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present war is not a war between a secular nation and a Muslim
nation. Ours is not a secular nation. We are the single-most religious
of all the advanced nations, and the third- or fourth-most religious
of all nations anywhere on earth.
Our Founding's
religion, in case you want to know, is predominantly Christian and
Jewish. And a good thing, too!
Now, it may
well be that politicized Muslims actually do believe that suicide
bombings are a way to Paradise (though I doubt it). But they're
making a mistake if they believe that they are alone in being willing
to die for their beliefs. They are not even alone in believing in
eternal life.
We Jews and
Christians do not morally approve of suicide. We regard a suicide
bombing of innocent noncombatants — such as those going to
work in the World Trade Towers on the peaceful Tuesday morning of
September 11 — as a symptom of pure, rank, and rotting evil
in the bodies that carry it.
But we are
willing to die in self-defense, we are willing to give our lives
for others — as did our brave fellow citizens, our brothers,
on United Flight #93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, who crashed into
the ground to thwart the would-be suicide bombers. Many, many more
of us will be willing to die in the battles ahead.
Although the
Hebrew Scriptures speak more than once of prayers and sacrifices
for the souls of the dead, Jewish writers make little reference
to eternal life. It is otherwise with Christians. We believe that
life on earth, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, as may be,
is framed within a far larger reality: the lightsome reality of
our Creator and Redeemer, Who has called us, as He once called the
patriarchs of Israel, to be His friends.
We do not have
much idea what eternity will be like, although sometimes we have
intimations of it, in moments of overflowing absorption in things
beautiful and good, when we lose all awareness of passing time,
and seem to dwell in an abiding now of total attention.
Having often
been much moved by the sweet, sweet beauties of earth, we have no
doubt whatever that that Beauty, in whose image all things beautiful
were made, is superabundant, overflowing, beyond our capacities
to absorb even a fraction of it.
To be in communion
with the One who has addressed us as "friend" is to have
stretched our capacities for love and life and light infinitely
beyond themselves.
I have yet
to see journalists point out the political implications of
the prevailing Christian view of eternal union with God, and its
Hebrew analogue. These implications are many and profound.
First there
is the dignity of the individual. Addressed by his Creator as friend,
each woman and man faces the solitary responsibility, the inalienable
responsibility, not to be shucked onto anybody else, of making a
free response.
Our God wants
the friendship of men and women who are free and standing erect
— not the worship of slaves.
"The God
who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time," Thomas
Jefferson instructed us.
A sense of
our individual and inalienable responsibility in the face of God
gives Jews and Christians our bedrock conviction in the dignity
and immortal value of every single woman and man. Our Creator made
us so, gave us such responsibility, holds us alone accountable for
it. No other person, agency, or institution dares to interfere with
that responsibility.
That is why
we hold every single individual to be an irreplaceable diamond,
an immortal diamond.
"The human
person," Thomas Aquinas wrote, "is the only creature made
to be an end-in-itself," a center of self-governing insight
and choice, formed in the image of God Himself.
There is a
second political point. Whereas, for the Greeks and Romans —
and for virtually all other peoples on earth — it is the inequality
of humans that is the natural law, for Hebrews and Christians every
man and woman is made in the image of God, is of incommensurable
value, and is in God's eyes equally needy and equally precious.
This very idea of equality owes its origins to belief in
human immortality before the judgment seat of God. In God's eyes,
every boast of humans, insofar as it is true, owes its reality to
Him. No human being huffed and puffed his own way into existence.
We are dust, and unto dust we all return.
The third political
point is that eternity is to be imagined as a communion with all
those we love, with all who have extended friendship to us, and
we to them. Our idea of community is friendship, and the freedom
from which it springs and in which it is rooted: the free gift of
self to another, and of another to oneself.
That is why
the Christian founders of Pennsylvania chose as the name of their
capital city the inspired name of Philadelphia, "love of brothers."
It no doubt
seems odd to other people, in other places, that we Americans, when
danger looms, do regard one another as friends. We rely on each
other as teammates do. (Did you watch the Americans in the first
hours of the World Trade Center disaster?) We work together. We
freely form one will. We unite. Spontaneously we adjust to one another,
see what each of us can do, and set to doing it without waiting
for orders from on high. We know what needs to be done. We do it.
As brothers, as sisters. As Cicero wrote, the essence of a republic
is friendship.
Perhaps I am
taking things too far, making too much explicit — but this
is also why Christians regard God as more like a community of persons,
a Trinity, than like the solitary nous that Aristotle imagined.
Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est, runs the medieval chant,
in a lilting Gregorian tune: "Where charity and love is, there
is God — That unites us in one, that love of God."
To think of
Americans as materialists is to get things all wrong, upside-down,
crazy. There are a few materialists among us, very few. Mostly,
we believe.
To think of
us as secular is to mistake the most vocal eight percent for the
religious whole.
"The first
political institution of the American Republic is their religion,"
Tocqueville wrote — I paraphrase. From our religion we get
our sense of the importance of the individual, our love for liberty
as the deepest drive in the human breast (at the origin of inquiry,
at the origin of love and friendship), our sense of equality before
God, our fiery friendship for one another, and our willingness to
die for our experiment in liberty.
And our religion
teaches us that at its pure root is the conscience of each. Though
we are all called to one community, the roads by which we journey
to it are many, often twisting and obscure, and in any case to be
traversed by each man and each woman, and each community of faith,
at an individual pace, in an individual way.
As the things
of Caesar are not the things of God, they must not be given to Him,
nor the things of God to Caesar. So also experience shows that a
pluralism of religious paths is best. The God who wants our friendship
will accept it only freely given, from the depths of the conscience
of each. For the conscience of each, therefore, more than tolerance
is due — respect is due. The same respect the Creator
lavishes on it, with infinite patience for all.
All of us in
America know in our ancestral memory — often not further back
than two or three generations — what it was like to have lived
in other lands. We know that, there, we could have worked physically
harder, and in the end had less to show for it. We know that, there,
we would have been scarcely half as free as here. We would have
had less than half the opportunity.
Here, we know
we have no excuses. Here in America is the fairest place that ever
was. We each have our chances. If we don't use them, blame us. Don't
blame America.
Don't call
us secular, bin Laden. Don't call us unbelievers. Don't call us
infidels. God shed His grace on us! and crowned our good with
brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
You ought never
to have messed with us, bin Laden.
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