During my junior year at
Tyner back in the 1980’s, I took World History as an elective. One homework assignment was to name the 10
biggest disasters on record. Not natural
disasters but the sociological/cultural/political kind. At the top of my list stood the Edict of
Thessalonika in 380 C.E., which made Nicene Christianity the official religion
of the Roman Empire.
At the time I was very devoutly
Anglo-Catholic and fully intent on going to seminary after university and being
ordained an Episcopal priest.
I had grown up next door to
a Jewish couple whose two sons were somewhat ostracized in the local elementary
school because their parents withheld them from the Bible classes taught by a
fundamentalist evangelical. So part of
my reasoning at the time was that no citizen of the United States should be
made to feel second class because of religious belief or lack thereof.
My main reasoning, however,
was that I didn’t want the interests of the state twisting of my religion. Many fail to realize, or conveniently ignore,
the inevitable truth that mixing the sacred and the profane causes both to
influence each other, often in ways unforeseen.
Both come out of the tunnel corrupted.
The greatest leap forward
of the new American republic’s Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order for the Ages”),
along with its complete abolition of the Second Estate (Lords Temporal), was
its removal of the First Estate (Lords Spiritual) from every single aspect of
government. That innovation has proven
to be beneficial not only to the State but to the Church, by taking its role as
merely an arm of the state and establishing the separate status to which it is
entitled.
In his letter of 1802 in
which President Jefferson first used the phraseology that in the United States
there was a wall of separation between church and state, he was copying a much
earlier figure in the European settlement of what to them was a New World. That man was none other than Roger Williams,
founder of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and the first Baptist in America. But neither of them can yet claim to be the
originator of the idea. A much earlier
teacher said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God the things that are
God’s”.
Public prayer before
meetings of a governmental body such as the county commission or at secular sporting
events which have nothing to do with the practice of the Christian religion is
the modern equivalent of the Pharisee praying on the street corner whom Jesus
condemned. It is also analogous to a
pimp pandering his working girls; those who do so make a prostitute of their
God. Because it is not about religion,
but about dominion; it is not about the God they claim to worship but about the
power of their “side” here on earth over the earth. Doing thus hands the religious over to the
secular, giving to Caesar the things that are God’s.
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