Without separation of church and state, ideology fails

Dubya has always made me paranoid. At first, I thought his inauguration was part of a secret… Dubya has always made me paranoid. At first, I thought his inauguration was part of a secret campaign to make Americans progressively less competent. I had images of Cheney and Rummy sitting in a bunker saying ” Hey, let’s put someone in office who has noticeable difficulty conjugating too many verbs successively. If we desensitize our citizens to botched grammar, then botched reasoning will be more palatable.”

Phase 1 of this little enterprise was good for some laughs. But the problem is we’re well into Phase 2 and our class-clown commander-in-chief has now decided he’s a hybrid of Steve McQueen and the Lamb of God. I can stomach the “axis of evil” – Sept. 11, 2001, mandated some tough guy talk, and Bush delivered in a way that a president who wonders “what the definition of ‘is’ is” couldn’t do. What I can’t deal with is that Bush keeps church and state about as separate as Osama and his turban.

In a time when we’re trying to convince the Western world that Gulf War part deux is a necessary and well-reasoned attempt to start delegitimizing Islamic law, Bush decides it’s OK to stand under a 10-foot-tall mural of Jesus and tell us that we’ll be protected by “the loving God behind all of life and all of history.” War will always be theater, but when the lead is played by the Methodist actors’ guild, we’ve got a problem.

The problem isn’t that the imagery of the two good shepherds marshalling us to world order is heavy-handed. Rather, it’s that you can’t pretend to attack the credibility of a regime you consider backward and ill-informed by being ill-informed yourself. Although things may only feel like “Jesus vs. Allah” in the abstract, this is a case where the abstract is worth exploring. Bush is in a position to make all the difference in the history we’re making now. His rhetoric will determine whether our society can legitimize itself by seeing the issue at hand: we’ve finally come to the point where we have to abandon Jesus, Allah, Gods, Godlets, Spirits, Forces, Field, Fluxes, Gnomes, Goblins, and all other icons of the divine persuasion.

Here’s the way I see it. Church and state were made separate so we can at least sustain the illusion that national decisions aren’t motivated by a desire to rack up points with the divine. It’s a beautiful idea – even though 90 percent of Americans believe in some kind of higher being, we’re intelligent enough to realize if we play the religious favorites game at the state level, we’re going to get into more trouble than we can handle. The solution? Tolerance when appropriate, and strictness when required.

That may sound like a nice principle, but it’s tough trying to execute it when there’s no consensus on what “tolerance,” “appropriate,” “strictness,” or “required” are. Is it wrong to put up a nativity scene on public grounds? Well, yes. But it just feels so damn Christmas-y, doesn’t it?

The game is totally different when you’re running a country. There can be a decent case made for ousting Saddam Hussein. But Bush’s public claim that “behind all of life and all of history there’s a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful god,” is totally inexcusable. The reason we pulse with anger when we hear Osama and his henchmen thanking Allah and nodding in Parkinsonian unison is the same reason we should tell Bush to watch what he’s saying. Even William Bennet, the conservative moral pundit, has said, “[Bush] turns to the language of faith naturally without thinking as to whether it would be a good idea or not.”

Although I’m proud of Bush for splitting fewer infinitives, I think he needs to think hard about what Bennet is trying to tell him. When you turn to the language of faith, you start playing intellectual tennis with no net up. I don’t know about you, but I find Bush’s faith in providence about as comforting as the mosque Hussein had commissioned (with its dedication written in his own blood). Hussein looks crazy because his people are poor and pissed off, and he has a genius for capitalizing on this discontent with metaphors of faith.

Maybe we should take the time to be scared of the home team, which finds the need to resort to providence even with all the cards stacked in its favor.

Jason Castro is a columnist for The Pitt News.