Does Religion Belong In Schools?

 Should the Bible be taught in public schools?  A new law in Louisiana requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom.  Oklahoma State School Superintendent Ryan Walters is mandating that teachers include the Bible in their instruction because, he claims, the book is foundational to America’s laws and Constitution.  There is a growing chorus that educational systems already struggling to teach grammar and math add prayer and theology to the curriculum.  

But which Bible should be taught?  Jews honor the Pentateuch or Torah but reject the New Testament.  Catholic scriptures contain seven books not recognized by Protestants.  The Latter Day Saints consider the Book of Mormon an essential text that completes the revelation other Christians consider canonical.  Of course, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have their own holy books. Who decides? 

Government has no business adjudicating these types of disputes, which is the reason the founders of our country provided for freedom of religion in the private sphere, leaving matters of faith to the individual conscience.  At the same time, they established a wholly secular constitution that makes no mention of God and whose sole reference to faith occurs in the stipulation of Article Six that no religious tests shall be required for public office.  The First Amendment to that document specifies that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, meaning that no sectarian viewpoint gets preferred treatment from the state.  As John Adams (second president of the United States and co-editor of the Declaration of Independence) affirmed in signing the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Weren’t Adams and the other framers godly men?  They were characters of high principle and solid morals but not always orthodox in their personal beliefs.  Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the gospels, omitting any mention of the miracles recorded there. Never a communicant, Washington was lambasted from the pulpit of the Anglican church he sometimes attended for absenting himself from the eucharist.  As to Jesus, an aging Benjamin Franklin quipped, “I have some doubts as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize on, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”  Are these the kinds of facts that  Superintendent Walters wants taught to the young?  

Outwardly, George Washington was careful to show respect toward believers and non-believers alike, at Mount Vernon willing to hire “Mohametans, Jews, Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists” so long as they were honest workmen, while James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution,  saw religious variety as the very linchpin of liberty: with a multiplicity of churches, synagogues, temples and tabernacles in the land, no one sect could dominate or oppress the others.  

Consequently, America is now the most religiously diverse nation on earth.  And thanks to the genius of its founders, who fashioned a separation between church and state, the United States has been mercifully free of the kind of violent strife that has plagued Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, and Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  Christian Nationalists in Louisiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere want to change that by rewriting history and enshrining their own narrow beliefs as law.  

To do so would be an invitation to chaos and a  betrayal of our nation’s best ideals

Time For A Just Peace

Just over a month ago Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli settlers shocking in its brutality. Hundreds including women, children and the elderly were taken hostage as missiles rained down on Israeli cities. Casualties were in the thousands. The following day, Israeli Defense Forces began a bombardment of Gaza that has killed many more thousands, burying civilians with no place to flee beneath the rubble of a ruined city starved for potable water, electricity, food and medical supplies. The cost in suffering has been enormous.

The roots of this conflict are ancient, as people of different faiths and ethnicities (Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bahai, and more) struggle to live side by side on a small piece of real estate that three major world religions claim as holy ground.

Warfare is not the answer, for while religious extremists espouse violence, the core teaching of all great faiths counsels a peaceful co-existence for the world's peoples founded on justice and mutual respect.

For hostilities to cease, the Palestinian people need a path toward an unoccupied homeland, with viable borders and self-determination. Israelis need security and an assurance that their neighbors are willing to accept the permanent presence of a Jewish state.

The Hebrew Bible envisions a time when swords will be beaten into plowshares, when each shall live beneath their own vine or fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. It is time for world leaders to step back from the precipice of wider war and begin a process of reconciliation that will end the bloodshed and bring about just and lasting peace.

Why Celebrate the Fourth?

 This weekend, millions of Americans will enjoy the fireworks, but others will take a knee on Independence Day.  Why celebrate? 

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project,  Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that the primary purpose of the American Revolution was to promote and preserve slavery.  But it’s important to get the history right. 

 In 1775, Virginia’s English Governor, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that slaves who deserted their American masters would be welcomed into the British army as free citizens.  Multitudes did so, and soon Dunmore had a black regiment at his command to quell unrest in the colonies.  It was only then, Hannah-Jones’ argument goes, with the prospect of losing their enslaved property, that delegates in Philadelphia put their signatures to the parchment declaring independence from King George.

Yet the skirmishing began long before Dunmore’s provocation. Prior to that, there was the Tea Party.  There were Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill.  Because muskets were so inaccurate in those days, the Continentals were instructed “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”  In the melee at Bunker Hill, the redcoats were savaged.  Over a hundred of the American soldiers that day were of men of color 

You may have learned in high school that Harry Truman was the first President to integrate the armed forces.  Actually, George Washington was.  Over 5000 African Americans served in uniform during the Revolution.  Blacks were there at every major engagement.

They absorbed the ethos of their compatriots.   “Self-evident truths” became part of their moral vocabulary.  They came away with ideas that were even more explosive than their flintlocks.  Men of color who fought and prevailed against the mightiest empire on earth walked with a new confidence.  They weren’t full citizens yet, but they were warriors.  And having fought to create the new nation, they had a deeper investment in its founding ideals.  

America would never be the same.   In her book Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution, scholar Judith Van Buskirk observes that before 1760, very few Americans questioned the institution of slavery.  It was a fact of life, like the weather.  But in the space of a generation, something happened. “By 1790,” she observes, “the northern states had put slavery on the road to extinction … Abolition societies and aid societies sprang up in the north and south.  What happened between 1765 and 1790?  The American Revolution.”  Slavery would never again go unchallenged. 

It would take generations to see the effects.  It would take the Civil War.  It would take mass movements, Montgomery and Selma and Black Lives to pass the torch forward.  The flame faltered at times.  It flickers now, as our nation faces white nationalists and resurgent hate.  But none of this should keep us from celebrating July Fourth.  For despite his recent coronation, Charles is not our king.  Our nation is founded on principles quite different from those of the hereditary right of some to rule over others.  A nation that still clings to the ideals of freedom and equality.  

Those ideals are fragile, always in danger.  So protest if you like.  Practice your right of free speech and assembly.  Our nation began in protest and needs healthy dissent.

Because America’s is an unfinished revolution, a revolution in progress.  Learn your history and then earn your history.  Fly your flag right side up or upside down or not at all, but know why you do it. Educate yourself.  We have no need to renounce or censor our past, nor any need to romanticize or gloss over it either.  For all its imperfections, it’s a heritage worth remembering.