Keeping the Faith

America is becoming increasingly Godless, says Glenn Beck, and this is the cause of everything bad!

For those of you who don't know...Glenn Beck is a former standup comedian turned conservative talking head. He, as you can see, is on the Fox network.

Early in the piece he makes several claims.

1: ten commandments at a court house

2: Can't pray in school

3: Can't sing Christmas carols in this country.

Oh and the national motto "In God we trust" is being taken off the currency.

I'll let Snopes take the currency issue.

One of the things about the USA is that it doesn't have, or sanction, a national or state religion. Quite a few Christians wish this were otherwise, although they're still very much in the minority.
The USA doesn't have a state religion because it was founded on principles of religious freedom. The state is entirely separate from the church (or churches), as in France.

To a Brit like me, this seems a little odd. When I grew up, there were daily faith based assemblies in school and we sang hymns. We also sang a lot of groovy christmas carols at Christmas. None of this prevented me from growing up Agnostic, but at least I got to enjoy all the religious flummery that goes along with holidays like Easter and Christmas. At least I understood what those holidays were for. Kids in the USA do too, although they also associate nearly everything with the acquisition of cards and sweets. Commercialized? Why yes! Certainly!

That aside, the reasons that kids don't say prayers in school is because the schools in which they may not pray are State schools. They are funded by a government which is constitutionally unable to pick religious sides. The First Amendment to the Constitution says

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So schools either represent all faiths or none. Which is great, really. How hard would it be to get into a multi-faith based system that represented all the major religions?

Well, except that the USA cannot prohibit the free exercise of any faith. Which means that any faith based assembly is going on for a while and will contain some startlingly contradictory elements; it's got to represent the assorted schismatic factions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism...the list is endless. And you just know that the Scientologists would want equal representation, as would the Pastafarians and possibly some of my own nearly-beloved Discordians. Also, what would be wrong with Rastafarians wanting in on the deal? Or Satanists? Or the members of the Reformed Cult of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth? Or even Cthulhu cultists?

No, that way lies madness. So, no prayers in school.

As for the singing of Christmas carols, well, people are at liberty to do so. Just not in schools. There are some commercial groups - like Wal Mart - who would prefer to not alienate their non-Christian customers at Christian festival times (because Wal-Mart is a tool of Mammon, when you get down to brass tacks, and doesn't care what's happening to your immortal soul as long as it can have your cash in the here and now, and it knows that infidels of all kinds have money).

Of course, this could all be taken care of if the President was also a Defender of the Faith (and no, Charles, you can't be defender of the faiths, you get the title from Henry VIII who was named it by a Pope and didn't give it back after he broke from the Church). The President could pick one of the countless flavours of Christianity.

They really are without number, especially as it turns out that Baptists regard each and every church building as a separate little faith-ette. Which is quite scary. Or they just have a healthy respect for swimming and wet t-shirts. Who can say?

I would count them, but it gets confusing after you've hit the big ones (Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Unitarians, Latter Day Saints, Menonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Methodists) and you soon get lost trying to work out which ones regard the others as Christian and which don't. Apparently the Baptists still think that the Catholics aren't Christian because they "worship Mary".

IN the light of all this, is it any wonder that the Founders of the nation took a look at the state of religion in their time (and I suspect that Thomas Jefferson may have sneaked a peak into the future as well), and decided that if you wanted all the colours of the rainbow to be seen equally, you had to make sure there was no chance of one being allowed to drown the others out.

Hence this nation being Godless, apparently. But given the number of churches, temples and places of worship I pass on a daily basis, I can't help but think that there are more gods here than anywhere else in the world.