April 29 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

Stepping up to the platform at the Southern Baptist Convention a few years ago, I was met by a heaving sea of tiny American flags. Seventeen thousand delegates were cheering the speaker who preceded me, Ollie North.

A blend of Christianity and Americana is a staple in our country's heartland. On any Fourth of July, thousands of churches host God-and-country rallies. And I understand the sentiment. As an ex-marine captain, I thrill to hear the Marine Corps Hymn, and to belt out (off-key) "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Evangelicals have been the backbone of America's civil religion: those virtues that bind a pluralistic society together. Admittedly, civil religion can be dangerous when it substitutes for true faith or baptizes the state. But at its best, writes Leroy Rouner of Boston University, it "has been a means whereby Christian loyalties and values have been indigenized and become effective in a modern, pluralistic society." But not for much longer, it seems.

In the Baylor Law Review, David Smolin of Samford University raises a troubling question for evangelicals today: Is American civil religion still viable? Or has America moved so far from "Christian loyalties and values" as to fracture a two-hundred-year tradition of religious patriotism?

Smolin cites the issue of abortion, where the Supreme Court has abandoned any notion of a higher law--whether divine law in revelation or human law in the Constitution. In Roe v. Wade, Smolin writes that abortion "rights" were based on the arbitrary will of judges and hence became "lawless."

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court went further: It transformed abortion from an implied privacy right into an expressed liberty--sweepingly interpreted as "the right to define one's own concept ...