"In this holiday season, we affirm our commitment to each other, as family members, as neighbors, as Americans, regardless of our color, or creed or faith, let us remember that we are one, we are a family."
The president made these remarks last night at the Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Washington. For all its innocuous fluff, this statement simply galls me, in the same way those condescending Coexist bumper stickers do. This was, after all, a special ceremony relating to Christmas, and the president, in his remarks, dismissed faith as somehow unimportant, that we as humans can overcome our differences in creed because we are, apparently, bigger than religion, bigger than God. Contained in this statement is a reemergence of the president's narcissistic worldview. Humanity, without the divisiveness spawned by theology's age-old grappling with the big questions, can come together as one, bland, agnostic family. I'm all for living together peacefully with people of different backgrounds, but we can't just treat religion and the primal questions about our existence and our destiny, questions to which religion seeks to provide answers, as one of those many incidental things in life that we can just gloss over in our happy enthusiasm for our common 'we are one family' Weltanschauung.
Being Catholic, for example, is central to my existence, as it provides definitive answers to a host of essential questions, about the origin of mankind, and, more importantly, about my final end. It's not something I can cooly set aside in a rush of sanitized Hallmark Card patriotism that aims to treat the core teachings of my faith as ultimately not that important, in light of the common values that unite us all (a reference the president frequently uses). Where do those values come from? What is their source?
It's not that I'm simply picking on Obama. I can see a lot of our leaders making similarly banal, hollow statements.
No comments:
Post a Comment