Trusting God and Worshiping Mammon

On the Religious Tolerance website, I found the following:

Concerning the Ten Commandments in courthouses and legislatures: You cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Lie’ in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians…It creates a hostile work environment.

The above witty quote illustrates a peculiarly American conundrum.

We US citizens have an officially nonreligious government enshrined in our founding document, the Constitution of the United States, yet one of the most religious populations for an advanced industrial nation. That dynamic opposition, historically speaking, has created an interesting political tension.

God As A Secular and Patriotic American

In the western part of United States, The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the second highest court, ruling over 9 states and 2 territories. It sets legal precedents for all courts in the western United States, and lower courts are bound by its rulings. Only the United States Supreme Court can overrule it.

This court recently made the preposterous ruling that the phrase “under God” in the American Pledge of Allegiance is not inherently religious. Two of the 3 justices actually said that the phrase “under God” was merely a patriotic and ceremonial phrase, not a religious one.

Now American judges are supposed to be scholars of the law. Thus, for these judges to make such an obviously moronic assertion with a straight face is an insult to the intelligence of thinking Americans.

Surely those august scholars of the law can’t believe that to be true unless they have deliberately stupefied themselves.

I clearly remember when that phrase was added to our Pledge of Allegiance in the middle 1950s. Before then, it had not been a part of the American Pledge of Allegiance.

For those of you outside the United States, the Pledge of Allegiance is a brief ceremonial loyalty statement publicly recited at such events as civic meetings, political rallies, sporting matches, and in many public schools (that is, tax-supported tuition-free schools) at the beginning of the day. Most American school children recite this pledge at the beginning of the school day as a class activity. We Americans recite this pledge in unison while facing the flag, with our right hand over the heart, as kind of a public display of patriotism. When I was in school in the 1950s, the pledge went like this:

I pledge alliance to the flag
Of the United States of America.
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.

No matter what one thinks of the content of the Pledge, this old one had a certain majesty in its rhythm when recited.

In the 1950s, the cold war was on. In those days, the evil empire was the Soviet Union, or as it was popularly known, “Communist Russia.” I don’t remember the schools teaching what communism actually was, apart from it being “godless.” If we were taught little else about what communism actually is, we knew that the communists were atheists, and they were held to be evil, in large part because they were atheists.

So, to distinguish the politics of the United States from the “godless tyranny of the communism,” the guardians of the public weal inserted the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance. We Americans supposedly held that all “men” had inherent dignity, put there by God, and we Americans respected everyone’s dignity (as long as they believed in God and weren’t reds, I assume), whereas it was said that those atheistic communists did not value human life, dignity, or freedom like “we” do.

After the words “under God” had been patched into the fabric of the Pledge, it no longer had that certain pleasing rhythm when recited in Standard American English, (my dialect). Instead, it sort of thudded leadenly along, the rhythm clumsily jarring the ear. Try as I could, I just never could get used to the sound of it.

The pledge now was this:

I pledge alliance to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, under God, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.

That third line just had one spondee too many!

And a few years later, the cold warriors and guardians of public decency and patriotic fervor also changed the national motto.

Our original secular motto since the earliest days of our republic had been “E pluribus unum,” Latin meaning “out of the many (or multitude) comes unity,” referring to a national unity, a single federal union arising out of the several states and peoples. The brevity and subtlety of that phrase in Latin is quite elegant.

And in 1957, the cold warriors replaced that motto with “In God We Trust.”

Frankly, I think if we Americans were honest with ourselves, our motto would actually be “In Mammon we trust.”

And openness, honesty, and frankness would make our Pledge of Allegiance look like the following:

I pledge alliance to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, under Mammon,
With liberty and justice for those,
Who will pay the negotiated fee.

For those not in the know, Mammon refers to money in the Bible, and the worship of Mammon is the sin of the avaricious idolatry of money.

The Bible tells us in Matthew 6:19-21; 24 the following:

19. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
24 No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Contrary to what the Bible says, many Americans, including many fervent American Christians, hold wealth, especially corporate wealth, and private enterprise to be a sign of the greatness of our country. They believe that God rewards virtue with wealth. There’s even a “gospel of prosperity” movement in parts of the Christian religious tradition.

If that’s not the worship of Mammon, I don’t know what is.

Ironically, , the person who composed the Pledge of Allegiance, one Francis Bellamy, was a Christian Socialist and a minister to boot!

