If America is still one nation, that is because no one who might be elected to public office takes religion as seriously as its founders did

Is America still one nation under God? That the question is even asked today suggests a negative answer. At other moments in America's history, few would have bothered to ask it. But after decades of confident secularism, which has coursed through much of American politics and culture, the question takes on serious relevance.

Imagine if the coiners of that phrase had a chance to walk around America today. Would they see "one nation under God"? Not likely. The nation of which they spoke would probably be unrecognisable to them. What they would see instead is one nation under secularism – or at best one nation under a very secularised modern understanding of God.

The truth is that almost everything in America has been secularised, including religion itself. This explains America's culture of religiosity without religion: "God" talk persists but it means less and less, as Americans try and shoehorn secularist morality and philosophy into fast-eroding religious concepts.

What exactly do references to "God" mean in a culture where the lifestyles of the "religious" and the non-religious are almost indistinguishable – in a culture where politicians punctuate every speech with "God Bless America" before trotting off to vote for partial-birth abortion and gay civil unions?

God-talk in such a culture becomes nothing more than a projection of modern fads, currents and desires – an appropriation of religion for essentially secularist purposes. Hence liberal arguments, whether it is for abortion or gay marriage, are usually shrouded in religious garb.

But the reality is that theism, properly understood and forthrightly stated, holds little sway over the ordering of American society. It has been dislodged, whether politicians admit it or not, by de facto agnosticism. Man, not God, is the measure of all things.

Just look at the the assumptions underlying political discussions in America: secularism is assumed to be identical with "reason" while theism represents "mere opinion". Thus any politician who argues against legislation on the grounds that it violates a God-given moral law is dismissed out of hand.

America's founding fathers would enjoy little standing in today's debates. They did not consider the existence of God a mere opinion or guess but a truth accessible to reason – a truth upon which they based the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. Were a politician to write such documents today, he would be rebuked for "imposing religion" on his fellow Americans.

Democratic party presidential nominee Barack Obama, who combines the rhetoric of religion with the philosophy of secularism, once lectured theists:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.

Leave theism behind, in other words. America's founding fathers would find Obama's formulation odd: for them, values are "universal" precisely because they derive from God, whereas lowest-common-denominator secularism yields no universal values, just relativistic fragmentation.

Secularism is a very thin reed on which to hang a political society. But that's the new democratic experiment underway in America.

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