"He's Not the Kind You Have To Wind Up on Sundays"

If you've never heard this fine tune, it's the final song on Jethro Tull's "Aqualung," and it deals with the hypocrisy of people who wear their religion on their sleeves on Sunday ... but basically ignore it every other day of the week.

If you're looking one of the great social shifts in the United States of America in the 21st century, look no further than religion ... or, to be more specific, Christianity.

In 1966, John Lennon said the following: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right, and I will be proved right. We are more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

Now, it's quite possible that Lennon, since he was only 25 years old when he said these words, uttered them in a haze of human hubris. It's doubtful that Lennon had anywhere near the insight, at his age, and regardless of HOW much acid he'd ingested by then, to have been able to predict the controversy that religion has caused in this last decade.

In 1966, the western world was still predominantly, and smugly, Christian. People questioned it, sure. Time Magazine even had a cover story asking if God was dead. There have always been agnostics, athiests, and -- perhaps more important -- people who subscribed to other religions, and other forms of spirituality. But there is no doubt that, back in 1966, that people who argued against school prayer, for example, were clearly in the minority (and by school prayer, I think we can all agree that we were talking about Christian/Catholic school prayer).

I use 1966 is a point of demarkation here because that's the year Time asked if God was dead, and the year that Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Like most everything else about the '60s, attitudes about religion were being re-examined under a different microscope. Maybe, the examinations revealed, it wasn't such a good thing to marry government and religion as freely as we had in the precedingn decades. Maybe, the examination revealed, the first amendment that prohibited the establishment of a national religion REALLY meant that government couldn't coerce its citizens, either overtly or covertly, to subscribe to a specific religion ... and that MAYBE the umbrella under which the amendment protected religious freedom included the banning of school prayer in public schools.

Now, the more introspective Christians (and let's include Catholics here so we don't have to keep saying two words instead of one; Catholics often don't want to be associated with a lot of these right-wing nut Christian sects, even though they're not really bastions of liberalism themselves) among us understand this, and they're all right with it. They see that public schools in the United States, especially in the inner cities, are melting pots whose religions affiliations go in a thousand and one different directions.

The less introspective Christians (and thre are a TON of them!!!!) see this as an example of "Godless Communism."

Now, let's digress for a few minutes and discuss Godless Communism. And let me preface by saying that in no WAY to I think that came out of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution was in any way desirable, moral, or even workable (as history has ultimately proven). But I do understand the Soviet Unionn's feeling about religion. Christians don't like hearing this, but religion has been the cause of a lot of pain in this world, from the time of Christ all the way up to now. It causes divisions and rifts among people for no other reason than their chosen paths toward spiritual fulfillment, which is perhaps the WORST reason to divide people. At different times in world history, people have been slaughtered en masse because of religious differences, and the Christians are no less guilty of this -- over the long, long haul -- than the most radical Muslem.

So if the Soviets, in their effort to create a more balanced society, felt that religion unnecessarily divided people -- not to mention got them killed -- then it's certainly understandable. But all the Soviets really did, however, was create a state and it treated like a God, and that's really not much of a difference at all. You'd better not worship God, but you'd better worship the state. That's the worst kind of nationalism there is, and you can see where this system didn't even last through the end of the 20th century.

Back to the subject at hand. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of a national religion, but it doesn't say people cannot practice their religions -- either in their own homes or right out there in public. And while I can see the logic that causes citizens to complain about using public money to put a Christmas creche up in the town square, I cannot see the logic that allows them to complain, and picket, if a private enterprise wants to foot the bill for said creche. We still have religious freedom in this country, not to mention freedom of expression, and if the owner of a department store wants to pay to put a plastic Baby Jesus in a manger, and put it on the town common, well, don't be telling him he can't do it. That's going too far.

On the other hand, when some judge in Alabama, or Mississippi, wants to carve the 10 Commandments on a slate outside his courthouse, that's a not-so-tacit crossing of the line between church and state ... and CLEARLY must be prohibited. Whatever laws we deem to follow on this country, we follow because they're ethically inspired, not religiously inspired. And even if, oftentimes, they're one and the same, that's not the point.

Most of these arguments were in place, and very much in the field of play, when George W. Bush was elected president (well, to be more accurate, was handed the presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court), and brought his born-again philosophy to the White House. Under ordinary circumstances, the excessive tendencies of zealots were to be watched, for sure, but there were all probably deemed harmless in comparison to other issues that greeded the president in 2001.