Although he was a socialist, he was definitely not an atheist. So in being a socialist, a Christian, and a patriot, his existence actually refutes the essential core idiocy of the cold war belief system of my youth and the Glenn Becks of our own era.

And contrary to what many Americans assume, the composer of the Pledge of Allegiance was not one of those hallowed founding fathers at all but lived long after they had all died!

In fact, Bellamy died in 1931, about a decade before I was born!

As it happens, Francis Bellamy was the cousin of another famous socialist, Edward Bellamy, the author of that classic of American literature, the Utopian socialist novel “Looking Backwards.” This novel became an immediate best seller when it was published in 1888, when my grandmother was just a young girl. It sparked mass meetings and several Utopian communities. Erich Fromm, one of the important figures in psychoanalysis, said Looking Backwards was one of the most important books ever written by an American.

So how was it that a socialist like Francis Bellamy came to write that paean to patriotism that we call Pledge of Allegiance? Here’s the story:

It was shortly after the civil war, and many veterans of the Confederacy and their sympathizers bitterly resented the federal government. Actually, a lot of them hated the federal government, didn’t trust it, felt it was plotting, along with foreign influences, to undermine the “American way of life.”

Conspiracy theories were a dime a dozen. (does any of this sound familiar?).

Thus Comrade Reverend Bellamy wrote this pledge for a popular youth magazine, hoping to spur the younger generation’s patriotic support for the federal government in the face of agitation by these states-rights activists who had just engaged in a war against the United States government a few decades previously, a war that had killed 10 times more Americans than did the Vietnam war at a time when the American population was about 1/10^th of what it is today, a war that technically amounted to an act of treason.

The Confederacy’s war was treason because the Confederacy organized and armed groups of militias and then attempted to violently overthrow the United States government, in part because they hated the federal government, in part because they hated the democratically elected president who at the time was Abraham Lincoln, in part because they resisted the hit to their profit margins that abolishing the slavocracy would mean.

And they resented the postwar “meddling” of the feds as the federal government attempted to integrate the defeated south into the union under federal law.

Fast forward a few more decades and to the opening of the first world war. By this time, Jim Crow was well established in the south, lynchings were common, and there was both a mass socialist movement and a large anti-socialist and anti-progressive movement. The country was polarized, neither side trusting the other (say, parts of this do sound familiar, no?).

It was 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and about 25 years after Rev. Francis Bellamy had written the Pledge of Allegiance that the Commissioner of Education of New York State a fellow named Henry Sterling Chapin, initiated a nationwide contest to write a short essay, a National Creed, summing up the political philosophy that the United States was based on. Like Bellamy, he wanted to encourage patriotic support for the federal government.

More than 3000 people across the country submitted entries, and a young chap named William Tyler Page won the contest. His winning entry was the famous statement, The American Creed. These were the words of that essay:

I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.

I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.

And on April 3, 1918, the United States House of Representatives adopted it as the official creed of the United States. Even today, this essay is often used as part of naturalization ceremonies for new citizens, and it still forms a part of the curriculum of civics classes throughout the country, although less and less frequently today.

The really interesting part of The American Creed that I wish to bring your attention to can be found in these words: “whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic.”

Note that these words do not say “whose just powers are derived from God.” No, instead the American Creed, adopted by the House of Representatives, says that the just powers of government come from the consent of the governed, and that the country is a democracy in a republic.

Now, that’s no accident.

In the days of the American revolution, whether the legitimacy of government came from God or the consent of the governed was the hot issue of the day.

If the laws of the state are what God says, then democracy is meaningless. God’s the boss.

But if the legitimacy of the state comes from the consent of the governed, democracy is the sine qua non (that is, the most essential and defining aspect) of the legitimacy of government.

You see, before the great 18th and 19th century bourgeois-democratic revolutions had swept the world and paved the way for modern capitalism, Europe was under the sway of feudalistic principles of government. That meant the authority of the state, the king, or the local feudal lord came from the will of God, not some law written down in a book that applied to everybody.

If you were a serf, it was because God willed it. If the feudal lord beat you, exploited you, raped your wife or daughter, it was all part of the divine plan of God.

It was not your place to judge the established order, because the established order was God’s will. Laws were nothing more or less than the will of God, and if you got confused by such notions that fair play might amount to much, there was always the local priest, bishop, or even the pope who would could educate you about what God willed.

