Freedom, religion collide in a Independence Day parade

MICHELE MARR

Hundreds of families for whom the Huntington Beach Fourth of July

Parade has long been a family tradition will not be in attendance

this year as the city celebrates the centennial of what it claims is

the largest Independence Day parade west of the Mississippi.

Even though the federal legal holiday will be observed on Monday,

the city will celebrate Independence Day on Sunday, July 4. Its

parade is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., when thousands of its

residents will be at worship.

There was a time when planning a civil celebration to vie with

Sunday morning worship would have raised no end of ire. But that is

becoming a distant memory. As Bob Dylan, the troubadour chronicler of

our epoch, wrote 40 years ago, the times they are a changin’. And so

they have been.

Hear freedom ring.

We’ve reached a point in our social history I never imagined we’d

ever see -- a time when religion, no matter how nonpartisan, how

generic, scarcely dares to raise its voice in public.

Whether it’s an invocation before public meetings, God in our

national pledge, God on our currency or on government walls or doors,

there has been a swell of cries from the anti-religious and

a-religious to do away with it. The arbiters of our civic life are

increasingly inclined to kowtow.

The zeitgeist seems to be pulling for a god-free nation in which

its citizens are free to believe anything they wish--as long as they

keep their religious beliefs to themselves and, if elected to public

office, constrain themselves from allowing those beliefs to have any

bearing on their actions or opinions.

Yet had this been the practice of our founding fathers, this

nation may never have come to be at all. At the very least, it could

not very well have been built upon the principles we claim to hold so

dear, for those very principles rely on a belief in the existence of

a creator, a god.

Fifty-seven words into the Declaration of Independence, it is

God’s authority that is cited as the just basis for the American

Revolution, the 13 colonies’ revolt against their mother country.

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one

people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with

another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate

and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God

entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires

that they should declare the causes which impel them to the

separation,” says the first paragraph of the Declaration of

Independence.

Then, before a laundry list of 20 such causes and eight

sub-causes, comes the premise on which every citizen of the United

States hangs his and her due liberty, whether they know it explicitly

or not.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created

equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain

unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the

pursuit of happiness.”

“Endowed by their creator.” As Webster’s puts it, “one who

creates, God; the Supreme Being.”

Of course, whether or not one embraces its spiritual foundation,

our government extends these unalienable rights, rights further

enumerated in the Bill of Rights, to every citizen.

Among those most prized, are those found in the First Amendment:

freedom of speech; freedom of the press; the right to assemble

peaceably; the right to petition the government for a redress of

grievances; and often now most contentious, the freedom to exercise

religion without interference of the government.

This is often paraphrased as “freedom of religion.” Increasingly,

it’s interpreted to mean “freedom from religion” -- not merely from

personal beliefs or practice but from any public contact with the

religious expression of others. More and more, this interpretation is

honored and upheld by municipal government decisions and court

rulings.

Creches have been barred from public parks, crosses erased from

government seals, scriptures removed from civic buildings, walls and

doors, many of them after a long public presence and tradition.

Invocations have been banned from high school graduations,

parent-teacher association meetings and city council proceedings. All

decisions made in the interest of keeping church and state separate.

But what the First Amendment says about religion is this:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,

or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... “

In our multicultural, diversely religious nation, where roughly 15

per cent of the population claims no religious beliefs or

affiliation, the degree to which we are banishing the presence of

religion from the public square seems worthy of some examination on

this weekend of our nation’s 228th celebration of independence.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].