North Carolina will not vote for an official state religion
after all—despite an impassioned move toward that end by a handful of the
state’s politicians. And that’s probably a good thing.
A little background: For the last few days, North Carolina
has been enmeshed in a pretty remarkable political brouhaha regarding
state-sanctioned prayer. The American Civil Liberties Union (on behalf of three
plaintiffs) filed a lawsuit against a county board of commissioners for opening
97 percent of its meetings with Christian prayer.
Now, anyone who follows this stuff knows that these sorts of
suits are fairly common: The ACLU often files lawsuits against governments,
schools or other state-run institutions that (they say) push Christianity in
public settings. Sometimes, these lawsuits are dismissed after the institution
promises to never, ever pray in the name of Jesus again. Sometimes, they go to
court—with mixed results. The First Amendment is a tricky thing.
But this is the first time that I remember a state saying, in essence, that governmental Christian
prayer is so important that they’d be willing to write a law that would,
essentially, supersede the First Amendment. It said, in part:
North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the
Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their
subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
The proposal was nixed before it could come to a vote. And I
think all of us, religious and secular alike, can be grateful.
Christian thinker Os Guinness has done a great deal of
ruminating on the themes of faith and freedom. Last year, in his book “A FreePeople’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future,” he talked quite
a bit of something he called the “golden triangle of freedom”—a dynamic
absolutely critical to, he says, the success and future success of America.
In The Christian Post,
he described the triangle like this: “Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires
faith of some sort, and faith of any sort requires freedom. And like the
recycling triangle, it goes round and round -- freedom requires virtue which
requires faith which requires freedom which requires virtue, and so on.”
Guinness says that freedom is great and all—but it can’t be
just sort of a willy-nilly, hedonistic freedom that some would like. Our
personal freedoms have to be tempered by virtue—a moral code of some sort that
helps us govern ourselves. And Guinness doesn’t believe that such virtue is
possible without faith of some kind. Atheism just doesn’t have the ethical
oomph to provide it.
But there’s another side to that: Faith needs freedom to
flourish—not just freedom to worship Christ, but freedom to worship, or not
worship, anything at all.
I heard Guinness speak several years ago, and I remember him
stressing how brilliant the First Amendment—protecting the rights of all faiths—was to the character of the
country. Europe (he pointed out) has always been filled with countries that
sanctioned official state religions. But when religion is tied too closely to a
government, it often grows corrupt and, as such, it often doesn’t look much
like the work of God at all. Guinness said at the time that the First
Amendment—and the freedom of religion it guarantees—is a prime reason why the
United States is still so religious compared to much of Europe. Faith needs
freedom to flourish, even if folks use that freedom to reject faith completely.
And really when you think about it, that philosophy mirrors
the whole concept of God-given free will. God doesn’t force us to love Him. Jesus
never twisted anyone’s arm to follow him. He simply asked if they’d like to.
And that still seems like a pretty good strategy to me.
I know that Christians can grow kinda tired of secular
assaults on faith and tradition. And hey, I like Nativity displays in the town
square as much as the next person. But the solution, I don’t think, is to
replace our spiritual liberty with a state religion—even if the religion is one
I agree with.
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