Here are a couple paragraphs from the excerpt appearing in last week’s edition of Newsweek from Jon Meacham’s new book “American Gospel.” Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek, an Episcopalian, and I’ve heard him speak on a number of television and radio programs. He is good, despite my disagreement with a few of his theological perspectives.
He is commenting on the current issues of faith in public life, the culture wars, and the animosity that seems to inflict much of our current and common life.
“Understanding the past may help us move forward. When the subject is faith in the public square, secularists reflexively point to the Jeffersonian ‘wall of separation between church and state’ as though the conversation should end there; many conservative Christians defend their forays into the political arena by citing the Founders, as through Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were cheerful Christian soldiers. Yet to claim that religion has only recently become a political force in the United States is uniformed and unhistorical; in practice, the ‘wall’ of separation is not a very tall one. Equally wrongheaded is the tendency of conservative believers to portray the Founding Fathers as apostles in knee britches.
“The great good news about America – the American Gospel, if you will – is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, the Founders made a nation in which faith should not be singled out for special help or particular harm. The balance between the promise of the Declaration of Independence, with its evocation of divine origins and destiny, and the practicalities of the Constitution, with its checks on extremis, remains the most brilliant American successes.”
(Newsweek, April 10, 2006, Vol. CXLVII, No. 15, p.54)