Why can’t the United States have a Church of America? We have a Bank of America. You don’t have to bank at Bank of America just because it’s called Bank of America, and in Church of America, you don’t have to subscribe to any particular dogma except lip service to God and Jesus. The stance is basically a sanctimonious attitude and a feeling like a divine right to open a can of whup-ass on the world.
Then guys in Georgia will be allowed to make Ten Commandment plaques on tax dollars, people can pray in schools collectively in homeroom, not just individually before tests, and “under God” will be blazoned over everything.
Holy War can commence instead of a “war on terror.” Even better, we can all call it the “Holy War on Terror,” which finally brings “Holy Terror,” a favorite moniker of mine, back into common vernacular.
It’s not like the separation of Church and State is so sacrosanct after all. The Roman Empire, once sacked and burned, realized that putting the Holy in Holy Roman Empire was the new way to change with the times. From that point until Luther himself brought faith into the equation and Henry the Eighth decided that he’d like to divorce his wife before he beheaded her, the “marriage” of Church and State had been as certain as death and taxes. Leave it up to a bunch of European eggheads to get all philosophical and argue that Church and State should really spend some time apart.
And then leave it to the up-start Founding Fathers to serve the papers.
But over 200 years apart is a long time, and it looks like State is really starting to miss Church and the moral absolutism support it provided. And Church is starting to miss the sacred bread that State once blessed and dropped in its collection plate.
Besides, the separation of church and state is soooooo Age of Reason. This is the Age of Plastic! We need a catchy credit-calling card with an expanding trillion-dollar limit, with a bill that our babies’ babies can foot. And we need this card to have a name with a really righteous ring to it. So, if the separated Church and State can be reunited, what’s holding back this hot and happening couple?
Well, maybe the neighbors. They’ve apparently started talking and aren’t so keen on this couple. Rumor has it that America’s neighbors to the East, once compelled into a fabulous ride of keeping up with the Jones’, now have decided not to keep up, but to pool their pennies. Or, more accurately, to save their pennies for loafers, and start their own currency — this thing they call the Euro.
Oh, here in the land of dollars, the Euro was once like Esperanto, the joke that would never catch on.
When Bank of America (not necessarily that specific bank, but the metaphor) was in bed with War Toys R’ U.S., the neighbors thought it was kinky and wanted to get in on the action. But then, when those two became absolutely intolerable and nobody wanted to go anywhere with them, in from Right field comes crazy Puritan-progeny: propaganda proposing a reactionary reunion with Governmental Policy.
Church and State in Europe is like an old, dowdy couple that no one takes seriously. But what they do take seriously is this Euro. Here in America, Church and State are like Glenn Close and Michael Douglas in that movie where a pet bunny takes the worst of it in a boiling pot.
The sparks are flying! Can these two try to make it together again? What will the judges say? What say you?
Here’s what I say:
The Holy Terror Whup-Ass Church of America against the world!
Laura Bahr is a graduate student studying mass communication.
