A Wink and a Nod to General God
by Orlando Strong
I once had the pleasure of hearing a priest and a young man speak about an interfaith prayer service, which was being hosted in our parish and in which the priest was to participate. The young man asked the priest if there really would be prayer. He responded,
“Of course, my brother.”
The young man asked, “Who will you pray to?”
“To God, of course.”
The young man looked down, puzzled. “But to which God, Father?”
“To the one, true God!” said the priest, laughing calmly.
“So you’ll pray to Jesus Christ with all those people from different religions?”
The priest became a little nervous. “Well, no, but we will pray to the same God that we all believe in.”
The young man answered, “But won’t the people there believe in different gods? The Muslims there believe that God has no son, but spoke through the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and the Jews there believe that God has not yet sent the messiah.”
“We will pray to the God of us all. I mean, to… GOD… God in general.” Upon saying, “God in general”, the priest waved his hands in opposing circles in the air, like a magician casting a spell, or a man washing a car.
The young man protested, “But, Father, how can Buddhists, Muslims, and Catholics pray together when they believe mutually exclusive things about God?”
The priest shrugged his shoulders and the conversation was dropped.
In this exchange, the concept of “God in general” truly made me think about the role of religion in the United States. Many would opine that the United States is a Christian nation because, after all, the Pledge of Allegiance calls us “one nation, under God”, and we have “In God We Trust” on our money and state buildings. Moreover, the Declaration of Independence itself says that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and mentions the “Supreme Judge of the World” and the “Protection of Divine Providence”. With only a little consideration, however, one realizes that these acknowledgments of God are more ambiguous than many Christians would like. Does the Declaration refer to the Creator as understood by the Catholic creeds, or by one of many Protestant statements of faith? Is it the God of Islam who will be the Supreme Judge of the World? Is the Deist God, in whom so many Founding Fathers believed, the Divine Providence who offers his protection? Or do we have another revelation of the General God?
Very often, especially around the Fourth of July, churchgoers around the country will be regaled from the pulpits, physical and digital, about the Christian heritage of the United States. Besides the mention of the above passages from the Declaration of Independence, they will hear about George Washington’s ardent prayer life and the discipline of fasting imposed on his troops; they will hear “When I was your age” stories about teachers leading their students in recitation of the Our Father in public schools; they will hear quotations from great Americans regarding the foundational importance of Christianity to our nation, such as the proclamation attributed to Patrick Henry: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ”. Weaved through this litany of impressive Christian monuments will be laments about the current state of America, how we have lost our way, and how there are people in power who hate our faith and want to turn this country into a haven for all breeds of immorality. What so many well-intentioned pastors and laypeople fail to recognize, however, is that the source of all their spiritual frustration lies at the very heart of the American founding: legally, and explicated numerous times in various courts of law, religion is precluded from legislative civil order. The First Amendment to the Constitution, while guaranteeing its “free exercise”, begins by immutably ordaining that, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion”. Many will assert that this clause means only that the government may not establish any state church, and that it has always been understood that Christianity is the guiding light for the United States. Again, I will direct the postulator to the actual legal decisions underlying our society. For example, in the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education, Justice Hugo Black wrote,
The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion to another ... In the words of Jefferson, the [First Amendment] clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and State’ ... That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. (Note: This case addressed the government bussing of children to parochial schools and if it violates the First Amendment. The Justices ruled that it does not.)
Even if it were true (though it is not) that Christianity were the moral foundation of the United States, of whose interpretation of Christianity do we speak? The Presbyterians’, the Mormons’, the Catholics’, the Unitarians’? When brought to this distilment, most political American Christians will say that the majority of the Founding Fathers were practicing Christians and that they always intended for Americans to organize our country on biblical principles, while leaving us the legal freedom of conscience to choose as we see fit—essentially, that the Founding Fathers left us legal agnosticism with a wink and a nod.
It is my belief that those who favor extreme secularist positions, such as the lack of protection of unborn life, the redefinition of traditional marriage, and the removal of prayer from public institutions, are entirely vindicated and endorsed under the law. We are free to worship in our homes and churches (and synagogues, and mosques, et. al.), but the public sphere must, legally, be free of any partiality to one religion or all of them. In place of public religion remains an optional, unofficial reverence for a General God who embraces all creeds and offends none.
For many secular millennials, the issue stops here. For the faithful Christian, however, we are left with many sad realizations. We cannot reconcile our beloved faith with the laws that govern our beloved land. Both major political parties are moving farther and farther away from authentic Christian teaching and no candidate squares with the voting guides given to us by our pastors. We can only watch as the nostalgic sentiment of Christian heritage is eroded by the whips and scorns of modernism; and our freedom, bought with the Blood of Christ, is more and more narrowly confined. The philosophical dissonance is especially astringent for Catholics: we must choose between collaborating with material evil among the secularists, profess allegiance to General God, or hope for a more emphatic wink and a nod to some iteration of Christian provenance. With the law so decidedly unfavorable to us, the only option for faithful Christians is manifest: to change the law.
As a devoted Royalist, I assert that the only just society is based on the Gospel of Christ and fidelity to his Holy Church. While contemporary pontiffs have vocalized respect for civil government and the conscience rights of non-Christians—which, I honestly believe, is very well and good—it is evident from the vast expanse of Catholic social teaching that public worship is due by right to the Risen Lord. Pope St. Pius X makes this truth plentifully clear in his 1906 encyclical Vehementer nos:
That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it.
As such, I advocate that the establishment clause of the First Amendment must be legally and peacefully repealed and, in its place, must be raised an unequivocal proclamation that the United States is a Christian nation loyal to Christ and his Vicar on earth. The government satisfies only a paucity of its responsibilities if it neglects its duties to help its citizens to Heaven. For those whose loyalty is to God, the Queen, and the Holy Church, and we must not compromise our eternal reward for the sake of political mollifications.
Christ has redeemed us and bought us with blood,
to serve and adore and fight for the good;
so therefore it’s treason, or at least fraud,
to wink and to nod at General God.
