The Tennessee Liberal

I am sad that it took me this long to have the opportunity to read this Outlook piece by Chattanooga's own Jon Meacham in Sunday's Washington Post.

Read it now. Go. Read it.

This is, without question, one of the best arguments I have seen for balance between the religious and the secular in modern America. Clearly, Saint Nicholas and McCallie graduates are geniuses, but none can top Jon Meacham. Don't believe me? Haven't gone to read it yet? Then here's a snippet or two:

Perhaps on this anniversary of our independence, then, we can rediscover that America is at its best when religion is one, but only one, thread in the tapestry of public discourse and life...Yet the power of our civic religion lies not in any sanctions it imposes but in the moral sensibility it nurtures. The opening line of Thomas Jefferson's Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1786 -- "Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free . . . . " -- is at once rational and theological, and is quintessentially democratic.

He highlights a quote from Sandra Day O'Connor that I had not seen to this point:

"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her concurring opinion in one case, "must . . . answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"

But my favorite part comes in his final paragraphs:

If we want to be true to the American gospel, though, we should acknowledge that both sides have a legitimate point of view, and that our course should be democratically determined by the free exchange of ideas, not by turning cultural disagreements into total war.

In fact, neither side has as much to fear from the other as they think. For the religious, the acts of reading, of contemplation and discovery, of writing poems and finding cures, are acts of piety and thanksgiving, for all things are God's. For the secular, such inquiries may turn on the wonders of nature, or rationality, or logic. So be it. The point is that we are all on the same journey, if for different reasons.

Go, read it now, please. There's also a discussion with Jon Meacham here.