Timothy Parker does us all a disservice with his letter in the July 17 edition of The Citizen by crudely equating religion in the public square with violence and danger.
He does a disservice to those religious figures in our history who, based precisely on their Christian faith, fought to end persistent injustices in our nation, from the abolitionists of the 1850s to the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and ‘60s.
If Mr. Parker would have had his way, those people would have stayed silent, or at best cleansed their rhetoric of any references to the faith and the God which drove them to seek justice.
One wonders how far they would have gotten appealing to people on a strictly non-religious basis?
Let’s see: how have regimes who are explicitly non-religious done when managing their affairs? The atheistic Communists like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were not so great at defending the liberty of individuals and, in fact, had no problem with exterminating millions of them to achieve their purely rationalistic goals.
Their victims, both those who died and those who suffered under brutal oppression, are done a grave disservice by Mr. Parker’s separation of God and government.
But, as many of you might say, what of the Crusades, what of the Wars of Religion? It is true that people fought and killed each other over religion. Humans are apt to do such things, unfortunately, whether the cause be God, land, greed, or gold.
But the number of people killed as a result of religious wars pales in comparison to those killed at the hands of atheistic regimes. And European culture figured out that, ultimately, the best way to avoid conflict over religion was to allow freedom of choice when it came to religion. However, that did not mean they sought to purge the public square of religion.
That is the mistake Mr. Parker makes and explains why he misinterprets the first amendment. It was not so much meant to keep religion out of government, as to keep government out of religion.
If that were not the case, would one of our greatest presidents have said these words at the close of the Civil War? “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” (Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address)
So I would argue, in opposition to Mr. Parker’s assertion, that we are a Christian nation in so far as our founding principles and deepest roots are Judeo-Christian to the core. Our elevation of each and every individual as endowed with rights by their “Creator,” as having a divine spark that requires acknowledgement of their inherent dignity and deserving of a government and nation that protects such dignity would not exist where it not for the work and faith of those ancient prophets of scripture, and of the Truth Himself, Jesus Christ.
And it is truth itself which is done the greatest disservice when we pretend that we mere humans are capable of perfectly apprehending it and practicing it without the guidance of the divine. Our Founding Fathers understood this, but we, very often, no longer do and that is the source of much of our current strife.
It is the the absence of dogma, not the prevalence of it, which so divides and harms us as a nation.
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
