God, Bless America?

Recently I’ve been dwelling more on the relationship between religion and politics.

One reason is tumult in the town next door, the town where my father grew up and where I grew up and where two of my kids went to school and where I’ve gone to church for 25 years. I’m fond of the place. It’s overwhelmingly white and, for the last two generations, Asian-American. You might get pulled over there if you’re not. It’s adjacent to a notorious sundown town that was popular with American Bundists, and its schools started as a white flight haven, but it’s quiet and has broad leafy avenues and craftsman or Spanish houses set back from the street. Sometimes people ride horses off of the horse trails past the Round Table Pizza, which incidentally is a sore spot on the neighborhood Facebook groups because a lady who may be homeless was seen hanging out there.

The oldest church in town was started in the late 19th Century as a Congregational community. Its sanctuary was built in the 1920s and has stunning stained-glass windows. Earlier this century it reclaimed its Congregational name and identity, and a young and energetic pastor has taken over. Under his leadership the church has articulated values to the town through children’s activities and movies in the park and speaker series in the church and outreach and participation. The values they have articulated are Christ’s love for everyone, tolerance, inclusion, compassion, and concern for the mortal and material fortunes of least of us. You know — woke stuff. It’s very nice and I’ve gone to a number of speaker series there but I will likely stick with my nearby Presbyterian church. It’s a little too informal for my taste. You can take the boy out of the Jesuitism but you can’t take the Jesuitism out of the boy.

The pastor and members of the church have felt free to articulate the church’s values in the town’s political and social circles, on social media and in letters to the community and before the tiny City Council. Most people in the town approve or are at least tolerant. But this unapologetic articulation of values — particularly toleration of the LGBT community — is abhorrent to a few. It has brought out the worst intolerance from, forgive me God, the worst people. Some of them are frankly unhinged about it. Religious people! Articulating their values in the public sphere! In MY America? They view the church as Babylon and the pastor as the child of Che Guevara and a knife-wielding drag-bruncher. They attack the church and its pastor, distribute anti-gay and anti-trans literature at the church, bray about how they don’t belong here and their participation in public discourse should not be tolerated.

As one born there I am embarrassed by their intolerance and more than a little concerned by their spittle-flecked fervor. But on some level I’m sympathetic to not liking religion in politics. (The same people absolutely favor imposing their religion forcibly through politics, and are currently trying to do so by corrupting the school district, but consistency is the hobgoblin and so forth.) I grew up Catholic, and have attended a Presbyterian church most of my adult life, but I’ve always been deeply ambivalent about the role of religion in American politics. Political invocations of religion here are characterized by arrogance.

When it comes to politicians invoking God, Abraham Lincoln is my favorite. His references show a common thread of humility before God. Consider the closing of his Second Inaugural Address:

Lincoln notes explicitly that we ought to be cautious about whether we know what’s right — whether we know God’s will. Similarly, at Gettysburg:

Our political invocation of God is mere air, Lincoln points out. It does not match people’s sacrifices. Lincoln’s religious humility may be a result of his religious uncertainty; his biographers have written volumes about it.

Modern political invocations of God are mere hubris in comparison. “God bless America” is almost mandatory in a speech by any Presidential candidate. Its absence is notable. Sometimes it is rendered as “may God bless America,” which I prefer, but too often it is rendered as GOD BLESS AMERICA. If we said it in Latin it would be in the imperative. It’s a command - God, bless America, and another Dewars while You’re up. God, it suggests, You must give us our due. Give us what we are owed. Or else it’s rendered as a boast — a way to say “God, naturally, blesses America.” And so He does, though perhaps His blessings fall more visibly upon some of us than others. It’s rendered in a tone that implies division — here we are, together, the ones preferred by God.

It certainly could be rendered more humbly. God, we spent half a billion on pet Halloween costumes and then walked the pets past mentally ill veterans sleeping on the sidewalk but if You could refrain from smiting us and bless us instead we would be quite grateful. God, rather that visit people in prison like You said we thought we’d cage more of them than anyone else and abuse them and then ridicule people for talking about the abuse, but still, if You could bless us, that would be just swell. God, whoah, okay, that’s a lot of dead kids, but still, You know, etc. God, I know that we were strangers in the land of Egypt but these strangers are vermin poisoning our blood, so, i can haz blessings plz k thx.

I would feel more comfortable listening to those invocations of God — ones characterized by humility before God, by uncertainty, by confession of our failings. I feel they would have landed more easily on the ears of my late father, an agnostic who felt despised by American political rhetoric. I would feel less threatened — feel more that the words echoed the Sermon on the Mount or Matthew 25 and less a triumphal and somewhat spiteful someday every knee shall bow, less a way to say someday we shall prevail over them.

But that’s not what I’m going to get, at least in mainstream American politics. The Jerry Bruckheimer version of “God Bless America” will continue to prevail for now. I am unlikely to make an impact on that on a national level.

But perhaps I can locally. Perhaps you can as well, if you care.

I still love the town, warts and all. There is the place where I drank three Cokes after soccer practice and threw up! There’s where mom ran her bike into a mailbox on the way to the Thai place! There’s where I kissed a girl the first time! It’s changed. When I was a kid the notion that a classmate could be openly gay was absolutely unthinkable. Boys played rough games of “smear the queer” at recess and the message was received. My classmates who weren’t like me often lived quiet lives of misery. Now it’s better. My youngest is finishing her senior year at the school where I graduated and the kids could absolutely not give a shit if their classmates are gay or lesbian or bi or trans or anything. I hear them talk and marvel at it. They have each other’s backs. I wish I had been brave enough to have my classmates’ back the same way in 1986.

I won’t change how Americans talk to or about God. But I might help change it in this town, just a little. I might help more young people that a church can be characterized by acceptance and values that appeal to them. And I might convey to the worst people in town that if they want to go after a church for preaching tolerance and decency, they’ll have to go through me.