One hears the phrase “God and country” all the time in mainstream politics. Candidates on both the right and the left often talk about how their faith informs their policies and drives them to bring about positive change. However, when unpacking the relationship between God and country further, they seem to be at odds with each other in terms of the principles they affirm. More specifically, God and country both suggest that the other is subordinate, presenting a dilemma for those who say they love both “God and country.”
First, I will start with country, which is the United States for our purposes. The United States was definitively founded on the premise that church and state should be separated in order to protect religious freedoms. This fundamental freedom can only be obtained if there is no lone religious establishment that secures a disproportionate amount of political power, thereby enacting laws that trespass on the freedom of other religions. However, by protecting religious freedom, the government has affirmed the principle that all religions are equal, a principle that cannot be true if one of said religions were “correct.” Furthermore, by establishing itself as a mediator of religious laws, the government also establishes itself as higher law compared to religion.
As an example, let us take a fictional religion in which the idea of private property does not exist and the acknowledgement of anything as private property is a sinful act. As a result, stealing would not be considered a wrongful action and even might be encouraged within the teachings of this religion. While this religion may have legitimate reasons for believing in such a radical concept, a member of said religion would undoubtedly be arrested if they stole my car. No one outside the framework of this fictional religion would agree that these people should be able to steal whatever they may please. In this sense, the secular law that we all abide by overrules their religious beliefs.
While there are many counterexamples to the aforementioned thought experiment, the very fact that a religion has to go through the government to get an exemption from a certain secular law implies that the government considers itself as higher law. In terms of power dynamics, the one who gives the exemption makes the rules rather than the one who gets the exemption. Furthermore, what if two religious beliefs are directly opposed to one another? Since there is no common ground between two religious frameworks, the only way to argue your case is by saying “you have the wrong God.” In such a situation, the secular law acts as the only coherent mediator between the two religious frameworks.
With the previous example in mind, the only way to protect religious freedom is by establishing a secular law that mediates all religious laws. Otherwise, to secure religious freedom is to promote a segregation of religions in which every person would move to a country that establishes a non-secular government of their religion. Thus, the United States treats its laws as objective while it treats everyone’s religious teachings as subjective, granting minor exemptions in particular cases. In short, it is not truly God that rules over man, but the laws of the United States of America that rule over man, says the United States government.
Given that the United States government has established itself as superior to religious law, I cannot imagine that the classic monotheistic God is too happy about it. Imagine God creating the universe, creating us and giving us a book to live by only for us to say that we can do better in terms of the objective law. In fact, I would expect that a monotheistic God would find the concept of a country quite silly. Do we really think that He created all of nature and all of us just so that we could draw arbitrary lines on a map and say, “That side is yours and this side is mine?” No, of course not. If there were a God that cared about what we do and sent rules to live by, it would be for all of us to live by, not just a certain nationality, culture, or ethnicity.
In terms of religious freedom, God and country are not on the same page. More specifically, if you believe a certain religion, you must think that the religion is true. If your religion is true, you must accept that it holds a special place among religions, being that yours is the only one that is true. Therefore, a dilemma emerges of how to justify the principle that all religions are equal.
You might say that it is everyone’s right to believe what they want, but that is a humanist approach to a universe governed by a divine lawmaker. If you believe that God has truly laid out the guidelines of how to live and how to act, then how can you justify saying that it is perfectly fine that people believe things that are directly opposed to what your divine lawmaker commands? By supposing a humanist ideal that all religions are equal, you are undermining the doctrines of the very religion you are trying to protect.
As a result of this discussion, those who say that they love both “God and country” have to reconcile the feud between the two. I wish I had a good answer for such a question, but it seems to me that the two are diametrically opposed, both claiming to affirm objective principles that everyone should follow. Meanwhile, nearly 50 percent of people would not vote for a political candidate that is an atheist, which is more bias than any other major category (including Muslim). Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t a non-religious person be best suited to establish secular law?