Some excerpts from the longer essay by Susan Jacoby:
"Like most Americans, I responded to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with an immediate wave of anger and grief so powerful that it left no room for alienation.
"Walking around my wounded New York, as the smoke from the ruins of the World Trade Center wafted the smell of death throughout the city, I drew consolation from the knowledge that others were feeling what I was feeling - sorrow, pain and rage, coupled with the futile but irrepressible longing to turn back the clock to the hour before bodies rained from a crystalline sky.
"That soothing sense of unity was severed for me just three days later, when the president presided over an ecumenical prayer service in Washington's National Cathedral. Delivering an address indistinguishable from a sermon, replacing the language of civic virtue with the language of faith, the nation's chief executive might as well have been the Reverend Bush. Quoting a man who supposedly said at St. Patrick's Cathedral, 'I pray to God to give us a sign that he's still here,' the president went on to assure the public not only that God was still here but that he was personally looking out for America.
"'God's signs,' Bush declared, 'are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own ... Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, can separate us from God's love. May he bless the souls of the departed, may he comfort our own, and may he always guide our country.'
"This adaptation of the famous passage from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans left out the evangelist's identification of Jesus Christ as God - an omission presumably made in deference to the Jewish and Muslim representatives sharing the pulpit with the president.
"Bush would surely have been criticized, and rightly so, had he failed to invite representatives of non-Christian faiths to the ecumenical ceremony in memory of the victims of terrorism. But he felt perfectly free to ignore Americans who adhere to no religious faith, whose outlook is predominantly secular and who interpret history and tragedy as the work of man rather than God. There was no speaker who represented my views, no one to reject the notion of divine purpose at work in the slaughter of thousands and to proclaim the truth that grief, patriotism and outrage at injustice run just as deep in the secular as in the religious portion of the body politic.
"According to a religious identification survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, more than 14 percent of Americans - a much larger minority than any non-Christian group - describe their outlook as 'entirely or predominantly secular.' There are more secular humanists than there are observant Jews or Muslims - but one would never know it from the makeup of supposedly ecumenical civic rituals that are ecumenical only for those who believe, to paraphrase Bush, that God is at the helm of our country.
"Bush's very presence in the pulpit represented a significant departure from the behavior of other presidents in times of crisis. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not try to assuage the shock of Pearl Harbor by using an altar as the backdrop for his declaration of war and Abraham Lincoln, who steadfastly refused to join any church even though his political advisers urged him to do so, delivered the Gettysburg Address not from a sanctuary but on the battlefield where so many soldiers had given 'the last full measure of devotion.'...
"Bush has spoken proudly, on many occasions, of America's religious liberties as one of the factors distinguishing the U.S. from radical Islamist states - but he does not respect those liberties, which flow from the separation of church and state, at home. Only last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee once again took up the nomination of one James Leon Holmes for a federal district judgeship. This is a man who, in a 2002 address to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, proclaimed that 'the final reunion of church and state will take place at the end of time, when Christ will claim definitive political power of all creation, inaugurating an entirely new society based on the supernatural.'
"What a great and welcome contribution it would be for John Kerry to step forward and proclaim a love of country based not on dreams of a supernatural Christian government but, as the Constitution's preamble asserts, on the authority of 'We the People.'
"The framers knew what they were doing when they declined to write, 'We the People under God.' It is simply disgraceful that modern politicians run away from the noble secular heritage that they should embrace."
Disgraceful it is.
