This article
by Garry Willis in this weekend’s NYT Magazine provides a snapshot of the American history of religion and politics
in wartime. Willis is the author
of Why I am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and
St. Augustine’s Memory.
In addition to
some disturbing echoes about the battle between pacifist clergy and militarist
clergy, it will answer some questions, make a few angry and plant a few seeds,
I think. – Karen Watters Cole
With God on His Side, by Garry Willis, NYT Magazine, March 30, 2003
(Excerpts below and attached in full)
Religion in America is much like Nature in the famous saying
of Horace: ''Nature, pitchfork it out how you may, keeps tumbling back in on
you, slyly overbears your shying from it.'' In the same way, no matter how much Jefferson and
Madison tried to pitchfork religion out of official governmental actions, it
has kept sneaking back in, beating down attempts to contain it. Madison said that religion is ''not
within the cognizance of civil government.'' He did not even want ministers of
religion to list their profession in the government's census, since ''the
general government is proscribed from interfering, in any manner whatever, in
matters respecting religion, and it may be thought to do this in ascertaining
who and who are not the ministers of the gospel.''
Madison would be surprised at how much religion gets ''cognized'' in, say, Karl Rove's Rolodex. The nation's
executive mansion is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study
cells, like a whited monastery. A sly dig there is ''Missed you at Bible
study,'' as David Frum reported in ''The Right Man'' with a ''twitch,'' since
''Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory,
either'' when he was in Bush's White House. Friends going to intimate dinners
with the Bushes should be prepared to lead the prayer said before the meal.
The answer to Madison has implicitly been this: a nation
with no cognizance of religion has no cognizance of God, and without national
recognition of his authority, it will not come within his protection. That is
not an advantage a country can do without, especially in times of peril. It is unpatriotic to expose the nation
to its enemies without taking every measure possible to insure the divine
blessing. In the minds of the devout, it is therefore a politically dangerous
act to teach ''godless'' evolution in our schools rather than biblical
''creationism.'' It is tempting the divine wrath to let a ''massacre of the
innocents'' go forward in abortion clinics. Pornography offends God and
therefore forfeits his benevolence. Nor can we be safe from terrorists unless
we see that a ''blessed country'' (to use the president's words) must extend
God's will of liberty for other countries, by force if necessary.
…
The deep roots of
these quintessentially American impulses are in our religious history. We
believe, on the one hand, that the individual must save himself or herself. One
of the people in Karl Rove's Rolodex, for instance, undoubtedly told him that help for people to get housing ''ran
counter to compassionate conservatism'' because it undermines ''personal
responsibility.''
So do affirmative
action programs, which include people as part of a social group rather than in
terms of individual merit.
No Congregationalist church sent people out to struggle for their souls more
stringently than do religious conservatives when it is a matter of state action
to help people cope with their problems. They are their problems, their souls
to save.
On
the other hand,
when it is a matter of recognizing God's authority, the state can impose uniform standards of prayer. It can quash pornography, forbid the
choice of an abortion, dictate the way evolution is taught (if at all). At this point, the communitarian becomes
the authoritarian.
The people as a whole must be saved
from the consequences of their own sin. They have souls we all have to save for them, to pay homage
to the authority of God.
… This communal sense arose, most recently, in the wake of the
Sept. 11 attacks, when the president declared war on terrorism. His initial
reaction was to call this a crusade, the war whose motto was ''God Wills It.'' The sense of peril was heightened by the
loss of the Columbia, suggesting the fragility of our national efforts. Like
the Sept. 11 event, that one led to prayer vigils and stronger expressions of
national unity.
At the memorial service held at the National Cathedral after the attack on the
towers, ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' was sung as a closing anthem. It
has been a perennial favorite in wartime, despite its odd lyrics: ''Let the
Hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel.'' Religion can get
bloody-minded when we go to war, with many serpents who need crushing. (end of excerpts)
WILLIS With God on His Side.doc