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[Rteacher]

The following is excerpted from a new book, an historical thesis on the role of religion in American government and society, by Jon Meacham, Managing Editor of Newsweek magazine (which naturally featured it in their latest edition...) I have only briefly skimmed it's introduction, but I think it suggests that the unique framework of the U.S. Constitution enables a healthy balence of nonsectarian faith and freedom to be expressed in the public sphere...

April 10, 2006 issue - America's first fight was over faith. As the Founding Fathers gathered for the inaugural session of the Continental Congress on Tuesday, September 6, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Thomas Cushing, a lawyer from Boston, moved that the delegates begin with a prayer. Both John Jay of New York and John Rutledge, a rich lawyer-planter from South Carolina, objected. Their reasoning, John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, was that "because we were so divided in religious sentiments"—the Congress included Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others—"we could not join in the same act of worship." The objection had the power to set a secular tone in public life at the outset of the American political experience.

Things could have gone either way. Samuel Adams of Boston spoke up. "Mr. S. Adams arose and said he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue who was at the same time a friend to his country," wrote John Adams. "He was a stranger in Philadelphia, but had heard that Mr. Duche (Dushay they pronounce it) deserved that character, and therefore he moved that Mr. Duche, an Episcopal clergyman, might be desired to read prayers to the Congress tomorrow morning." Then, in a declarative nine-word sentence, John Adams recorded the birth of what Benjamin Franklin called America's public religion: "The motion was seconded and passed in the affirmative."

The next morning the Reverend Duche appeared, dressed in clerical garb. As it happened, the psalm assigned to be read that day by Episcopalians was the 35th. The delegates had heard rumors—later proved to be unfounded—that the British were storming Boston; everything seemed to be hanging in the balance. In the hall, with the Continental Army under attack from the world's mightiest empire, the priest read from the psalm: " 'Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.'"

Fight against them that fight against me: John Adams was at once stunned and moved. "I never saw a greater effect upon an audience," he told Abigail. "It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that morning." Adams long tingled from the moment—the close quarters of the room, the mental vision in every delegate's head of the patriots supposedly facing fire to the north, and, with Duche's words, the summoning of divine blessing and guidance on what they believed to be the cause of freedom.

As it was in the beginning, so it has been since: an American acknowledgment of God in the public sphere, with men of good will struggling to be reverent yet tolerant and ecumenical. That the Founding Fathers debated whether to open the American saga with prayer is wonderfully fitting, for their conflicts are our conflicts, their dilemmas our dilemmas. Largely faithful, they knew religious wars had long been a destructive force in the lives of nations, and they had no wish to repeat the mistakes of the world they were rebelling against. And yet they bowed their heads...http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12115700/site/newsweek/

[Rteacher]

Jon Meacham appeared Easter Sunday on Meet the Press' show highlighting "Faith in America"... Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

TIM RUSSERT:Jon Meacham, were people more religious at the founding of our country and were we more divided on moral issues back then than we are now?

MR. JON MEACHAM: I don��t think so. I think there��s a continuum of both religiosity and division on important issues of the heart and the mind. What the founders wanted to do, I think, and what I think the American gospel is, the great good news about America, is that religion shapes us without strangling us, and that we are a religious people, by and large. Our public institutions tend to reflect that. While keeping church and state separate, in the sense of an established church which had come—brought no good to nations that had gone that way, we were able to preserve the connection between religion and politics because people��s faith is essential in politics because politics is about people. It��s about their values; it��s about what matters to them. It��s like economics or geography. It is simply a part of the air we breathe...


...MR. RUSSERT: I want to turn the conversation to politics, Jon Meacham, and cite a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and read it for all of us. ��By far the most powerful new reality at the intersection of religion and politics is this: Americans who regularly attend worship services and hold traditional religious views increasingly vote Republican, while those who are less connected to religious institutions and more secular in their outlook tend to vote Democratic. ...

��This divide was very much in evidence in the 2004 presidential election. Voters who attend church more than once a week,�� which is about 16 percent of us, ��supported President George W. Bush over Senator John Kerry by a margin of 64% to 35%. ...

MR. MEACHAM: I think the Democrats have lost their historic claim to the language of faith. Franklin Roosevelt, the founder of the modern Democratic Party, the only thing he said on D-Day 1944 was to read a prayer of his own composition that he used from the—wrote using the physical ��Book of Common Prayer.�� John Kennedy��s speeches were rife with theological references, the kicker of the great inaugural, ��On Earth, God��s work must truly be our own.�� Lyndon Johnson clearly saw himself as a deliverer of captive peoples, whether they be African-American or the poor or those who lacked health care. I think that the Democratic Party in the last 30 years has lost that capacity to speak in terms that resonate with people who hold a religious view of the world.

