The greatest danger facing the nation today is not terrorism but the wave of followers of messianic leadership. True, as in Osama bin Laden, this leads to terrorism, or in the case of the likes of Saddam to brutal totalitarianism, but in more ostensibly sophisticated nations or groups of people, brutality is clothed in the subtlety of misshapen values.

In this country the early settlers were apostates of European religion and had suffered persecution; so naturally they founded their colonies on religious freedom and suspicion of secular government. The founding fathers were aware of the religious spirit of the people and therefore established that no law would prohibit freedom of worship. A wall was erected between the body politic and the right of religion.

But for minimal chipping away, the wall was secure for developing the management of law through which one pursued daily affairs in making a living , after which the Sabbath was set aside for religious matters. However, those with strong spiritual beliefs were unable to separate the two and increasingly interfered with secular law, claiming it was artificially separating sectarian beliefs from temporal behavior which omitted the essential guidance of divinity.

The shady inference that nature’s laws were always in truth God’s laws without stating such became intolerable to believers. No longer was faith a private thing or a unique matter for the Sabbath; inner conscience became public pronouncement. Taking an oath with a hand on the Bible and opening congressional sessions with prayer were ammunition for the self-styled spiritualists to make further demands for a more open religious entry into daily life. A woman no longer could make a private decision to abort a fetus in the cornfield. Since communism was deemed godless, the “under God” was inserted in the pledge when ‘under democratic principles” would have sufficed. In spite of all this, the nation managed to uphold to a reasonable degree the separation of church and state — that is, until the messianic prophets of the religious right grew in power.

Now, with the messianic epitome of George W. Bush who preaches and lectures his constituents that the law of the land is God given and therefore he has license to interpret from the mount what the Almighty judges: homosexuals, if not diseased, are hedonists; the poor weak and shiftless; the sick irresponsible; unions unpatriotic; single mothers sinners; a woman’s body subject to law; the military as cross-bearing crusaders; corporations as benevolent manna givers; and liberalism as effeminate atheism led by an apostatizing altar boy. Last but not least, Bush is an ordained wartime president because “God is on our side.”

Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 30, 2004.

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