I've been thinking about being one nation, under God.
On Flag Day, June 14, 1954, three days before my thirteenth birthday, Congress added the words Under God to the pledge of allegiance we said at the beginning of each school day, standing with one hand over our heart, facing the flag. I was a teenager in a conservative Presbyterian church during the 1950s, and understood that the God our one nation lived under was the Christian God, the one Jesus called his Dearest Father, the one I addressed in my repetitious prayer as Our Father which art in heaven.
In the First Amendment to the Constitution our founders were explicit: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Despite this clear restriction, I and many other Americans believed ourselves to be established as a Christian nation.
I first affirmed my Christian faith at a Billy Graham Crusade meeting in the Hollywood Bowl in October, 1951.
In the many decades since I assumed we were a Christian nation, I have watched Christianity, still professed as their religion by more than sixty percent of Americans, become a battlefield on which right-wing and left-wing believers wage verbal and sometimes physical warfare with one another. Many Evangelical Christians malign their progressive sisters and brothers as faithless secularists, who then sling the malign mud back by writing off their conservative co-believers as ignorant bigots. Many Christian denominations have become so polarized that they have split in two and now foster - rather than disassemble - these antagonisms. Meanwhile, the multitudes between left and right are rendered inaudible by this sound and fury.
Not surprisingly, then, given this chaos, fewer than half of our citizens now belong to any congregation, and somewhere around a third self-define as agnostic or atheist. Then there’s this: the fastest growing "religious" population in our country is none: those with no articulate faith, who belong to no religious community, who practice no form of communal worship or personal devotion. More and more of us are religious refugees, no longer attached to a formal religious or non-religious community but still curious spiritual seekers looking for fellow travelers.
I’ve discovered how much I have in common spiritually not only with other Christians but with Buddhists and Muslims, Jews and Native American spiritualists, mystics, mediums and one close friend who is Baha’i. We have differing names for God, recite different prayers, and develop beliefs with our community’s distinctive nuances. We are no longer one nation under God but something much better: a diverse group of friends with a similar sacred core and a common spiritual hunger animating each of us.
All of this came to mind as the congregation I worship in – All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California – gathered on May 7th to celebrate our Rector Emeritus, George Regas. George was ninety years old when he died in January of 2021. Because of Covid restrictions, we couldn’t gather then to celebrate his life; so we waited for over a year to remember him publicly. Despite the long and wistful delay, when it was finally time to celebrate I realized just how privileged I was to know and love him, and how much he gave me to be grateful for.
Our family’s friendship with George and Mary began in the mid-1970s, when I was a pastor in nearby San Marino and George invited me to serve on the board of The Peace Operations Center, which mobilized religious communities in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Five years later, on a spring Sunday evening in 1981, George and Mary sat in our crowded sanctuary as I resigned, telling our congregation what I’d done to betray my calling. Becky and I then exited while the stunned congregation was left to decide what to do in this sudden transition.
We walked to our home at the end of the church parking lot and were sitting on the couch, crying together, when the doorbell rang. George and Mary were there, and spent fifteen minutes consoling and embracing us. As they left, George said, And when you’re ready, bring your family to All Saints and be part of our congregation. We’ve been there for forty-one years.
Twenty years later, on Friday evening, January 7th, 2000, we got a call that our younger son had died while riding in a bush taxi in Guinea, West Africa, where he was serving in The Peace Corps. I don’t know how they heard, but at ten o’clock the next morning, Saturday, our doorbell rang again, and there were George and Mary. Our extended family had already arrived, so we clustered as a group in our dining room, arms around one another, as George and Mary once again consoled and embraced us, and George prayed us through this terrible morning.
In the same way that George reached out to me and my family, he reached across religious boundaries. His best friend for fifty years was Leonard Beerman, founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles. They met in 1967 at an anti-Vietnam war rally, and spent decades creating and promoting projects to fulfill the command to heal the earth and its inhabitants they each found in the roots of their differing faiths.
George and Leonard invited Maher Hathout and his brother, Hassan Hathout, leaders of the Islamic Center of Southern California, to join with them in multi-faith coalitions on a variety of these social justice issues. During the Persian Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, these friends organized weekly assemblies for Muslims, Christians and Jews to pray and worship together. While Jews and Muslims fought in the streets of Jerusalem, tensions spilled into the rooms where these meetings were being organized. The air was often thick with the difficulty of trusting one another in the midst of this distant conflict rooted in our differing faiths. But through this and every subsequent issue, friendships prevailed and endured: Leonard’s and both Hathout’s successors spoke in George’s memorial services and read texts from their sacred scriptures in Hebrew and classical Arabic.
George was thirty-seven years old when he arrived at All Saints in 1967. We were living through the tumult of the Civil Rights movement and what seemed like our endless war in Vietnam. Already the seams in our national unity were ripping. In an effort to welcome any and all into this growing congregation, George introduced what has become the signature sentence of our life together, which is repeated whenever we gather for worship: Whoever you are, and wherever you find yourself on the journey of faith, you’re welcome at this table to receive the bread and wine made holy.
Not everyone agreed then nor agrees now with his understanding of faith. But he exercised his convictions with such integrity and candor that, for those of us whom he shepherded, we know what we believe. We know too that what we believe requires of us actions built upon the love for community he called justice and the love for individuals he called compassion.
We are no longer one nation under God, but a diverse collection of religious differences. Too often, the religious right raise their contentious voices and drown out the majority of us who would like to find common ground. I'm grateful to have spent these years under George's leadership, learning to be comfortable in our diverse religious culture and holding out hope that we can learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.
This is the prayer George recited before every sermon he preached to us from 1967 to his retirement in 1995. It summarizes his own faith and captures his vision for each of us as children of our Creator who are called upon to turn the human race into the human family.
Help us, O Lord,
To be masters of ourselves,
That we might become
The servants of others.
Take our lips and speak through them,
Our minds and think through them,
And take our hearts and set them on fire
For Christ’s sake.
Blessings,
Rick
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe now.