Bombs away - religion and language in the USA
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - september 05 ]
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
- Article I, Amendments to the Constitution.
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
- The Treaty of Tripoli, entered into by the USA under
George Washington.
A fact that George Washington and his collaborators took for granted was that the United States of America was the first Western country without an established religion. It was brought into being without a religious creed. There is no ‘state religion.’ In the United States a person has the right to worship or not to worship. He also has the right not to speak English. For good reasons the United States has no official religion, and similarly it has no official language. Religion and language are the private property of Americans, the people who come from everywhere. In America you could find, say, an Aramaic-speaking Zoroastrian, if you looked hard enough.
The Founders wanted the United States to break away from the past, to make a fresh start free from the old chains of feudal privilege and social class. They knew that religious differences are specious grounds for discrimination. The horrors of religious wars and rebellions were fresh in their memory. Furthermore, the new states were havens for those persecuted for their religious differences. Maryland, for example, had been the first colony to achieve religious freedom, the struggle between Catholics and Puritans there being resolved in 1691 when it was made a royal colony and the Church of England the established church, a creed liberal enough to accommodate most Christians.
It used to be against social convention to mention religious differences in public in America. There was something shameful about being seen as a member of a religious minority. Today religion is not to be considered before the other facets of one’s personality. It is only when an influential person’s expressed affiliations can be pernicious that we mention them. For example, it is better for a politician not to be a Roman Catholic. Look what happened to John Kerry, and to John Kennedy. Similarly, the views of lunatic preachers are held up to scrutiny and caveat.
We certainly did not talk about religious differences in public until totalitarian, absolutist religions, like Catholicism in the 19th Century and Islam in the 20th became intrusive.
There remained a problem the Founders had been trying to solve, expressed as E pluribus unum: out of many one, one state made of many states, one culture made of many cultures, one tribe made of many tribes, one clan made of many clans, one family made of many families made of individuals as unique and precious as life itself. How do we make one out of many if some do not agree?.
To expect everyone to practice the same religion and speak the same language was impossible in a free country, so the Founders ignored linguistic differences and made religious differences legally irrelevant. No laws respecting religion or language were considered. So, the American Religion and the American Language grew out of the common experiences of the people, just as all ways of speaking and behaving are formed. Language and religion are the backbones of culture in the widest sense.
Every person has at least one language. Every person acquires the language(s) he grows up with. Similarly, everyone has the religion(s) of the same people. He may reject or add on to the religion and the language for various reasons later on, but the unconscious and natural learning of his first language and religion stay with him all his life. They are part of his make-up. They seem right and beyond questioning.
Faith and religion, however, are not one and the same. Faith is the product of one mind. Religion, like a language, or a cuisine, or a kinship system, is a product of an ethnic group, something that happens when people live together for a long time. A religion is a way of life, an ethos, the guiding beliefs of a group. The American Religion is what it means to be an American, a progressive contender for excellence who has faith in the pursuit of happiness.
A language academy, an official cultural institution intended to maintain the purity of a language according to ‘law,’ exists only in that most Laputan of countries France, where ideals and reality infrequently coincide. The idea of tongue troopers and inquisitors is abhorrent to English speakers, so we have no arbiters of language or religion with much influence.
Language is the most obvious and physical part of everyone’s make-up. The language you use identifies you precisely, ethnically, socially, and often damningly. Furthermore, one can often use different styles, regional dialects, and even other languages to suit the occasion.
Faith, in contrast, is the most intangible and fabulous part of everyone’s make-up. It is beyond the physical and material world; it is metaphysical, that is, it is supernatural. It has to do to a reality that is beyond the senses. It is abstract, theoretical, beyond proof, extremely personal, and nobody’s business. So, do not try to make your faith my business and we’ll be OK. At the same time, we share a belief in ourselves that Harold Bloom calls the American Religion (The American Religion, Simon & Schuster, 1992). When I write ‘we’ I mean everybody. Post-Christian secular religion is the order of the day everywhere.
The Moses of the American Religion is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), the post-Christian lawgiver, a popular, radical preacher who said to Hell with the past, and whose good sense in teaching us self-reliance complemented the great revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, which ultimately produced such American religious movements as the Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, and Southern Baptists, and which profoundly affected the mainline Protestant sects, the Wesleyan Holiness denominations, the Catholics and Jews, and in particular the secularists who believe in the idea of America. The American Religion is to the old religions as jazz is to classical music, an independent, upstart child with amazing talents.
Knowing that God is hidden, and cannot be categorized and subjected to reason or philosophy, Emerson could claim: As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so all their creeds a disease of the intellect. (‘Self-Reliance’).
