If you're serious about God, this is a disaster

NEW YORK - When is God not God? When He's blessing America, apparently. Or when in Him we trust. Or when this big old imperial power is one nation under Him. Take your pick. Philosophers have puzzled over the question of God's nature for centuries, reaching various entertaining or desperate conclusions, and yet the answer was right there in front of our eyes all the while -- God is a Yankee.

But not even Nietzsche could have killed God off any more effectively than the Supreme Being's annexation to American patriotism. Yes, it's true. In the flurry of controversy over the recent Ninth Circuit Federal Court ruling that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance violates the U.S. Constitution's separation of church and state, nobody seemed to mark the passing of God as, you know, a god. The ruling, from what has been consistently described as the "notoriously liberal" West Coast court, was instantly ridiculed on op-ed pages and talk shows from coast to coast. President Bush stood up and took issue with it. It was, everyone said, certain to be overruled by the Supreme Court.

No doubt. But that's because the Supreme Court doesn't really believe in God. If they did, they would realize that the current wording of the Oath, whose god-free 1892 version by Francis Bellamy was altered by Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration in 1954, does indeed cut against the Constitution's famous -- you might say notoriously liberal --division between worship and government. It is only by invoking what the higher court has called "ceremonial deism" that any of the ubiquitous God-talk of American public life is saved from legal incoherence.

Trouble is, that doesn't save it from logical incoherence. Deism is the thesis that there is a God but "he" is neither interventionist nor, in some versions, an entity of any kind. The god of deism is more a philosophical principle, like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or the fixed point of causality. In the 17th century, when smart European philosophers were trying to reconcile reason with faith, often in order to avoid persecution and punishment from the Christian authorities, they constructed deistic theories as a way of keeping God in a picture without giving up the hard truths of science. Deism meant you could sign on to religious doctrine without actually allowing that Christ was God, that there were miracles, or that God cared a hoot what went on in this intricate clockwork universe. Deism suggested the if there was a Great Clockmaker, he was, so to speak, off in another room having a glass of iced tea.

Most theologians and the vast majority of ordinary Christian believers wanted nothing to do with the idea. The "god of the philosophers" has been ridiculed and rejected by orthodox Christians for centuries, not least because it takes all the interesting divinity out of the Creator. You might as well construct a religion around natural selection. So when the Supreme Court invokes it to keep God in the patriotic picture, there are only two possibilities: either they know their position is unconstitutional and are using obfuscation and semantic trickery to keep that under wraps, or they haven't done their homework and are confusing two very different notions of what "God" means.

How convenient. This God-not-God move is the same mealy-mouthed rationale you hear everywhere now, as God is invoked more and more often as a token of post-9/11 American righteousness. Earlier this year, a worker at a Home Depot in Long Island was enraged when his large "God Bless America" sign was removed from the store window because it violated company policy against religious signage. "It's not religious," he said angrily to the television reporters.

If it's not religious, what is it? If he doesn't mean the Christian God of the scriptures, why does he even care?

In this country you get used to seeing God, of course. In my neighbourhood, nearly every storefront and pizza box sports a stars-and-stripes motif and the "God Bless America" injunction. I was at Yankee Stadium the other day and everybody got up during the stretch to sing the same sentiment along with a scratchy recording of the late lamented Kate Smith. (God had other plans that day, though: The usually hapless Toronto Blue Jays racked an 8-3 victory.) Every piece of currency, from the lowly Lincoln penny up the Benjamin, says "In God We Trust" -- an inclusion that President Theodore Roosevelt, for one, staunchly opposed because he thought it debased belief in the deity. The same motto will soon appear in every public schoolroom in Michigan, Virginia, and Utah, with other states certain to follow. And every morning since 1954, schoolkids across the country have risen and pledged their allegiance to an indivisible nation under God.

Does any of this matter? Well no, if you're prepared to reduce God to a neutered and empty synonym for, say, Powerful Force We Really Hope Likes Us. But if you're serious about God, this is actually a disaster.

As so often, the devout and pragmatic landowners who founded this country, not to mention their far-sighted successors, knew better: They kept God out of the Constitution precisely because they took belief in him seriously. God is invoked in the Declaration of Independence, an explicit expression of hope (it also contains the lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), but is conspicuously absent elsewhere. Christian believers all, the Founders nevertheless knew that a state-creating legal document had to be neutral on the issue of religious faith if the country was ever going to realize the liberal dreams they had inherited from some of the very same philosophers who, a generation before, had struggled with faith and reason.

"It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven," John Adams wrote of the founding in his influential Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. "Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery ... are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."

Adams was an intelligent and perceptive statesman, but he was wrong about one thing: that very thing gets pretended every day, from the President and the Supreme Court on down.