But then came September 11, 2001. Everything changed. And among the great changes that swept across the country were attitudes toward religion. There were people who dug in, and saw this as the resurrection of an ancient battle between the Moslems and Christians (if you go to Wiki and look up Muhammad, it'll tell you that the Moslems consider themselves the purest form of God's teaching, and that all the rest of the religions are infidels). The more radical Moslems consider it their duty to weed out the infidels (a polite way, I suppose of saying "kill them,") so that the purity of Islam can flourish once again.

This is one attitude.

Others, and I kind of put myself in this boat, suggest that the purity of Islam has very little to do with what's happening, and that all of this terrorism is purely political, borne of the Moslem world's raging resentment over how it's been occupied and exploited by western powers for centuries. There's one thing about religious people that rings true again and again: the most zealous of them are gullible to ridiculous degrees. Tell them if they do this, or that, that they'll be saved for all eternity, and they're on board. Tell someone you're asking to martyr himself for a cause (that -- as any sensible person can see -- is more political and spiritual) that he'll be greeted by seven virgins in paradise, and if that's their ONLY formal education, they may buy into it.

I don't think the people who lead these terrorist cells are as devoutly religious as they are devoutly political. They use religion to twist people into doing their bidding for them the exact same way David Korech and Jim Jones did.

This is no big secret ... at least not to me. So when these hysterical people want to frame this debate as some monolithic religious struggle, I want to scream.

But there's been a curious backlash ... I think, anyway. And it's being borne out by reports, that just came out this week, that people are changing their religions more now than at any other time in U.S. history.

Why is this?

I think it's because for the first time in American history, we see the damaged, up close and personal, that radical religion can cause. There haven't been many times, in the history of this country, where religion has caused serious, historic tragedies. There have been the Jonestowns, and Wacos, and all of that, but these people have always been dismissed as the lunatic fringe. And while it's true ... they ARE the lunatic fringe ... we've always been able to smugly disassociate ourselves from the worst of it. That's not US. No WAY the local Episcopalian church at the corner would ever be on board for THAT. We need not worry. That'll never happen in Smalltown America.

Even after 9/11, as horrible as that was, we could at least say "that's those crazy Moslems. We should just carpet bomb every country over there and exterminate them. Then everything would be OK."

But would it?

I remember a few years ago when a soldier from Marblehead, Massachusetts was killed in Afghanistan, and this small sect called the Westboro Baptist Church, from Kansas, picketed his funeral because, to them, his death was God's way of punishing America for being tolerant of homosexuality.

It didn't surprise me that they picketed. it's America, and Lord knows there are crazies all over the place -- even in America. What bothered me was the stunning silence of more mainstream Christian groups who DIDN'T consider it their duty to set the record straight and say "hey, whoa! They don't represent ME, my CHURCH, or ANYTHING that I think and believe."

As they say, the silence was deafening.

Now, I thought it was every Christian's duty to set the record straight. And that really, really opened my eyes. There are times in this life when you have to set yourself apart from the thundering herd of Rhinoseri careening down the street (a tip of the cap to Eugene Ionnesco). And if there's that much hatred in this world, then if you consider yourself anywhere near a MORAL person, you have to stand up and be counted.

But fringe groups notwithstanding, there was the Roman Catholic pedophilia scandal in which the church was very slow to see what was happening, and even slower to respond. If one of the stated purposes of religion is to set the moral bar high, then how is that possible when your priests (or some of them, anyway) are molesting young boys and your organizational structure will not respond?

Finally, there's the 2004 election, in which the Republican party absolutely co-opted evangelicals all across America. It's one thing to be religious, and it's one thing to apply your religious beliefs to the way YOU live. But for a group of generally extremely right wing religious zealots is allowed to hold that much sway over a national election? That's downright scary.

So I think Americans now see religion with a much more cynical eye. I think people really, and finally, see why it's so important to keep religion out of government, and government out of religion.

Don't forget: the framers of the constitution were only a century and a half removed from persecuting "witches" in Salem, Massachusetts. They were only a century and a half of stockades, and other forms of public humiliation, for religious transgressions. They were only a century and a half of a puritan heritage that actually survives, in many quarters, TO THIS DAY.

There are all kinds of reasons to be concerned about the growing influence of the religious right in American politics, beginning with a general rush to judgment about how we live our lives up to, and including, hijacking Roe vs. Wade.

This examination is long overdue, as this is the single most unsettling development in this country's political history, probably, since the runup to the Civil War.