Tag: Religion

Church and State

I am old enough to witness and experience the deleterious impact of religious oppression on the lives of individuals, communities and a nation.

In 1961 my family moved back to east Tennessee after 16 years in the U.S. Air Force. We had lived in Texas, California, Hawai’i Michigan, New York, Kansas, Virginia, and Tennessee.

I was 16 when we returned to Johnson City, Tennessee near the Appalachian mountains and birthplace of my father and me. My paternal grandparents lived just outside of town in the small rural community of Watauga. Their hilltop home and farm were my personal touchstones in an otherwise migratory life.

At the base of the hill was a little white church at which Grandad was custodian and carpenter of pews, altar pieces and other furniture made in his shop in the old red barn.

I remember as a child a kind of freedom in worship. My parents, both raised in Christian faiths, explored many faiths as a practice, learning something from each to form what I learned was my responsibility: to form my own values based on my experience growing up in a democracy. To test them against the moral laws of the country as a guide and bulwark against tyranny.

These dear memories stand in contrast to what life in a small southern town was like for a teenager, for a woman. The church exerted a controlling influence espousing different freedoms for men than for women. From behavior to choice of avocation to personal freedom, there was a code for women much more circumscribed than for men. I never went to church without gloves, hose, garter, and garter belt, without behavior in deference to men. This is the white male hegemony that current MAGA leaders seek to reestablish. Repression of women, Black individuals, and immigrants is concurrent with building back an imagined past.

While the Bible teaches tolerance, the South practiced racism, while women are revered by Jesus, Southern men used vulgarities when referring to women’s bodies while requiring them to be virgins at the same time. It was common for young women to be touched inappropriately by relatives or strange men. A girl thus treated could not speak out about it without being tagged a slut.

Our early founders dealt with much greater religious domination. Having personally witnessed and experienced religious oppression by a state religion, our founders and early Americans of the Revolutionary times, wisely chose to keep religious preference in the personal realm. At the founding, there was a diversity of religious beliefs and diversity of people from Native Americans to far eastern, European, African and Islander living together in the British colonies. Diversity is the seedbed of our Creed: E pluribus unam, from many, one.

In 2025, a Christian nationalist cabal has seized control of the American government, a democracy founded on laws. This Christmas, it chose to impose Christian religious symbols and religious language on a nation founded on religious freedom and separation of church and state.

I abhor and reject this regime’s imposition of a particular faith on all, declaring it a state religion. IT IS NOT. Christianity is a personal religious choice. but not exclusive of any other religious tradition including the right not to embrace a religious faith.

Make no mistake. Trump et al intend to destroy the United States of America and install a king and minions in the name of Christ. Just as we helped Europe rid itself of a demagogue, we must ourselves rid the country of Maga ideology and ideologues before they take what is ours.

We are a nation of many faiths including Christianity. About 60% of Americans embrace Christianity. But it is not, nor was it ever a state religion. Nor are we a white nation. We are a nation of many peoples and beliefs and that is the great strength of our democracy and the hope of the world.

To Govern Ourselves

Fundamentally grounded in values, ethics are a moral sense of right and wrong. Ethics are demonstrated through one’s actions in everyday life; when a person cares about someone or something, their conduct conveys that care and respect, inviting the same in return. Ethics direct all members of a community to treat one another with respect for the common good. ~ The Land Ethic essay by Aldo Leopold.

As I learn more about the writing of our Constitution, it is clear to me that at least a few Founders, if not all, adhered to moral and political philosophies from classic literature to John Locke. To read from these foundational documents, is a window into the quality of education and personal pursuit of truth and morality that defined these men. Our Founders dared to establish a nation based on the belief that all people are have equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They also believed that societies are capable of governing themselves without the need for a King or despot to control them.

However, to live in such a manner, communities function best when there are ethics and processes by which individuals can strive to become their best self.

In the Declaration of Independence, these words encompass centuries of human understanding about an ethical basis for living your life. John Adams in particular understood Happiness to mean the freedom to pursue a life of learning to understand and practice our moral obligations to each other.

Aldo Leopold, centuries later, would broaden the Declaration to include the ecology of the Earth in his essay, “The Land Ethic.”

A Land Ethic®. expands the definition of “community” to include not only humans, but all of the other parts of the Earth, as well: soils, waters, plants, and animals – “the land”. In a Land Ethic®, the relationships between people and land are intertwined; care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. Thus, a Land Ethic® is a moral code of conduct that stems from these interconnected caring relationship. Aldo Leopold

Today’s post bringing the Declaration of Independence together with The Land Ethic is my way of pausing to reflect on the turmoil created by persons in power who follow no true ethic in governing America in 2025. There is no moral code or ethical basis in hurting citizens or the community of living beings that make our lives possible in the first place.

What is our moral and ethical basis for living in contemporary America?

[Next post will consider how Albert Schweitzer discovered the ethical basis for living.]

A Reading Life

“A reader lives a thousand lives before [s]he dies . . . The [hu]man who never reads lives only one.” ~ George R.R. Martin

Readers of this blog know that nature is a constant theme in my writing, reading and public work. We all have our roots plunged in soil we call home as did Lauren Groff, a magnificent writer who first found her inspiration at the family farm in New Hampshire.

Groff’s recent novels The Vaster Wilds and Matrix. pose profound questions about how religious and cultural practices have led to the depletion of nature’s resilience and how both men and women contribute to it when acting from an anthropocentric view. The journeys of discovery of both female protangonists is personal, imbued with hopes and dreams in the crucible of living their lives in times when women possess little social agency.

Groff is currently writing the third in the “triptych” of stories that carry the thread of inquiry and discovery. Readers are led to consider our present predicament of killing the very thing that gives us life: the living Earth.

Here are two excellent interviews that explore how Lauren Groff came to write each story, all the complex threads of thought, stories and influences that helped her conceive these outstanding novels.

The first interview explores The Vaster Wilds which takes place briefly in Jamestown colony in the “starving time”and mostly in the American wilds in 1609 North America.

The Matrix concerns Marie de France, the first published female poet in France, a poet and deep thinker whose writings are surprisingly free of social and religious strictures on women at a time of low female agency. Many sources contributed to the final story Groff tells. I found this instructive and supportive for writers of fiction.

This lecture from the University of Notre Dame is in my view the best exploration of how Matrix evolved and the exceptional thinking of one of America’s most brilliant writers of our time.

There is a music interlude to begin. Start of the Interview is 5 min. 23 sec

As a writer who shares the theme of nature I am so grateful to Lauren Groff for demonstrating the power of fiction to move us to understand the deep roots of our misunderstanding.