Is the US still 'one nation under God'?

[dawnharvey68]

After the election, will America still be one nation? And will it still believe that it shelters under God's providence?

The question

This election has been fought between two apparently devout Christians, whose first debate was held in Rick Warren's megachurch in California. So it seems that Christianity has united the nation. Yet religion has also been hugely divisive, perhaps more so than in any previous American election. If the losers refuse to accept the legitimacy of the result, their fury will certainly be couched in religious terms: either the atheists or the Christians will be seen as unAmerican. So, can America contain its religious divisions within the old big tent of civic religion, or will it take a new kind of tent meeting to revive the sense that all Americans, whatever their faith or lack of it, are part of the same great enterprise?

One nation under secularism

George Neumayr

If America is still one nation, that is because no one who might be elected to public office takes religion as seriously as its founders did

Is America still one nation under God? That the question is even asked today suggests a negative answer. At other moments in America's history, few would have bothered to ask it. But after decades of confident secularism, which has coursed through much of American politics and culture, the question takes on serious relevance.

Imagine if the coiners of that phrase had a chance to walk around America today. Would they see "one nation under God"? Not likely. The nation of which they spoke would probably be unrecognisable to them. What they would see instead is one nation under secularism - or at best one nation under a very secularised modern understanding of God.

The truth is that almost everything in America has been secularised, including religion itself. This explains America's culture of religiosity without religion: "God" talk persists but it means less and less, as Americans try and shoehorn secularist morality and philosophy into fast-eroding religious concepts.

What exactly do references to "God" mean in a culture where the lifestyles of the "religious" and the non-religious are almost indistinguishable - in a culture where politicians punctuate every speech with "God Bless America" before trotting off to vote for partial-birth abortion and gay civil unions?

God-talk in such a culture becomes nothing more than a projection of modern fads, currents and desires - an appropriation of religion for essentially secularist purposes. Hence liberal arguments, whether it is for abortion or gay marriage, are usually shrouded in religious garb.

But the reality is that theism, properly understood and forthrightly stated, holds little sway over the ordering of American society. It has been dislodged, whether politicians admit it or not, by de facto agnosticism. Man, not God, is the measure of all things.

Just look at the the assumptions underlying political discussions in America: secularism is assumed to be identical with "reason" while theism represents "mere opinion". Thus any politician who argues against legislation on the grounds that it violates a God-given moral law is dismissed out of hand.

America's founding fathers would enjoy little standing in today's debates. They did not consider the existence of God a mere opinion or guess but a truth accessible to reason - a truth upon which they based the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. Were a politician to write such documents today, he would be rebuked for "imposing religion" on his fellow Americans.

Democratic party presidential nominee Barack Obama, who combines the rhetoric of religion with the philosophy of secularism, once lectured theists:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.

Leave theism behind, in other words. America's founding fathers would find Obama's formulation odd: for them, values are "universal" precisely because they derive from God, whereas lowest-common-denominator secularism yields no universal values, just relativistic fragmentation.

Secularism is a very thin reed on which to hang a political society. But that's the new democratic experiment underway in America.

Neither one nation, nor under God

In 2008, American religion is inextricably linked to social conservatism and the political right

• HE Baber

Some 44% of Americans reject the theory of evolution but I've never met any of them. I don't know many churchgoers because I live in an urban-coastal area far from the "pro-America areas" of the continent, commended by Sarah Palin, where most reside.

I belong to the fastest growing "religious group" in the US, the 100-million strong unchurched and, as a "knowledge worker" have little contact with members of the pro-American diaspora. We occupy the same geopolitical landmass, but during the Big Sort of the late 20th century, became different nations. Citizens of my nation are socially liberal, politically left and, above all, secular because, in 2008, religion is inextricably linked to social conservatism and the political right.

In 1965, religion in America, as Americans understood it, would have been readily intelligible across the Atlantic. Mainline churches dominated the landscape. Americans expected everyone to be religiously affiliated and regarded religion as beneficial, or at least innocuous. The gothic revival church was America's religious icon and, regardless of their own religious beliefs or practices, paradigmatic Christianity for most Americans was an ecumenical faux-Anglicanism resembling the as-yet-unreconstructed Songs of Praise.

Twenty years later, American religion had undergone a paradigm shift. The icon of American religion was the evangelical mega-church, where televangelists preached to thousands in situ and multitudes of TV viewers. Americans, irrespective of their own religious beliefs or practices, regarded American-style fundamentalism as paradigmatic religion.

In the interim, American religion was caught up in culture wars. Citizens of secular America believed that religious Americans were a potent force intent on taking away their freedoms and destroying their way of life. Many still take seriously Margaret Atwood's 1985 fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale, in which the religious right has established a theocracy where women are sex slaves.

Other Americans have their own fantasies. At a recent Republican rally, 84-year-old John Gay warned that "If we go the socialist way, you young people will lose all your freedoms - mentally, physically and religiously." Mike Brecht claimed that his 21-year-old son, adopted from Russia at 7, still remembered life behind the Iron Curtain. "He can tell you all about his one turnip a day that he ate."

Citizens of the American nation under God believe that religion is a bastion against social chaos and the poverty, drudgery and constraint of godless socialism. Citizens of the other American nation are convinced that religious believers are intent on destroying their freedoms, and that self-professed liberal Christians are disingenuous or, at best, "enablers."

I do not know whether the projected Democratic victory will make us one nation again, but I am certain that it will not reconstitute us as one nation under God.