“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” says the Psalmist (33:12). What can that verse mean for us in the United States, or in any Western nation whose laws are predicated upon either religious neutrality, or irreligion?
It will not do to say to the Psalmist, “Every nation has its own gods, just as you have yours.” He knows that already. In fact, he could hardly imagine any nation without a god. It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute that to his time and place.
Every nation will have a god or gods, what the people value above all things, what in effect they bow down to in worship. “Some boast of chariots, and some of horses,” the Psalmist says elsewhere, “but we boast of the name of the Lord our God.” (Psalm 20:7)
Some people trust in political powerbrokers, but, says Isaiah, “the protection of Pharaoh [shall] turn to your shame.” (Isaiah 30:3) And Ezekiel saw the women of Israel, at the temple, “weeping for Tammuz,” the Sumerian Adonis, god of fertility, dying every year to be reborn again. (Ezekiel 8:14)
So too did the men of Judah follow along with the inhuman fertility cult of Moloch, when even Manasseh the king “burned his son as an offering” (2 Kings 21:8), and when they set up sacred prostitutes, both women and boys, as part of the cult of the Baalim and the Asherah, Canaanite fertility gods and goddesses (see 2 Kings 23 for the good Josiah’s campaign to destroy their groves and banquet houses).
The trappings of man’s worship may change, but his heart does not change. When he turns his back on the Lord, he reverts to the same old false gods, got up in new garb: military force, political power, wealth, sex.
People will worship. They will bow down in homage to a person or a thing; perhaps to some idol of themselves. They will obey, and they will be all the more basely obedient, they will fawn and flatter all the more, as their god is false and foolish.
Man is never cut free from obedience, heeding his own will alone; that is only to say that man does not create himself. The question is whether he will worship God, the Creator who made him to be free as an obedient son is free, raising himself by obedience into greater responsibility and greater capacity for action; or a false god, one that promises freedom but claps the manacles on his mind and heart, and often enough on his hands as well.
“Perhaps,” says someone who thinks of individual choices above all, “but where does the nation come into it?”
Here: there can be no nation without common worship, because nationhood must be nourished in the soil of culture, and culture without religion is an absurdity.
People cannot be united by the choices that individuals make as individuals, to be valued because it is individuals who make them. We are made one by what we turn to in awe and gratitude, setting aside, in that sacred space, the countless things that would have us at each other’s throats.
I am well aware that men may fight over religion, as they fight over everything else. The question is not whether they fight, but what can make them lay down their arms and sing together.
Liberalism can at best provide a truce, if a nation is wealthy and if there is a de facto commonality in religious worship, in the regular practice of most people in the small places where they live.
Liberalism cannot of itself bring peace, and it cannot constitute a nation. And we do want nations, not agglomerations of individuals, as we want real neighborhoods and towns, not geopolitical fictions. We want them as we want fresh air, clean water, and good food. We cannot thrive without them.
A nation wherein everyone is a liberal Cyclops, pursuing “happiness” as if it could be gotten apart from the common good and apart from the divine that alone can establish in our hearts a love for people we otherwise and with plenty of self-justification might ignore or despise or hate, is not a nation at all, regardless of constitutions, electoral machinery, governmental bodies, and the habits of mass man, consuming entertainment, politics, sport, and popcorn.
“Blessed the nation whose God is the Lord.” Do we believe that? If we do, I cannot see how to justify making religious indifference the cornerstone of our national edifice. It is the stone which God has rejected, and “unless the Lord shall build the house, they labor in vain who build it.” (Psalm 127:1)
A policy of benign governmental neutrality, friendly to faith in God, may be of practical use for a people who already are a people, who possess a thriving culture, and who acknowledge the self-revelation of God in Scripture; I include the Jewish people in my consideration here. But it can also cease to be of use. If it is made into a fundamental principle of life, it does harm.
For man is one and not two. We do not have political man here and religious man there. You cannot sever the world from its Creator. So too you cannot sever man in his daily duties from man made by God for eternal life.
Any attempt to do so will either truncate his soul or leave him in a nervous muddle. His arts will wither, his families fray, his neighbors fade from vision. Will he read the Bible? He will not even read Emerson.
“Blessed the nation whose God is the Lord.” I do not believe we can reduce that verse to a vague feeling of niceness and helpfulness, with a pinch of incense, or to various policy prescriptions seasoned with a little verse from the Sermon on the Mount.
How to embody its truth in a nation’s customs and laws – that is the question on the table now.
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