Faith in America

Faith in America

January 16, 2024

In light of the encroachment of Americans who want to end the American practice of the separation of church and state, it is time to articulate more clearly and directly faith in America, not faith as being an adherent of one of the religious faith communities of  our country, but rather faith in the founding ideals of our system itself.

Why articulate faith in America among faiths in theistic Being or beings?  I would like to promote the similarity between faith in American and having faith in God or some other systems of holistic lifestyle practices.  I would begin this study of similarity by noting what is common in the New Testament word for faith, and the classical Greek word for persuasion found in Aristotle's Rhetoric.  The New Testament koine Greek word for faith is pistis.  The classical Greek word for persuasion is also pistis.  One of the goals of rhetoric is persuasion whether in politics, law, artistic speech, or public speaking events such as funeral discourse/eulogies.  The contexts in the way Aristotle used pistis and the way in which pistis is used in the New Testament are centuries apart but what is common is the notion of persuasion.  The New Testament writers defined their lives as having faith in Jesus Christ, and it could be synonymous to say that the New Testament writers were persuaded about Jesus Christ and the messages which attended his witness in the tradition derived from him.

I would like to promote faith in America as being persuaded about certain ideals of formation and identity as a country which originated in the experience of our founders and how those ideals were articulated in our founding documents.

The founders were aware of the practice of religious faith in England and on the Continent.  They were aware of how religious faith was established in the monarchies which made those who did not embrace the established religious faith non-conformists and less than equal in their rights within society.

The founders of our country proposed a persuasion about political practice which would prevent any person losing their rights and privileges as a free citizen because of their practice or non-practice of any particular religious belief.

The evidence of competing Christians harming each other, even to discrimination, persecution and the burning of heretics at the stake, was evidence of the consistent failure in practice of what one might call Christian charity.  The founders of our country proposed a political system of persuasion to referee among Christians who often fought with each other, but also a system to protect anyone of any system of persuasion.  The requirement of the founders in our political system was that our citizenry live according to laws which tolerated the differences in religious beliefs and other systems of persuasion.

In our time, we need to shore up the refereeing function intended by the founders of our system of political persuasion, and indeed we need to be renewed in our faith in America. 

January 17, 2024

The persuasion about American ideals that our founders proposed was informed by the influences of the Enlightenment with a dependence on reason for the practical governance of community.  The Enlightenment with an emphasis on reason gave the founders a different kind of discourse, a discourse which is more scientific or social scientific discourse than a religious discourse.  Just as the Enlightenment resulted in a more poignant division between the discourses of science and religion, so the American founders proposed a legal system a rule of law which would be freed from specific religious judgment criteria while being committed to impartial observations, observations which might be enjoined by people of all persuasions.  The discourse of faith in America, or persuasion about our ideals, is a discourse which admits/invites the discourse of people of religious persuasion to the conversation, but the American founders assumed that our government does not deliberate because of a specific religious faith, even though the values of justice might be the similar in any faith tradition.

Often interfaith groups in our country gather for local community benefit and participation in many things.  They gather not to try to convince each other to believe and pray the same; they gather to share what might be call orthopraxy, that is right practice of justice and charity within the community on which they agree.

One might say that the founders of America wanted us in a similar way to be a system of orthopraxy, that is, a system of right justice for our diverse citizenry.

January 19, 2024

As dignity for the states of being has come to awareness as to who deserves rights and inclusion in the equal benefits of human community, the power groups of community have been slow to to recognize and share rights and inclusion of many to the full privilege of membership.

How many religious denominations have been separating because of women, gay, lesbian, transgendered people wanting full inclusion?  The Holy Book interpretations, doctrine, and practice of many religious groups set a limit on the acceptance of persons with unchosen human conditions of being and even designate them as "sinful."

Some religious communities believe that the practice of persuasion about God and Christ needs to be inclusive of persons who discover themselves in unchosen states of being that still allow them to make vows of love and justice consistent with the love which Jesus showed to those who wanted to always be better and yet who were not given acceptance within religious community.

In a similar way our faith in our American system is being threatened with division, even civil war, by persons who do not think that they can tolerate the level of diversity which our citizenry is now presenting to us.  Many Americans seem to want a white, male, controlled society with a certain kind of Christian control.  They would return white males to seeming paternalistic roles on behalf of women, and minority groups.  In paternalistic practice, those who have the control by law, wealth, and power make the decisions on behalf of their version of a diverse society.

Having faith in American should mean being persuaded about a dynamic political system which is able to integrate the arising in awareness of the diversity of people who are now living within our borders.  Faith in America should be dynamic process to include and expedite the ideal expression of justice for all within our border.  Hence, faith in America has to be known as a refereeing faith among other faiths, especially religious faith communities which have a history of poor treatment of those with whom they disagree.  A single religious faith community cannot be the established faith community to negotiate among the other expressions of faith in our country.

January 20, 2024

As brilliant as our founding documents of our country are, the writers of these documents did not believe that they were final.  The documents themselves prescribe Congress as a legislative body to perform the continuous work of law making.  This means that faith in America requires the continuous work of articulating what is permanent about our ideals into the changing contexts of our American life.  If being originalist about our Constitution and Declaration of Independence meant the retaining of the cultural practices from which these document derived, it would be original to still practice slavery, not allow women to vote, and allow only muskets as valid arms to be permitted.  No one is naive enough to be strict originalists so as to assert that we maintain the exact cultural practices from which the founding document derived.  Being American is not like being Amish in trying to freeze cultural practices and technology to the cultural practices and technology of one "model" period in history.

