A faith perspective on current events. By: Fr. Steven Foppiano
Where are the Guidelines?
The Western world has largely turned against their back on their own roots. I am speaking her about the move towards secularism and away from anything religious. In our country there are strong efforts to ensure that in anything government is involved with, that religion is absent. In San Diego the use of a church bell tower on the city symbol is objected to as a religious object while elsewhere crosses are being removed from public lands. Of course, our schools can not seriously study religion and even the idea of a holiday for Christmas or Easter is now being replaced with “Winter” or “Spring” vacations. Despite holding up the mantal of free speech, public schools have banned any religious references in ceremonies, not even allowing a prayer at graduation services.
The problem with all of this is that we owe so much to religion and it is, in fact, at the very heart of our civilization. We forget that the freedoms we enjoy and the rights we proclaim are not something that came out of a revolutionary committee. Whether you look to the common law justice in Europe or our very own Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, there you will find the roots of these ideas in religion.
The first legal system of the West was Canon Law, the laws of the Church. It in itself is derived from the scriptures, particularly from the Ten Commandments. It is from this beginning that English law was derived and from this origin that all Western law developed.
The founders of our nation were also very religious men. The problem is that today we try to understand them from the basis of our own faith. In fact, many were Deists, those who believe in God but do not see God as a personal being. God is untouchable yet God is the origin of all things. In particular they found God in what came to be called our inalienable rights. Most of the founders would have no problem referring to 'God given rights.' They did not seperate our existance from the existance of God.
Our inalienable rights are those rights which cannot be taken away because they are not given by any worldly institution. They are ours by means of whom we are, human beings, made in the image of God. Our right to happiness, our right to worship God, our rights to life and liberty, these are all rights found in the scriptures because they are rights given us in our creation by God. As beings of God, these rights are ours and cannot be taken away. In the same way we have been given responsibilities which we cannot dispose of. These responsibilities are also found in the scriptures, beginning with the commandment to not kill and being carried forward throughout scriptures in the commands to care for the poor, stand up for the helpless, and to respect the rights of others.
If we totally separate our society from its religious roots, where will we draw our line of acceptable behavior? Will it be left to our leaders? The world has examples of this in Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Poi Pot, and many others. This week a secret mass burial site was found in Russia, dating back to the time of Stalin. During his reign he murdered over 20 million of his own citizens because he thought it was needed for the good of his society, a good that he measured by his own standard. Is this what we want standards of moral behavior based on; whoever is in charge at the time? Who do you trust to set the standards you are to live by?
In Christianity, the Western World found a standard that works. It provides not only guidelines for our own behavior but guidelines for the society as a whole. The Western World has not always been able to live up to these standards but it at least has had a goal by which to measure its progress. Eliminate the roots of our morality found in religion and you wipe clean all milestones for behavior. Everything becomes subjective and nothing can be said to be clearly wrong. We are already close to this type of thinking and we cannot afford to move closer in this direction. Government is horning its way into all aspects of life and makes up more and more of our society. If we eliminate all references to God in our government, we may well eliminate it from our society as a whole.
In our constitution we have been granted the freedom of religion, not freedom from it. The intent was not to wipe out all mention of God in the public forum. It was to ensure that we could each worship God in our own way, so long as we remained within clear moral guidelines; guidelines that were set by Christianity but which apply to itself and to all faiths. The main concern was that there not be an official religion of our government. Europe had gone this way and the original pilgrims were coming here to escape the constraints of “official” churches of European governments, particularly the Church of England.
We need to be true to the intent of our constitution which itself reflected the desires of the earliest pilgrims. The intent is that here we would be able to worship God without government interference. It is not that we have to be sterile of all references to God or to our own history. If we wipe out the very principles that we were founded on, where will we drift to in the future? Who will tells us what standards we should live by or, the standards that they will live by. Will power become the only arbitrator of justice? If so, then God help us all.
Father Steven Foppiano