Missions, preaching, soapbox pulpit-whatever you want to call it, we see it virtually every week at the Monroe Park compass in front of James Branch Cabell library. God’s advertisers claim their “Word” is well intentioned and protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Yet times might be changing, even if God’s message is not.
In the past the United States’ identity was largely hijacked by Christian egos. “In God We Trust,” Christian religion amongst immigrants, and a host of “Christian approved laws” abetted those egos. Along with a batch of Christian benevolence and a lot of good old fashioned “fearing the Lord” many still lay claim that “the United States is a Christian nation.”
My reply is that the United States is a nation of laws.
Before I go any further in this, let me explain why I am writing this particular editorial. Our laws do not reflect the values of our people. We do not care for the poor, we encourage waste, we are ruled by the corrupt, we laugh at violence, and today our largest debate is whether keeping people healthy is cost effective. Where are the real Christians? Their “vast majority” certainly wasn’t reflected in this past decade’s laws.
So I make the statement: We are a nation of laws. Recently our laws have been very ineffective because both Christians and non-Christians are engaged in the wrong debates. Rather than creating solutions, we fight amongst one another and argue whether this will send you to hell or that will send you to hell. Or perhaps this clumping of cells is a baby, and this clumping of cells is not a baby. Or maybe we should teach our children about God in school (instead of evolution), when parents who advocate creationism in schools are already teaching their kids about God anyway and don’t want them to raise questions about evolution. Not only are these issues ingratiating, they only serve as a distraction to the realities we face: namely, that the United States is in decline because of irrational laws.
Universities are a marketplace of ideas. They are a limited public forum where students should be able to express themselves without fear of condemnation. When groups of religious zealots gather in the compass to shout out that our pursuit of knowledge is obscene (maybe God doesn’t like it when we look up creation’s skirt) or that homosexuals will burn in a pit of fire for eternity, I tend to get a little offended. Not because they believe such things but because they present faith based arguments in public with exceptionalism.
Let me put it in perspective:
If I went into a church in the middle of sermon and started yelling things like, “Man is genetically similar to great apes,” or “Geology indicates that the Earth is several billion years old,” or “We can create simple organisms using plasmids,” I would likely beattacked or forcibly removed from the church. I was of course expressing my First Amendment rights in a limited public forum but that does not mean it was the right thing to do.
The truth is, offensive missionaries and atheist activists are lionizing the masses when we need to focus on common ground- like how we corrupt public officials, keep on polluting (even though we are stewards of the Earth) and let people get sick and die because it doesn’t turn a profit to heal them. These are basic things; it shouldn’t matter whether we believe in God or his laws so long as we want to do good for the people of the world. We should be focused on eliminating evil we can actually see, instead of trying to come up with a recipe for righteousness.
I propose the university institute a policy that bars religious missionaries who disturb the peace of the university. Religious speech is synonymous with inciting violence against non-believers when it is aggravated and dramatized. If a person needs to get up on a box and scream that people should not be pursuing knowledge (at a university) and that homosexual students are immediately threatened by eternal hellfire (a threat passed down from God), then maybe that person should go to a place where people enjoy being called irreverent and evil. Peaceful demonstrations are fine, there’s no problem with guys in suits handing out Gideon Bibles, or people forming prayer circles, or actually doing something productive with one’s faith. When it comes to disparaging on the basis of unproven personal belief, this is the kind of behavior that belongs in church-not at a university.