We Christians at First Lutheran in Benton love our country. We are proud to be Americans, we are thankful to our God for our nation, and we pray for it. But we must be candid about this: there are things about America and its culture that are not only not very good, but are really quite bad, and we must stay clear of them.
Originally, the separation of Church and State was meant to keep the government from playing favorites among Christian denominations. That is not what it means any more. Today, there is a significant strain of thought in America (and in the West generally) that only science and reason can reliably determine the kind of truth that we are obligated to believe. For example, science says the earth is round, and it rotates about its axis while revolving around the sun. Everyone is obligated to believe this or be thought a fool. The problem with this attitude is that it reduces truth only to those things that have been verified by logic and observation. That’s not very much! In fact, it might surprise you to know just how little in life can really be “proven” scientifically! But that’s for another day.
For many, the problem with religion is not that it isn’t true or good or useful, but that it cannot be verified scientifically, so we just can’t know that it’s true. Religious “truth” for them is more in the nature of an opinion–maybe a good and worthy opinion, but still just an opinion. This results in the following logic: Our government should stick with what we all know to be true. Scientific inquiry alone leads to truth of that kind and therefore can and should be supported by the government. On the other hand, religion cannot be verified by science as true, and so the government ought to stay out of teaching religion. So now, the separation of Church and State is no longer to keep the government from playing favorites among churches, but has become a “Wall” to separate Science, which determines truth, and Religion, which deals only in opinions and things we just cannot know.
See where this has brought is. In our public schools our government can (and does) teach that everything began out of nothing, all by itself, in a big bang, and then evolved, all by itself, by random chance alone, from that initial big bang into what we have now. No God, no meaning, no purpose, no future. That is, some think, what logic and observation alone (that is, “science”) tell us about our origins and the world in which we live, and so that is what our government teaches to our children. (Actually, it is not logic and observation that is telling us these things. Something else is going on here, but again, that will have to wait for another day.) By contrast, though, even the most elementary religious truth, that “God has created me and all creatures,” cannot be taught in our public schools. It cannot be taught not because we know it’s not true, but because we cannot verify with logic and observation that it is true. In other words, it’s not “scientific” to say that “God has created me and all creatures,” so it cannot be taught in our schools, but “No God, no meaning, no purpose, no future” — that is true and that can be taught!
Sad to say, for many of our fellow citizens, that has become the American Way. We Christians must not buy into that. Logic and observation alone cannot do what our nation has demanded of them. They can tell us the earth revolves around the sun, sure, but they cannot tell us why there is an earth or a sun. Anyone who reduces truth to only what can be observed and reasoned out will know very little, and will never know a great deal. They will never know God, will never know where they came from, why they’re here, what anything means, where they’re headed, or why they ought to live a certain way. If science is your only truth, you will never know the truth at all.
James D. Burns
Pastor, First Lutheran Church (LC-MS)
Benton, Arkansas
First Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) 