And what��s—to me, what��s very important about America, and to go to Father Neuhouse��s point about the Catholic Church, is the country has its arms open. George Washington said, ��We shall give to bigotry no sanction, to,�� excuse me, ��to persecution, no assistance.�� And it��s very important that we remember that the idea of religious freedom has a religious basis, which is that if God himself did not compel obedience, then who are we to try? And I think in our political realm, we have to both practice mercy, we have to practice charity, we have to be forbearing or we risk slipping into a more theocratic way of being.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12283802/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/

[Rteacher]

Now that AFN Prime no longer carries Meet the Press on Sunday nights I rely on viewing the webcasts on MSNBC's web site on Mondays.
I haven't seen the whole show yet (kept falling asleep...) but whenever I became more-or-less awake I heard some interesting discussion on an important topic. Even the token Rabbi contributed some good insights:

MR. RUSSERT: Rabbi Lerner, you wrote this in your book, ��Most of those on the Left ... feel queasy even thinking about allying with spiritual and religious progressives. ... Many on the Left, to be blunt, hate and fear religion.�� Why?

RABBI LERNER: Well, there��s a long history of this, first of all, because the left emerged in the struggle against feudalism and sided with the emerging capitalist class and adopted a world view that said that that which is real is that which can be verified through senses or measured. But there��s another more immediate experience, and many of the people on the—who have come into liberal or progressive movements have had the experience of being in oppressive, hierarchical, patriarchal, sexist, homophobic or racist churches. And that experience has led them to, I think, draw the wrong conclusion, namely that they��ve said, ��Well, this is all religion.��

They forgot the voice of Martin Luther King Jr., where the left was strongest when it was speaking from a religious perspective. In other words, they, in, in a way, bought what the political right has succeeded in doing: convincing people that religion only means right-wing politics. So they focus on a wedge issue, like abortion or stem cell research, one of those, those kinds of issues, homosexuality, and they forget that the Bible also is calling every 50 years for a redistribution of wealth, every seven years to forgive all sins. Where are the fundamentalists on that? Well, the fundamentalists are suddenly forgetting about the word, the exact word of God, when it comes to financial redistribution of wealth to the people in the, in the society, but they are very exacting over their narrow issues.

And the left then ends up—those people who fled from repressive forms of religion identify all religion that way and don��t understand that, in fact, the aspiration to connect to the holy is a central need of human beings, a central aspect of reality that must be validated. That��s why we��re creating this Network of Spiritual Progressives to not only challenge the religious right, but also to demand a space in the liberal and progressive world for a spiritual consciousness...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12283802/page/4/

The entire webcast can be found here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/

[Rteacher]

I guess I might as well post some of the token Moslem's rap ...

MR. RUSSERT: Professor Nasr, after September 11, 2001, Americans learned a lot about Islam they didn��t know. Many hear words like infidel. What does that mean?

PROF. NASR: First of all, you have two currents opposing each other. A lot of people learn a lot about Islam, but a lot of people are also misled about Islam. A great deal of misinformation came into the market of ideas, you might say, as well as, of course, authentic teachings, and this itself helped those extremists in the Islamic world who wanted to have such ideas propagated in the West about Islam. So it was kind of like yin-yang situation. One helping the other.

As far as the word infidel of co - is concerned, of course, it��s -the Latin word means ��lacking faith.�� The Arabic word for it is kufr, which mean to cover a truth over. And the Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, explicitly says that those who are infidels are not only non-Muslims - in fact, Christians and Jews can go to heaven, and they can be people of faith, and there��re people among Muslims who, if they do not follow their religion, they become infidels.

The usage of infidel as a political term goes back really to the consequence of the Middle Ages, especially during the colonial period when our Muslims consider those people who were colonizing them or, during the Crusades, killing us, being infidels. But technically and theologically speaking, infidel means someone who really does not have faith in God...

... But there is a struggle, deep struggle, going on for the understanding of what Islamic teachings are and a kind of rebellion against what Muslims have believed and practiced for the last 1400 years by a small group of people extremely angry and bitter about the historical and military defeat of the Islamic world during the colonial period, the post-colonial period, and now a cultural economic domination ...

Russert lets John Meacham close out the show:

MR. RUSSERT: Jon Meacham, when you hear the phrase ��Christian Nation,�� ��Christian Society�� what comes to mind?

MR. MEACHAM: That it��s not the case, that we are not a Christian nation, that there��s no such thing. As it says in Hebrews, ��We seek - we have no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come.�� The idea that we are a Christian nation, we are God��s chosen people, has often been used to cloak and to justify some reprehensible social behavior and I think Lincoln was right when he said, ��We, we��re not God��s chosen people, we��re his almost chosen people.�� And I think that—I think everyone��s temperatures will go down, their blood pressures would go down if we realized that every political discussion, every political fight does not have to be a religious one. If you go to what I consider to be American secular scripture, Federalist 10, James Madison said, ��We��re not a democracy, we��re a republic. Let religion be one force among many as we work these things out and let��s let the soul��s journey go forward as it will.��...