(From my radical liberal Episcopal friend Harry Cook):

Now That’s the Idea

By Harry T. Cook

5/08/09

Thomas Jefferson would be proud. So would H.L. Mencken. So would today’s faithful watchmen upon the wall guarding our civil liberties.

You’d wish the object of such pride might be, say, in Joplin, Missouri, or in Jackson, Mississippi, or even in Juneau, Alaska. It is, in fact, in Jakarta, Indonesia.

In parliamentary elections in Earth’s most populous Muslim nation, voters have scorned the big Islamic party whose leaders would impose Sharia law on the country’s 240 million people.

Postings by the Indonesian Survey Institute tell the story: All Indonesia’s Islamic political parties have fallen from favor. Support for them among the electorate has dropped from about 38 percent in 2004 to about 25 percent today — just about the percentage of American voters said to be evangelical Christians.

Indonesia’s secular parties now dominate the political landscape there as the emerging moderate majority in the nation embraces values approximating those of the theoretical secular democracy of the United States. In short, they don’t want Muslim fundamentalists running their lives.

Would that the rest of the Muslim world would follow Indonesia’s lead. Would that America would where Christianity is concerned.

The United States, clearly founded as a secular democracy, should be leading the way. Instead, government continues to flirt with sectarian religion all the way from prayers at Barack Obama’s inauguration in January to the continuation of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

I think President Obama made a serious error in appearing to have embraced the Christian Religious Right in his selection of  ¼ber evangelical Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration. There is yet a greater error, and that is continuing the idea of having prayers of any kind upon such national occasions.

You would think that a former teacher of constitutional law at one of the nation’s top law schools would have used that background and his own visible distance from conventional religion to put on an inauguration that featured the great American themes enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, some of Jefferson’s and Madison’s writings, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural instead of theologically barbed pleas to an imagined deity.

Such national texts plus the reprise of Marian Anderson in the person of Aretha Franklin singing “My country, ‘Tis of Thee” would have said to the nation and to the world that the United States has a deep and rich literary tradition that needs not the pious words of clergy to cloud the issue.

If such sectarian activities as prayer and bible readings in public schools are unconstitutional — and they are: see Engel v. Vitale 370 U.S. 421 (1962) and Abington Township School District v. Schempp 374 U.S. 203 (1963) — then so should sectarian prayer be considered unconstitutional at mandated, official ceremonies of state, including not only presidential inaugurations but sessions of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Yes, I know: The Religious Right, through its zealous lobbies, has sued here and sued there to get its foot in the door over prayers before high school football games and at commencement exercises, and has sometimes succeeded thanks to excruciating judicial parsing of the law.

It is said that although voters in Indonesia have overwhelmingly backed their secular political parties, many of them contentedly practice Islam in their private lives and in their mosques.

That, of course, is the idea, and it was an American one in the first place.

Certainly it’s not that religious sentiments, beliefs and practices are generally undesirable or should be discouraged. Hardly. The history of religions and their ideas has been the meat and drink of my own intellectual life for half a century’s worth of research and writing.

It is the overtly public practice of religion that is in question. Judaism, Christianity and Islam in their conventional forms are theistic religions. As such, their belief systems posit an objective deity that, through prayer, can be invoked to intervene in the natural order and the events of history to do or not do this or that.

Such belief systems are uncongenial to non-believers — “non-believers” being among those included in President Obama’s inaugural address as having religious if not theistic interests. They are, besides, offensive to those of us who long ago abandoned the irrational mumbo-jumbo of theism.

How appropriate it would have been for the Rev. Rick Warren to have summoned his congregants to the fabulous Saddleback Church in California this past January 20 and have offered in their presence the same prayer he offered from the Capitol steps. As it was, Warren’s intellectually unsustainable evangelical Christian beliefs spoke for all Americans that day — a mostly benign kind of Christian Sharia foisted upon us all.

Unless we wish as a national people to acknowledge that all such public prayers are dramatic performances to be classified with aboriginal rain dances and the reading of entrails, they ought to be banned.

Perhaps the Indonesians will lead the way.

 © Copyright 2009, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.