My family's faith tradition is what you could call All Over The Place.
My father, an Armenian American from Fresno, identified with Zorba the Greek, who lived life with passion and wonder, but who was highly skeptical of religion and religious institutions.
My mother, a WASPy Mayflower descendant, was a member of the Vedanta Society, an interfaith spiritual group rooted in Hinduism. Until she met my father in Berkeley in the early 1950s, she intended to become a Vedanta nun.
As a compromise of sorts, they raised their four children in the Unitarian Universalist Church; We attended the famous “Onion” of the Valley. It has been said that Unitarianism is a religion for people who do not believe in God.
But God or not, my mother left us an important lesson: all religions are equal and all spiritual paths lead to the same place.
Unfortunately, that does not appear to be a sentiment shared by the thousands of conservative evangelical Christians who recently flocked to the National Mall for a day-long prayer rally to “rededicate” our country as “one nation under God.”
The meeting, ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country's founding, was dominated by Christian nationalist leaders and included some members of Trump's Cabinet, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is the subject of complaints of religious discrimination by active-duty troops for his constant invocation of Jesus Christ and for Hegseth's “voluntary” monthly prayer meetings at the Pentagon.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also attended the rally, as did the Rev. Franklin Graham and the Rev. Robert Jeffress, who has adopted the “Christian nationalist” label.
“If being a Christian nationalist means loving Jesus Christ and loving America,” Jeffress said, “count me in.” (Actually, that's not what it means at all. We'll talk more about that in a moment.)
The rally was another spectacle designed to persuade Americans that ours is a Christian nation, that Christianity should be privileged in American public and private life, and that Christians are under relentless attack in the United States.
In reality, conservative evangelical Christians are working hard to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. They want to install the Ten Commandments on the walls of public school classrooms and in courthouses. They are trying to use public funds for religious charter schools. They are attempting, in many ways, to dismantle the country's sacred separation of church and state and, in the process, rewrite history.
In April, for example, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who chairs President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission, denounced the separation of church and state as the “biggest lie ever told in America.” (Actually, the biggest lie ever told in America is that Trump won the 2020 election.)
Although the phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution (and neither does the word “God,” for that matter), the founders were clear that government and religion should not mix.
We owe the “wall” metaphor to Thomas Jefferson, who while president in 1802 used it in a letter to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, concerned that the state was infringing on their religious freedom. “I behold with sovereign reverence that act of all the American people who declared that their legislature should 'enact no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State,” Jefferson wrote.
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center examined how Americans feel about the influence of religion on government and public life.
More than half of respondents (52%) agreed that “conservative Christians have gone too far in trying to push their religious values in government and public schools.” To be fair, nearly half (48%) said that “non-religious liberals have gone too far in trying to keep religious values out of government and public schools.”
Naturally, the dividing line turns out to be partisan. But one thing a large majority of Republicans and Democrats agree on is that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics.
As for Christian nationalism, Pew found, Democrats generally view it unfavorably, while Republicans either view it favorably or have never heard of it.
So what exactly is Christian nationalism?
As many scholars and researchers have written, Christian nationalism is not a religion. It is a political ideology that, upon examination, has very little to do with true Christian or democratic values. “It accurately describes American nationalists who believe that American identity is inseparable from Christianity,” Georgetown political scientist Paul D. Miller wrote in Christianity Today. In his February 2021 article, Miller noted that many of the January 6 insurrectionists were sporting Christian signs, slogans, and symbols.
As constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel of the Freedom From Religion Foundation told the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, that day, “Christian nationalism tore off its mask, demonstrating that it is… a violent and exclusionary movement bent on seizing power here and now.”
Americans do not need to rededicate themselves to the idea that we are one nation under God. We need to rededicate ourselves to the importance of maintaining that great, beautiful wall between Church and State, one of the best things about this 250-year experiment.
Blue sky: @rabcarian
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