I was born in a secular country. A country whose constitution doesn't mention a god. A country that values dissension and individuality, where nonconformity is a strength and the inconvenience it produces deemed well worth the chance to be free. The people are trusted to have the reasoned judgment to do good for the community. Great faith in humanity is required.
This country is America.
The people who founded this country, who set out the principles and wrote the words to give them life, knew the danger of mixing religion and government. Article VI of the Constitution states, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." An early treaty states that the United States is "not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
It is no coincidence that the first sentence of the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of religion. The Bill of Rights created a new kind of people - people who were free to think and speak their minds, free to gather, free to worship or not, free to be left alone. Free to be.
No longer subjects of a monarch, nor subject to religious persecution, people could explore themselves and the world they found themselves in. This was a bold and courageous world view with new man-made rights. The words creating these rights prevailed over customs, habits, slavery and laws as men and women gained freedom, equal status and voting rights via the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th amendments. It is our secularity that allows us to strive to be a nation where people are not defined by ethnicity, color or religion, but by our shared humanity.
It is said that religion is the attempt to organize spirituality, and in doing so may kill it. When religions attempt to explain the world and make the laws, dogma replaces mystery and wonder, thinking and discovery. New thinking is suppressed. For centuries it was true that the sun went around the Earth. It was true because it looks that way - there was no place to stand to see things as they really are, and powerful disincentives to try.
Secularity allows new truths because it allows new perspectives and thus avoids much of the fear, upset, and violence arising when believers are confronted with conflicting "truths." The founders of our democracy designed a backdrop of secularity to accommodate the new thinking necessary for spiritual and intellectual development.
There is a kind of blind pseudo-patriotism that is equally fatal to honesty and learning. It has its own dogma and encourages people to avoid looking at the gaps between our ideals and reality. Suddenly we have been jarred into a new place to stand staring into some of those gaps.
The world is not different since Sept. 11, but we are. Marcel Proust said "the real act of discovery lies not in seeing new lands, but in seeing with new eyes." As we scramble for meaning, and a return to comfort, we risk closing our new eyes.
That is the last thing we should do. The automatic response is to search for something similar in our past to give us clues of what to do. But there isn't anything in our past like this, so we get upset and look around to the pundits and hucksters offering a menu of interpretations that we scan to fit with our personal beliefs and past experiences. You have heard them: This is war, retaliate with full force. We've been ignorant and arrogant. God is punishing us. Buy a new car today to help your country, and so on.
But hasty interpretations bring inappropriate reactions that shrink rather than expand our strengths: Ari Fleisher telling people to watch what they say, a bill for prayer in schools, a plan for national identification cards, unconstitutional searches, detentions, confiscations and deportations. Once a position is adopted, thinking tends to stop, opinions harden and our jarring new perspective yields little. That would be a tragedy. Terrorists have demolished buildings and killed thousands, but they cannot diminish our free, open, secular society. Only we can do that.
This is not a simple drama of "good vs. evil." Monsters did not fly those planes into the Towers. People did. People in every culture and era commit terrible acts. We burned witches, mounted heads on spikes around city walls and lynched people before chanting crowds. These were acts of terrorism designed to scare others and promote a world view. It is a part of us that requires bold insight into what it means to be human. Bolstering old beliefs is insufficient.
To paraphrase Einstein, the world we have made as a result of the level of our thinking creates problems we cannot solve at that same level of thinking. Now, while our belief systems are cracked open, we can do the hard thinking required by an open secular society but prevented in a closed, dogmatic one. We will be a real superpower when we are equated with the ability to expand the potential of humanity and the freedom to be.
Observer community columnist Vicki Taylor of Troutman works as a management and leadership consultant here and overseas. A lawyer and volunteer Covekeeper, she is a member of Voices and Choices and serves on the executive board of the Catawba-Wateree Relicensing Coalition. Write her c/o The Observer, P.O. Box 30308, Charlotte, NC 28230-0308, or by e-mail at vetaylor@compuserve.com