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On Faith
The Rev. Mike Young
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A Christian nation could hardly be holy
A Pew Research Center poll found recently that 67 percent of Americans think the United States is a Christian nation. I keep wondering what that would really mean if it were true. What would a Christian nation actually look like?
The usual list would include prayer in public schools. Yet I have a difficult time imagining the full gamut of Christian denominations agreeing on who would determine which prayer. Is it "debtors" or "trespassers" the Lord's Prayer asks us to forgive?
"Abstinence only" sex education would be on the list. Yet the most comprehensive sex education curriculum yet devised was written by the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalists. It not only isn't abstinence only, it was so controversial when it first came out that the post office wouldn't let it be mailed.
Surely abortion would be outlawed. No, a majority of Christians still want abortion to be legal, and the list of denominations supporting the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is pretty long. And many Planned Parenthood clinics were originally started by coalitions of church groups.
Indeed, not a single item on any of the usual lists has the unanimous support of Christian churches.
Would the moral climate improve if this were indeed a Christian nation? Would business ethics rise to a higher standard? Would violent crime decline? Child abuse? Domestic violence? Racism? Maybe.
But what has been preventing that climate change for all these years that the nation has been predominately Christian in culture? Is everybody in jail a non-Christian in this country that has more of its population incarcerated than any other nation?
When our Founding Fathers were framing the Constitution, they had one eye on the history of religion in Europe at that time. It was a history of wars and bloodshed. Protestant and Catholic alike were fond of killing one another over religious differences. The burning of heretics was an ecumenical activity.
Many had fled to the New World precisely to avoid getting killed. The Quakers hadn't become pacifists over violence in the abstract. The threat was very concrete.
Getting Christians to agree on much of anything has frequently been a bloody affair. Sixty-seven percent said this is a Christian nation. Maybe they're right.
The Rev. Mike Young is the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.