Part of the wisdom of incorporating change in the America experience of justice has to do with creative advance in self-awareness.  What self-awareness often reveals is our hypocrisy, that is, the discovery that our ideals proclaimed have not/are not being lived up to in actual practice.  Where has America had to learn painful lessons of self-awareness?  We have had to admit that all "men" being created equal did not apply to women, native peoples, black Americans, and more recently people who have understood their gender identities different from binary or heterosexual designation.

As diversity increases within our populace and as collective minorities gain voting power, there is fear of the eroding of the dominant influence of the once privileged group.  As the popular vote can no longer guarantee the privilege of those who once controlled the political situation, there has been a retreat by some from democratic ideals to a proposal that our Constitutional democracy actually means that constitutional governing bodies can overturn the results of election.

Faith in America means that we can embrace new self-awareness which exposes our hypocrisy of the past in living up to our ideals of justice for all who are created equal.

January 21, 2024

The thesis of this writing is that "faith in America" is insightful about our political way of life.  By faith, I mean being persuaded about the founding ideals of our country that still lack achieving of what might be referred to as a perfect union.  Our hope is to be at the work of becoming a more perfect union, and such perfection in this union would mean a practice of common good which provides equal justice for all who are participants in this union.

By faith, I have harkened back to the New Testament work for faith, which in Aristotle's Rhetoric meant persuasion.  (pistis = persuasion). I have posited that our American founders proposed a political lifestyle to referee among the many persuasions in our lives.  Why do we need such a referee?  Because when our religious faith persuasion do not end up being universally persuasive, there has been the tendency for people of religious faith out of pride and fear of rejection of their cherished truths, to be prejudice toward, persecute, harm, or even kill people who do not practice allegiance to their faith perspective.  Our founder proposed being persuaded about a system of community interaction which involved having faith in a refereeing process for the many persuasions which people have in their lives.

I would argue for the benefit of faith in America as a refereeing or regulatory faith among the other persuasions of our lives, ones which if are not regulated can end up with the persecution of people who are are not persuaded.  To try to establish the Christian faith or any religious faith as the established faith of the government is to end in the persecution of members of the populace who cannot freely enjoin themselves to such an established religion.

In proposing defining faith as persuasion, I am casting faith as a definite rhetorical function.  And I would argue that faith in America involves rhetorical function, one of which is regulatory because it involves the generation of laws to fulfill the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by all participants in this collectivity which we call a Union, or the United States.

As humans we exist within a rhetorical field, that is, we are constituted by the ways in which we have come to use language.  We express ourselves in language in different ways, and these ways of expression might be called discursive practices.  The various discursive practices which we use might have something in common with what Wittgenstein called "language games," in that they are practices within language which have their own specific rules.  We can name some of these discursive practices which have rules that pertain to their practice: religious discourse, philosophical discourse, juridical discourse, political discourse, psychological discourse, social discourse, ethics, and a vast array of aesthetic discourses such as prose, poetry, theatre, cinema, and music.   We cannot avoid embodied language, "word made flesh" expression of language, or the body language which represents actions with intended purpose and meanings.  We cannot avoid that our actions and the environments that we live in are completely coded with predesignated meanings because we use language and are choreographed by the ways in which we have taken on the language of our lives.

The American founders in their deliberations and attending documents are asking that each American for the purposes of attaining a more perfect union, check their others faith egos at the door, not for the purposes of their abandoning their own spiritual and religious lives, but for the specific purpose of living together in most adequate ways for the common good of all people.

Our religious faith egos are the most difficult ones to surrender.  What can claim to be more expansive than the divine?  How can having a faith in God, play second fiddle to faith in America as a most adequate way of living together?  Such would seem to diminish one's faith in God by a practice giving preference to faith in America over one's specific faith in God.  People who often oppose their faith in God to faith in America do so using an appeal to civil disobedience and they might cry like the evangelists in the Acts of the Apostles, "we have to serve God rather than man."  People who make that claim also have to be honest about the Gospel wherein Jesus is not presented as a person who is opposing the Roman Government authorities.  He is quoted as saying "render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar...."  St. Paul as a member of two religious minority groups in the Roman Empire, as a Jewish follower of Jesus, enjoined his church members to pray for the authorities, even as being ordained or established by God.  Apparently Jesus and Paul both knew how to be religiously faithful, and still be participants in a political system which did not establish their faith perspective as the official religion.

People of religious faith can have conflicting consciences on specific issues within the American system without having the Christian religion or any religion be established as the required religion of America.

Another insight to arrive at in the midst of dilemmas of conscience and apparent contradiction is the insight about the human person being a multi-discursive being.  Each discourse has its own rules and when one conflates rules which pertain to a specific discourse confusion, and conflict can arise.  If one tries to use the rules of chess in the game of checkers, confusion arises.  If one tries to treat poetic imagery as though it were empirically verifiable occurrences, then conflict, absurdity, and comedy can result.

The faith in America or being persuade about our American ideals means that one can be a multi-discursive faith being, having multiple kinds of persuasive practices in the many different discursive practices of our lives. The faith in America proposed by our founders asks of us a wise and mature multi-discursive mental and psychological soundness.  The ideals of our American faith persuasion allows us to be a poet, a scientist, an eye-witness reporter, night dreamers, day dreamers, religious, and much, much more because we are asked to act and be toward the common good.  Faith in America encourages us to keep our personal faiths personal and individual and practiced in families and smaller communities so long as they do not harm or injure the common good.

This of course sounds simplistic and we know that defining the common good is the continual process of justice in our quest of becoming a more perfect union.