If something did not make sense to you, it was because God’s divine plan was too complex and complicated for your puny, tiny, mortal mind to comprehend.

If preaching the word did not suffice to fill your mind with the grace of accepting God’s plan, there was always the thumbscrew, the rack, the sheriff’s truncheon, or perhaps the stake.

Grace, humility, and the acceptance of majesty of God’s law sometimes penetrated the brains of the faithful in a somewhat bloody and cruel fashion.

There was not, generally speaking, a law that everyone, high and low, rich and poor, had to obey. The law was nothing more and nothing less than what God or his earthly representatives said it might be at any given moment. What was lawful today might not be what was lawful yesterday, nor was it very predictable. Consistency was not the hallmark of God’s will. It amounted to rule by powerful men, not rule by the law. Today, this is such a foreign concept that it is hard to imagine.

The framers of the Constitution of the United States were quite familiar with this history, which was not so far removed from the lives of their grandfathers and fathers.

Around the beginning of the 18th century, the great European and Scottish enlightenment philosophers came up with the idea that the authority of law came from the consent of the governed. Most of them believed in a God, but not the God of the Bible. They were deists who thought that God created the universe and then pretty much left it alone. But mankind had a certain dignity, a certain worth, and because of that, certain rights. They banded together, formed societies, and then created laws that should be based on reason and respect for liberty. This was how Thomas Jefferson viewed God and the law, the same Thomas Jefferson who wrote the major parts of the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

These philosophers and their American followers felt that human society should be under the rule of a codified law, not the whim of a particular individual, even if that individual claimed to be a representative of God, such as the Pope, the King, or the King’s local sheriff. Moreover, it was the reasoning of men, not the words found in holy scripture, that should be the basis of the law.

Here’s what Wikipedia article says about the Scottish enlightenment:

Sharing the humanist and rationalist outlook of the European Enlightenment of the same time period, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority which could not be justified by reason. They held to an optimistic belief in the ability of man to effect changes for the better in society and nature, guided only by reason.

This revolutionary ideology became the ideology of the American revolution, and because of that, when you look at the Constitution of the United States, you find no mention of God or the church. Go ahead, click on the link, and read it yourself. You’ll see what I mean.

In the preamble, you find these words instead:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In other words, the Constitution of the United States claims to derive its governmental authority from “We the people,” not from God or those claiming to be spokesmen of God. And about religion the constitution says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

and Article VI, it says this:

…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

And that’s it! That’s the only thing the Constitution of the United States, the founding document, the most basic law of the land says about religion, God, churches, salvation, grace, or the rest of it.

That, bluntly speaking, is the description of a secular foundation for government.

After watching the religious wars and the partisans of God killing each other off for a couple of centuries because of heresy, the framers of the constitution decided they wanted what Jefferson famously called a “wall of separation of Church and State” in his letter to the Danbury Baptists of 1802. (Click here to see the text of Jefferson’s letter).

The truth is that the words “under God” are unconstitutional and not in conformity with what the founders of the United States had in mind. It’s not just secular atheists who don’t believe in an intelligent creator outside of and separate from the universe. Other religions, such as some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism also don’t believe that some sort of god created the universe.

Personally, I have many disagreements with some of the founders’ ideas. For one thing, the only people who got to vote were white men who owned a certain amount of property. For another thing, they institutionalized slavery and legislatively enabled what by today’s standards are genocidal wars against the original inhabitants of this land. When they talked about the rights of “all men,” they did not include blacks, women, the original peoples, or anybody who did not own land.

But I agree with them when it comes to the relation between religion and the state. I do not think the government should foster or oppose religion. This is a matter of private conviction. As an atheist, I do not want my tax money going to sponsor, promote, or oppose religious viewpoints, although I’m perfectly happy to let people practice their religion in their private lives, attend the churches of their choice, or have sociology and history classes teach about various religions without advocating for or against them. I just don’t want government to be involved in fostering or opposing what should be a matter of private conscience.

Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living – Socrates

This work is copyrighted by the author under the pen name Alan OldStudent in 2010. You may distribute this work free and unaltered as long as you attribute it to me, do not charge for it except incidental copy fees, and do not alter it. Further, you may copy excerpts from it for review or commentary in accordance with the USA fair use standards.

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