Meacham on "public religion"

Check out Jon Meacham's op-ed, "The Prayer Breakfast Presidency," in today's Washington Post.  Talking about the recent national prayer breakfast, at which the President was joined by the Rev. Billy Graham, Meacham continues:

For many Americans, the image of presidents at prayer is reassuring; for many others, scenes such as the one last week with Bush and Graham represent an unhealthy mixing of church and state.

However, American history suggests that allusions to faith in the political arena are part of what Benjamin Franklin called "public religion," a religion whose God is perhaps best understood as the "Creator" and the "Nature's God" of the Declaration of Independence. This was not the God of Abraham or God the Father of the Holy Trinity, but a more generic figure who made the world, is active in it through the workings of providence, and will ultimately judge how people conducted themselves in life.

Taken together, the past reveals that the benefits of faith in God in our public life have outweighed their costs. "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records," said Alexander Hamilton. "They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

Guided by this idea of God-given human rights, America has created the freest, most inclusive nation on Earth. It was neither easy nor quick: the destruction of Native American cultures, the ravages of slavery, the horrors of the Civil War, the subjugation of women and the bitterness of Jim Crow attest to that. And there is much work to be done. In its finest hours, America has not been wholly religious or wholly secular but has drawn on both traditions. Understanding that may help the left adjust its fears of a supposedly nascent American theocracy and convince the right to discard its historically inaccurate vision of America as a "Christian nation."

Following Homer, who said "all men need the gods," John Adams once remarked: "Religion always has and always will govern mankind. Man is constitutionally, essentially and unchangeably a religious animal. Neither philosophers nor politicians can ever govern him in any other way."