Secular Christianity: Phew!

A debate occupies the editorial page of the local paper, The Methow Valley News, week after week, month after month, political season or not. One side tries to convince the nonbelievers that because of the Founding Fathers we all have a responsibility to be Christian if only because we have a considerably good government. The other side, which I tend to take, is that the idea of a secular government is what we owe our secular education and prosperity to, not to mention rapid advances in social ethics among which are liberal civil liberties. I think the two extremes are irreconcilable but the associations can be mutually beneficial.

I still get my concrete from the concrete plant, and I get my lumber from the lumber yard, but the hum and buzz from the recent Presidential election suggests that for my astounded feeling of history for the better in the making, the guy that loads 2X10’s into the back of my pickup is afraid his hunting rifles will be taken away by the liberal radical that I voted for. The woman that sells me bagged mortar had a sign up on her horse property for McCain/Palin. It’s still very decent mortar, despite her politics. I know of no car or suicide bombings in the whole history of the Methow Valley, though political opinions and perspectives are polar opposites.

Still, it bothers me when people talk about God, as if any one of us were talking about the same thing at all. Transport the lumberyard or the concrete plant to Istanbul or Salt Lake City, or Nepal, and the idea of God will take on a whole new foreign significance and incomprehensibility. In the rural U.S., I think I know what they mean by God, and I just don’t believe in it, even though Barach Obama, a Christian, won, thank gods.

Idolatry was defined well before Christianity ever existed. Idolatry basically meant: Don’t worship any false gods. I feel fortunate and grateful that today in America and much of the modern world I do not have to resort to desperate measures in order to not commit this long-articulated sin. I am not convinced that Moses and Isaiah would have sympathized with Paul, and I think there are entire civilizations of people that might agree. Even so, I do not feel bound to rely any more on Isaiah than I might appreciate John Steinbeck, Leonard Cohen, or the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

Even if every one of our Founding Fathers were a Christian, and they weren’t, they set up a new kind of government that prevented the rulers from forcing their idea of God on anyone. The Constitution even prevented democracy from exercising the same sort of tyranny, much like the result of the recent election. The separation of faith and rational prudence, of belief and force, of church and state, is one of the greatest proven wisdoms of our Founders and of ages, for after them came other wise women and men free to express her- or himself, to think, to protest, to work, and to serve. A climate of enlightened rationalism across countries allowed a Darwin to flourish after a General Washington, a Martin Luther King to pulverize the falsehoods of fascist dictators, and un-kept fighting women demanded the right to vote after their refusal of enshrined patriarchy.

I am grateful to rational, humane minds that came before, for centuries and millennia, that have struggled to articulate the divine, wisdom, and humanity, and for our system of inspired government, that while there remains a majority of Christians, I am not forced to commit what in my mind and my experience is idolatry, however appealing and traditional Christianity may appear by some to be. Secular is the stance I prefer and expect from my government to take while I sociably practice my own idea of spirituality. I wish the same joy on believers and nonbelievers alike.