The Delusion of Piety and Politics

The New York Times published an article yesterday entitled “Lawmaker in Kentucky Mixes Piety and Politics” which led with the following sentence:

Tom Riner looks for God everywhere, and in places he does not find him, he tries to put him there.

The article goes on to quote Mr. Riner, a Baptist minister and a Democratic representative in the Kentucky legislature as saying:

The church-state divide is not a line I see.

Mr. Riner is reported as having been involved in activities that have cost the state more than half a million dollars in legal fees related to separation of church and state issues. Whether or not it occurs to the public that elected him that there are better and more appropriate uses for $500,000 dollars isn’t clear. Maybe they simply look at that money as the cost of admission for “true” believers. 

I find it annoying that Mr. Riner and others quoted in the article have the nerve to insist that the founding fathers created a Christian nation and that we should follow their lead. The question of whether or not America’s founding fathers were as religious as the religious claim them to be is far from answered in my mind. 

As I’ve written before, there certainly isn’t indicating that the Constitution, clearly a founding document of the American nation, anticipated a theocracy. And experience itself has not shown the religious political leader to be blessed with any more grace of “god” than any other person. Consider the results of the last eight years of what I hesitantly call the faith-based presidency of George W. Bush. Has America really benefited from Bush’s faith? To the contrary, we are facing one of the worst economic and political eras in our nation’s history – and it happened under the guidance of a self-proclaimed believer – one who claimed that his decisions were guided by god. Could this possibly be a god who cared for his own creation? It’s hard to believe as more and more people lose their jobs and their homes, quickly followed by their hope for a better future.

Mr. Riner needs to spend a little more time learning about the history of the founding fathers if he plans on making such ridiculous claims – and a little less time believing in fairy tales.