the Muslims, the Great Spirit to the Native Americans. And these are different names for the same generic “Providence” they worshipped. Though, as theological unitarians, they didn’t believe that Jesus was God, rather that he was a great moral teacher who may have been a man (Socinian) or some kind of divine being created by and subordinate to God (Arian).
This may not be sound theology, but it is what the key Founders believed. As Tom Van Dyke pointed out, their benevolent rational unitarian deity is closer to the Biblical conception of God than to the Muslim, Hindu, Native American, or the Gods that the Greeks and Romans worshipped. That makes sense given they were brought up in and lived in a Protestant context.
Their untarian deity may have been closer to the Biblical conception, but they still changed Him enough that He was arguably a different creature, notably unitarian, not Trinitarian, and more sober and rational, less wrathful and vengeant.
Plus, apt to the above story, I think their conception of God, helped:
1) Make religious freedom for non-Christian religious easier psychologically for them to deliver. While certainly one can be an orthodox Christian, believing just one way to God, and desire full civil religious rights for non-Christians, if all religions lead to the same God, since they are all “sound,” they are easier to tolerate. After all, if we tolerate a religion that will lead people down the wrong path, how many souls could be lost forever? And this is exactly the logic that kept the sects persecuting one another from the very beginning of Christendom until the Founders and philosophers they followed shifted the paradigm. This is exactly, for instance, why Rutherford believed it was just for Servetus to be burned at the stake.
2) Lead America to being a haven for all sorts of non-Christian religions. “Jews Turks and Infidels” abound in America precisely because of what our key Founders personally believed about religion and the national public policy they originally set forth.
Filed in The Belfry, The Bureau
[...] If Madison were an orthodox Christian concerned with the souls of Native Americans he would not have used this language but admonished them to come to Christ. Instead, he told them their pagan God they worshipped was “the father of us all,” the same God he worshipped. This unmistakably affirms my contention that the Founders believed all religions about which they were aware were valid ways to God and that included not just Christianity, but Judaism, Deism, Unitarianism, Islam, Hinduism, Native American Spirituality, and Pagan Greco-Romanism. God is Jehovah to the Jews, Allah to the Muslims, the Great Spirit to the Native Americans. And these are different names for the same generic “Providence” they worshipped. Though, as theological unitarians, they didn’t believe that Jesus was God, rather that he was a great moral teacher who may have been a man (Socinian) or some kind of divine being created by and subordinate to God (Arian). [...]
Prayer is an active effort to communicate with a deity or spirit. For many religious people prayer is an important part of deity worship, some people take prayer very seriously, and as such prayer is an intrinsically religious activity. Secular government, properly understood, does not censor prayer. The correct approach, consistent with nonestablishment, is to not include prayer at all on the official agenda at government sponsored events (including state university graduation ceremonies). The pervasiveness of prayer at government events is a symptom of the weakness of nonestablishment in this country and it will likely be a source of contention as long as it persists.
I know that this is not what people want to hear, that lots of people react with horror to the notion that the long tradition of “inclusive” majoritarian Christian compatible monotheistic prayer at government events should be dispensed with. When we set a legal principle it is no good for the health of that legal principle to insist that the principle protects some people but not others for no reason other than majority prejudice or tradition. If nonestablishment is a good principle for protecting Christians from government preference for some denominations over other denominations than non-establishment is a also a good principle to likewise protect atheists and polytheists from monotheists. We are not strengthening that umbrella by putting holes in it underneath where the atheists and polytheists stand. It is a good principle and it needs to be strengthened and the way to strengthen is to make it fairer. To the extent nonestablishment is interpreted as excluding atheists and polytheists it isn’t fair and is thus weakened. Instead of focusing on how inclusive the prayer is at state university graduation ceremonies, we should be focusing on how inclusive nonestablishment is at the state university graduation ceremonies.