So, my daughter was complaining yesterday that she hates being compelled to acknowledge God all the time. She said that she didn't really believe in God, and that she was forced daily to say "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and to implicitly endorse the sentiment "In God We Trust" on all our coins, and "other stuff like that all the time".
I told her she was born more than fifty years too late. "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, in a spate of anti-Communist bombast.[1] "In God We Trust" wasn't the national motto until 1956, and it's been on and off coins since the Civil War.
While none of that was very helpful, it seemed to give her some solace that the only word on every US coin ever produced is "Liberty", not "God".[2] However, I still had to provide her some guidance.
Of course, she doesn't have to say "Under God" if she doesn't want to; she doesn't even have to stand and recite the Pledge. But she would certainly feel pressured to conform, with all those others around her doing it. I even told her that if it bothers her, and she gets in trouble, I'd come get her and make sure it never happened again. Still, that didn't seem to compensate for an entire nation (in the guise of her public school) pressuring her to state she believes in God.
She went on to say she couldn't believe that every single other person in the country was Christian. She asked me why we even live in a country founded on Christianity, especially when the current population didn't seem to want us here.
That stopped me for a few minutes. How could I explain to a little girl that the Founding Fathers were trying to create a place where men were religiously indebted only to their own consciences -- not to any governmental restriction -- when that government was forcing religious observation on her, and every other voice was expounding that it was "a Christian nation" and "founded on Christianity"?
I started by explaining that we're not a Christian nation, by any reasonable definition of the phrase. I had to explain that the majority doesn't define the character of a civilization; its laws and actions do. I had to explain that although the Pilgrims were a Christian sect, they hadn't come here to found a nation; they came to start a colony of England. The founders were the ones who fought to make a new nation, in particular the people who created the government for that nation, as written in the Constitution; and many of them weren't Christian.[3] I explained that the Constitution -- the law that should define the character of the country -- wasn't Christian, but solely rational.[4]
But I was just one voice. In order to stop the insanity, I would have to stop all the voices trying to claim America as God's Nation (when they know full well that's really Israel). And then it struck me: they wouldn't want to claim the USA if they just realized that democracy is ungodly.
Despite the obvious rhetoric -- I could think of at least three less offensive ways to say the same thing -- it's equally obvious that democracy can't be God's government. The angels don't vote. The government of Heaven is probably best considered a monarchy, because I'd really piss people off if I called it a dictatorship. God's government of Earth is probably best considered anarchy: He just leaves us alone. Neither could be classified as a democracy, or even a republic.
Worse yet, most people would say that democracy was invented by the Greeks. And everybody knows they were a bunch of polytheistic pagans. Even if you want to classify us as a republic, you're talking about a form of government invented by the Romans (polytheistic, and considered highly immoral by most Christians) or Indians (also polytheistic). That's right, no matter how you slice it, our form of government was invented by pagans! Does that seem like a basis for a Christian nation to you?
So, all you "Christian nation" people: stop bothering my daughter. You don't want this country anyway. Go make one of your own.
