Church and State: The Final Merger

I couldn’t believe my ears Sunday. I was driving home and turned on the radio. It was a religious program. And the topic of the day was, believe it or not, the Senate rules regarding filibusters.

(Out of about 200 judicial nominations, the Democrats have blocked just ten or so. But the GOP and churches are acting as if the Dems have blocked them all.)

There is no denying it now. There is no more waiting to see. It is here. It is now. And it is very, very dangerous to our religious freedom, our democracy, and our Constitution.

The GOP and Religious Right had their “coming out” party this past Sunday. They called it “Justice Sunday,” but really is was a funeral for checks and balances.

What I was hearing was the sound of blatant hypocrisy. The host of the event, the Family Research Council, brought in a line of Republicans and pastors to preach the gospel of One-Party Rule. And the current obstacle to that end is the Senate filibuster. The current opinion of this group is that the use of a filibuster to prevent an up-or-down vote on a judicial nominee is EVIL. It’s against God and Christ. It’s against the divine plan of merging Church and State in America.

It’s also something this very group PRAISED just a decade ago. When Clinton wanted to appoint a gay man as an ambassador, the FRC wrote at length of the absolute constitutional NEED for the filibuster. It was good, it was just, it was... the needed tool (at the time) for the divine plan of merging Church and State in America.

Here’s what the FRC spokesman said on NPR those years ago: "The Senate," he said, "is not a majoritarian institution, like the House of Representatives is. It is a deliberative body, and it's got a number of checks and balances built into our government. The filibuster is one of those checks in which a majority cannot just sheerly force its will, even if they have a majority of votes in some cases. That's why there are things like filibusters, and other things that give minorities in the Senate some power to slow things up, to hold things up, and let things be aired properly."

I wish this were the only instance of “religious” activists using their influence to peddle purely-secular Republican causes. It isn’t. Churches across the country saw preachers at the pulpit saying a vote for Bush was a vote for God. It didn’t matter that a vote for Bush was really a vote for unchallenged corporate rule.

The real problem here is not that religion is taking over our government. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Political schemers have taken control of American churches. They praise the sanctity of profit and accumulated property. They convince people that money can buy influence with God (“pay off your vows/pledges to this TV show and God will give you the car you want”; it’s indulgences all over again).

Religious freedom is at risk in America. These fundamentalist whackos aren’t seeking to increase our freedoms. They intend to fuse money and God, then canonize the righteousness of accumulated wealth, then impose that singular vision--all packaged abundantly with images and rhetoric of Jesus--on every person in America.