Consequently, without rules governing religion and language, Americans have spontaneously developed their own religion and language. The American religion incorporates the old festivals at the solstices and equinoxes, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, The Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Halloween, making them official holidays (Holy Days) with the general assent of everyone; it also contains the common law, freeing Americans from despotism and invasion of privacy. The theology of the American Religion is a congregational trust in the innate goodness of our fellow citizens, and the assumption that each individual has his own special knowledge that his personal God has given him. He knows that God loves him.
Americans’ faith in scientific progress is a sort of humanism that uses modern dentistry and electricity as proof of its validity. We thank our hidden, intimate God for computers and anaesthetics, and we often do it in public.
Several Christian and other cults became the American Religion, and several kinds of English came together to become American English, the lingua franca of the world, the all-purpose language without constraining rules or standards of correctness, except the Victorian social sensibilities of the schoolma’ams.
Following this pattern, the American Religion, the all-purpose religion, is easily adaptable to circumstances, and simple to use. The old religious sects became a set of social clubs extemporaneously or traditionally organized according to income levels and ethnic backgrounds, propriety being reduced to amusing hypocrisy and feigned outrage like President Clinton’s peccadillos and impeachment.
The melting pot, assimilation, works. Once the basic economic needs of a majority are satisfied, religious and linguistic differences become largely irrelevant. As mere excuses for discrimination they are no longer useful. For example, in a recent federal election in the United States, the winning candidate scored a home run exactly as required by the rules of the religion game. He touched first base by speaking at Bob Jones University, rounded second and third bases without touching the mainline or holiness churches, as permitted, and jumped on home plate in Vatican City with both feet.
In America we forget about religious conflicts or pretend they do not happen, excluding their frightening history from the schoolbooks. The American media rightly ignored the fact that the slaughtered in Kosovo were Moslems, and Orthodox and Roman Christians, because the real reasons for their murder was economic advantage and wealth, and we do not want to upset the Serbian, Croatian, and Albanian immigrants in the United States. Ethnicity, that is religion and language, is a no-no. We don’t want to talk about it in the melting pot.
Today we face violence because others are jealous of our good fortune, wealth, and strength. They do not care about religion; religion is only a cover, a disguised, camouflaged false front. If the use of Arabic were co-extensive with Islam, then Arabic users would be the enemy, to this way of thinking, but it is not. Adherents of Islam and speakers of Arabic are not the enemy. Their poverty and our theft of their resources are the causes of war. Jihad is for dollars, pounds, and euros, not for Islam. Whatever the motives, however, today we may no longer ignore fatwas, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, malignant, absolutist maniacs, and ignorant priests and preachers claiming that Islam is evil, and telling their parishioners how to vote. Down deep the real motives for violence are economic. Religion is the opiate of the suicide bomber.
Perpetrators of violence create tragedy, which has the effect of freeing them from the past. Violence is a cleansing force. It causes a catharsis, a purging of old poisons, a release from turmoil, poverty, and misery. It is liberation from the strictures of the old ways. It frees those who do not share our way of life from their feelings of inferiority, their despair, helplessness, and inaction; it makes them feel that they are at once the center of things. It restores their self-respect even if it kills them.
Where does that leave us?
Our humane Western way of life today is a product of Christian ethics filtered through wars, reformations and social theories, they say. We cherish liberty, justice, peace, order, good government, dignity, and self-realization, ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ because of the ethics and morality of enlightened reason. Science, art, and faith in progress have replaced the old religions as the source of our values. What we now hold dear is the American Religion. Progress is the most important goal of the American Religion, salvation and redemption being the right of every American.
Humane people, Europeans and Americans in particular, have a way with the world; many other people do not have a way. Our science gives us technology. Our technology controls nature to a large extent. Art gives individual value, beauty, and meaning to the benefits of science. Faith gives us the strength to believe we are right and justified in our work, and that every day in every way we are getting better and better.
Of course, the preceding is bullshit. The Promethean fire stolen from Zeus ultimately will consume us.
Boy, do we have a surprise coming!
We know deep in our hearts that progress is ephemeral, gone in a heartbeat like salvation. One vicious, evil act has repercussions far beyond the moment. For example, 9/11 lives in the memory, inescapable. Every image of the Manhattan skyline calls up the Trade Towers in our minds, whether they are there or not.
Now that the Global War on Terror has become ‘the struggle against violent extremism,’ a war of ideas to win the hearts and minds (sound familiar?) of Islamist extremists, to be waged by the same arrogant incompetents who in all bad faith gave you Iraq...
Maybe there is a way to skip the next chapter, which promises to be a bloody disaster.
That but this blow
Might be the be-all and end-all here -
But here upon this bank and shoal of time -
We’d jump the life to come.
- Macbeth, I:7.
