America, the land of the free and the home of the faithful

Novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In light of this cogent insight, let us travel to the foreign lands of 1863 America, to the middle of the Civil War.

In the spring of that year (a few months before the famous Gettysburg Address), President Abraham Lincoln declared April 30 “a day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” and called on Americans to “abstain from secular pursuits” in favor of “acts of devotion and public worship.” A very foreign tune from today’s obsession with separating church and state.

In his declaration, Lincoln stated: “We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. … We have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!”

At a time of costly, violent political tensions and national division, and an increasing sentiment of secularism, the president in that “foreign” era of United States history sought to aim the vision of his people not to himself, nor to the legal system, or even to the body politic, but to God — a foreign notion indeed.

However distant or strange the past may seem relative to the present, our nation is still experiencing many of the same problems as did the “foreign lands” of Civil War America. Though — thankfully — nothing nearly as violent, there is still a deepening political and social divide both felt and seen across the American landscape.

A study out of Pew Research Center showed that when Americans were “asked to sum up their feelings about politics in a word or phrase, very few (2%) use positive terms; 79% use negative or critical words, with ‘divisive’ and ‘corrupt’ comping up most frequently.” In terms of political tension and division, perhaps things aren’t so different from those foreign lands after all. What is different, however, is our approach to healing our divide, and where we turn to for help.

Most of our Founding Fathers, and many, if not most of our past presidents (including George Washington , John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan , to name a few) would often (and publicly) look to God to guide and direct, and even course-correct, our country. Today, this seems almost unthinkable; our overwhelmingly secular society wouldn’t allow for it. But this is precisely what we need, and perhaps what most Americans hope for.

Like the foreign country of yesterday, a large majority of Americans (3 in 4) still espouse religious affiliation, despite the alarming increases in “religious nones.” On a global scale , “more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared with 25% in Canada, and 18% in Australia and 6% in Great Britain. (The average European country stands at 22%).” In many ways, we are the land of the free because we are faithful.

Yet we, like the people of Abraham Lincoln, have become too prideful “to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace.” The problem, however, is that no one in command can or will remind us that what we most need today is not secularism and politics, but the “Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!”

Our lack of faith, both of our leaders and of the people of our nation as a whole, comes coupled with today’s rise in secularism and explains the “foreign” feeling many might have to the words of Lincoln. Secularism — far from simply seeking to separate church from state — often looks to completely erase God from the picture altogether, when it was by the grace of divine providence that we have a nation at all.

A secular society is one that blindly seeks to remove God from its institutions while benefiting — as spoiled inheritors — from the faith that built them up. The prophet of secularism is one who denies the noon-day sun while preaching online with his computer tied to a solar-panel charge.

And yet, the secularist works against the whole of American history, even the whole of all civilized history, to remove God from all that we have. As C. S. Lewis once wrote , such a bet against history “seems to me very long odds, longer odds than I would care to take with the voice of almost all humanity against me.”

Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles likewise offered a prophetic warning against such long odds in the “foreign” lands of 1978, stating that “irreligion as the state religion would be the worst of all combinations. Its orthodoxy would be insistent and its inquisitors inevitable.”

Such a warning for our day harmonizes beautifully with the warning of the 1959 novel “Children of the Alley,” by Egyptian novelist and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. The novel tells the story of the great Gabalawi (an allegorical symbol of God) and his alley in Cairo, Egypt (symbol of the world).

Over the years, the alley grows into a garden maintained by Adham (symbol of Adam), which spills out into the city. Eventually, a Moses figure (Gabal in the story), a Christ figure (Rifa), and a Muhammad figure (Qassem), who all come from the same alley and from the same blood, appear in the alley to allegorize the intimate relationship between the Abrahamic religions.

The final section of the novel, however, introduces one last character, Arafa, who symbolizes science, magic, sorcery and modern-day secularism. At the novel’s close, Arafa (science) kills Gabalawi (God) and leaves the alley completely destitute.

In the novel, Mahfouz illustrates the need for those who love God to unite under the bonds of faith to preserve our societies against the destruction of secularism. If we don’t, he seems to say, secularism will destroy our right to faith, and may destroy any possibility of unity. Secularism unbridled, he says, will ultimately kill our ability to worship, and our ability to unite across ever deepening divides of difference — and in our case, may destroy America.

This was the message from Abraham Lincoln, and we need it even more so today. We have forgotten God and at our own peril. When we remove God from our indivisibility, we become infinitely divisible, and “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” May you and I, and all believers around our country, make this season of our history one of prayer, fasting and humility before God. May God grant that the foreign America of yesterday be born again, and this be our motto and our prayer — “In God is our trust.”

Scott Raines is a writer in the Midwest, and received his Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literatures at the University of Kansas.