"This is God's Country"

I recently found myself on the Internet reading a series of posts on a website's message board. The specific topic was simply this: a mother, new to the area, asked if there were other non-religious families who would be interested in getting together for tea or coffee or some such. That's all. Simple as that. Seems like a rather straight-forward question. The degree of venom that this post engendered, however, was truly shocking. One of the posts that really caught my eye concluded with this phrase: "This is God's country."

In the above example, one wouldn't have thought twice about someone posting "I'm new to the area; are there any good Christian families interested in getting together?" However, to ask a slightly different question incurs the wrath of many. It reminded me of the point that Sam Harris makes in The End of Faith when he talks about how pervasive Christianity is in our society. He says to demonstrate this, the next time you encounter a phrase with the word "God" in it, simply replace with word "God" with a mythological figure of your choice and listen to how strange it sounds. "In Vishnu We Trust." Catchy, no? How about this: "And to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under Odin, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Or perhaps a rousing rendition of Ethel Merman singing "Artemis Bless America." What if the question had been "are there any good families who ardently believe in the tooth fairy who would be interested in getting together?" The reaction would have been, shall we say, lively. Or how about taking it one step further. What if this person had asked if there were any Satan worshiping families who wanted to get together? Can you even imagine the outrage? The extent to which people would have been up in arms is difficult to imagine.

The phrase "this is God's country" kept clanging in my head every time I read the post. It is? A country where the founding fathers went to inordinate lengths to separate church and state is God's country? Repeatedly we see the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and countless others refuting this point. It is difficult to conceive of a topic that luminaries such as these so adequately repudiated that long ago, is still somehow accepted as fact, and while on the whole we still hold those luminaries in high regard, we, on the whole, conveniently overlook their stinging rebukes to religion and religious doctrine.

As I read and re-read the series of posts, the same question kept recurring to me. Why? Not only were there few (any?) posts actually answering the question that had been asked, the topic was essentially hijacked by religionists, saying what ultimately amounted to "we don't like yer kind 'round here." True, there were a number of posts defending the original question and the person's right to pose it. Still, though, there were few if any direct answers to the question, and even the posts made in defense were watered down, and tap danced around the point rather than going after it directly. How is it that religion is still given this much latitude? The very idea that we live in a society where everyone has a cell phone (many people have two or more), wi-fi internet access is nearly as ubiquitous as drinking fountains, and more and more of us have our lives sustained or improved by medical science, that there is still this religious riptide underneath it all is, in the truest definition of the word, incredible.