Left Behind: Religion, Technology, and Flight from the Flesh: An online book by Stephen Pfohl.
Preface: One Nation Under God:
Quote: >>The United States of America is history's first formally secular republic. The U.S. constitution guarantees legal separation between church and state. This is one reason why America has long been viewed as a beacon of modern enlightenment, democratic governance, and scientific rationality. This is the sober and pragmatic America envisioned by the nation's "founding fathers," most of whom were deists. This is an America governed by "self-evident" rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is also the America of "the Protestant ethic" described by Max Weber, an America that believed that "the rational and utilitarian uses of wealth ... were willed by God for the needs of the individual and the community." In this America, enlightenment and religion stroll as cordial companions, each complementing the existence of the other. But this is only one side of a decidedly Janus-faced America. Since its inception, another powerful -- and far less rational -- religious spirit has split the nation's attention, bifurcating America's vision of itself and its place in world history.
The second American religious spirit is the intense, emotionally charged, and judgmental Christian spirit of a nation believing itself to be the divinely ordained agent of God's kingdom on earth. This is an apocalyptic religious spirit, a harbinger of God's imminent intervention into the course of human history. From the time of the American Revolution to the present, when political leaders invoke this second spirit to praise the virtues of freedom and liberty, the terms they use are "saturated with religious meaning." This is to speak of freedom in ways that transcend the human rights and democratic principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Here, freedom is drenched in biblical connotations and blood, an offspring of grace and the unerring authority of the Gospel. This suggests a special kind of freedom -- not simply freedom from tyrannical rule and unjust authority, but freedom found in "the joy of conversion, and a liberation from the pain and sorrow of normal life."<<
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posted by johannes,
Monday, November 20, 2006
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