The right has made a bit of hay over the non inclusion of God, as well an omitted reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in this years Democratic Party Platform. Both God and Jerusalem were put back, but only after a rather contentious floor vote. As Stanly Kurtz points out, God was not mentioned in the 1992 platform either, with a line about the American people's faith added only after Sen. Joseph Lieberman made an issue of it. I have never read a party platform before, and had no idea that God was mentioned in either side's quadrennial manifesto. But apparently it is a regular feature of such things, with the Democrats doing it less frequently since about 1972, and not at all that one time. What should we read into this controversy, if anything?
Firstly I'm not so ready to condemn the delegates inside the convention for booing after the floor vote. I did not take it, as some suggested, that they were jeering at the Almighty or Holy Mother Zion, but rather demonstrating their disapproval at the shredding of parliamentary procedure (there is no way two-thirds of the hall responded "ay" to the proposed modifications). Nor did it leave me with the belief that Democrats are Godless, as Illinois senator Richard Durbin claimed his party was being painted, in a bizarrely defensive rant on Fox News the day before. This choice does say something though, especially since this is evidently common language in these documents.
I would say that this omission, and the reticence by some on the left to talk about God at all, reflects a misunderstanding of the role that the Creator and religion was meant to play in American life from the time of nation's founding. We can argue over the religious status of the founders; were they deists, Masons or Protestants? They all believed, in one way or another, in a supreme being from whom emanates our rights. Government does not give us rights, it can only recognize them, protect them or deprive them for a just cause. This was acknowledged by Thomas Jefferson, the one usually invoked to support the "Wall of Separation" reading of the Constitution. The framers did not want to establish an official religion, true, but they did not intend to eliminate God from the public square, either. They wanted the nation to be non-sectarian, not radically secular as some believe.
To establish a particular religion, or favor a particular form of a religion as being normative for a nation can be destructive to national unity. The framers knew this. But to acknowledge God as the giver of our rights does not depend on sectarian allegiance or religious practice. It is, in the end, the greatest affirmation that government is limited. If the source of rights is purely human, they can be made up, taken away, given to some and not to others, dispensed from the barrel of gun or ignored, all arbitrarily. If God is not recognized as the creator of our rights, some thing less will be, and that something less is usually the civil government. Governments who claim to be the highest authority of all are almost always dictatorships, who seek the total loyalty of the people. They not only claim priority over God, but over family and community as well. To deny God as the source of our rights is to slide toward spiritual serfdom and political idolatry. Recognizing God as the source of our rights is actually the greatest protection to our personal liberty.
I happen to think we have, by and large, a good government, and agree with Sen. Durbin that there are God fearing people in both parties. I have friends on both the right and the left who sincerely look to their faith for guidance in forming their political views. I'm glad the Democratic Party put the reference to God back in their platform (even if the process was a bit off). Once is enough, you don't have to be showy about it. Once is enough to show that you know that we are not laws unto ourselves, no government's power is absolute, and that all of us, even the President of the United States, must answer to a higher power.
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