Our forefathers’ original mistake in printing American currency was to blur the “L” out of it, and so it is that we continue to insist we’re a Christian nation because our coinage hymns out, “In God We Trust.”
Biblically speaking, this was one of those “fortunate falls.” Where else more appropriate for “God” than His endorsement printed on the object Americans worship the most?
“Gold” just doesn’t ring with it!
Religion, in its larger sense, reaches out to the pocketbook as readily as it does to the spirit. With good old American efficiency, we’re religiously inspired to collection-plate conscience. Corporate billions assured by Monday-to-Saturday cheating from the wage earner can be rendered onto God and Caesar in one fell swoop on Sunday, and the heavens will smile upon the thief. Render onto Aetna or the god of pharmaceuticals, and it will be returned one-hundred fold in the form of “claim denied.” In Gold They Thrust!
Freedom of a state-imposed religion may have motivated our ancestors’ emigration from England, but it ran a close second to material gain and individual prosperity:
. . . for the colonist, once freed, to worship and to feed
Imposed his fervent greed and persecuting need
On those impious souls who disagreed.
The only time any kind of theocracy ruled in America, women were imprisoned and publicly humiliated for adultery by their pious “brothers;” others were executed for witchcraft. And Holy Wars have been no less barbaric via our country’s “Christian” execution than the oily truth that motivated them.
The masquerade of religious zeal covers the materialism that blesses the corrupt congressman in his pursuit of power and wealth for himself; death for lack of health care for his constituents.
We are, in fact, a nation of diversity. One may worship anything from the god of the purple pelican to the golden cow if he so chooses, and make a church of it if he can find followers. In addition, our freedom of religion includes the freedom to be irreligious.
We may choose to pray our own prayer in our own religious language in the privacy of our own closets and not, like the Pharisee, make a public parade of it.
We do not call ourselves “Christian” because God blesses us with money for our patronage and withholds it from the undeserving poor. We are Christians in what we give, not what we take.