Each year, on the first Thursday of May, elected officials gather in Washington, D.C., and around the country for the National Day of Prayer. It’s a day when public servants from the president on down encourage Americans of all faiths to pray and contemplate the role of the divine in their lives. But 20 percent of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated or simply don’t believe in God — and many of them aren’t comfortable with the idea of a government-sanctioned occasion that shuts them out entirely. This week, Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who represents the District of Columbia…introduced a resolution to create a secular alternative to the National Day of Prayer. The one-time occasion, known as the National Day of Reason, would be observed on Thursday, May 5, the same day as this year’s National Day of Prayer. According to the resolution’s authors, the National Day of Reason would provide an opportunity for the religious and non-religious alike to come together and recognize “the importance of reason in the betterment of humanity.”
Ah, the separation of Church and State- that hallowed, time-honored idea which holds religious faith to be a deeply personal issue having no place in affairs of state. The Founding Fathers wanted to avoid the mistakes England had made in intermingling politics and religion, and so they determined that to be successful American governance must be free of theological strictures. They didn’t want to preside over the sort of theocracy we see today in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, and they understood that the commingling of religion and government represented nothing if not a recipe for disaster and theological tyranny.
Fast forward a couple of centuries, and it would appear some folks slept through that part of their high school Civics class. Not only do many on the Far Right not accept the separation of Church and State, they insist that America is a Christian nation and that American governance must reflect that truth by basing government on biblical principles. That the theocrats would, of course, be the ones defining those principles and how they’re to be employed goes without saying. The similarities between theocracy and tyranny extend far beyond the letters both words begin with.
The National Day of Prayer, while no doubt a well-intentioned and arguably relatively harmless expression of Christian piety, is nonetheless a clear and undeniable violation of the separation of Church and State. Those who support refuse it to acknowledge this, of course, because, good Christians that they are, they see no harm in dissolving the separation of Church and State when it suits their purpose. And, as ANY good Christian knows, you can’t go wrong by denouncing those with the temerity to consider themselves good without God.
How could an atheist claim a right to sit at the table, when ANY good, God-fearing, Conservative Christian patriot understands that America’s a Christian nation, and that if you ain’t got Jesus, you ain’t $#!%?
I suspect the proposal for a National Day of Reason will encounter all manner of furious opposition from those who demand their One, True, and ONLY Faith © be respected even as they discount the beliefs of others. If they could dial back the righteous outrage, they might recognize that no one is advocating against their right to practice their faith. Proponents of a National Day of Reason are merely arguing that religion and government function best when they function separately.
Is it any wonder that advocating for the denial of the rights of those who consider themselves good without God seems to be one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination allowed in this country?
