No clergy at Ground Zero on Sunday? Good.

It seems that there will be no clergy involved in the ceremonies at Ground Zero marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

Good.

I approve- not because I share the shameful objection of those who blame all Muslims for the attacks to he participation of the odd imam. Rather, as a sometime Christian clergyman, I myself am offended by the reduction of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and all other religions to a bland, incomsequential, throughly neutered and frankly idolatrous veneer of  nothing more than lowest common denominator sentimentality.

And make no mistake: the god of American civil religion is indeed an idol. He is not Allah. He is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And he is not the Holy Trinity. He is something other- and far less- than any of these. The abomination of the blasphemous Yankee Stadium civic worship service held in the days following the attacks, which effectively emptied all religions of the content and substance which alone coulld have provided meaning and comfort at such a time amd substitued a weak, insipid and impotent pan-religious gruel, was a disservice not only to those to whom it so signally failed to offer the comfort of any specific and substantial faith, but to religion itself.

It is true that there are certain great truths held in common by the great religions. But contrary to the myth so enthusiastically embraced by the Oprah Winfreys of this world and the shallow purveyors of ecumenical nice-nice, their teachings differ in far more than they agree. The comfort that any of them might give is vitiated  when they are watered down by the necessity of playing well with others. At times of grave civic crisis, the first concern of religion ought to be the casting of truth's light and the power of theological substance upon the darkness, not the scrupulous avoidance of any chance of hurting someone's feelings by saying something with which they might disagree.

On Sunday- and on all the other solemn moments which our nation's future will doubtless hold- let us opt fot the power of unneutered religion and the comfort provided by the substance of our varied beliefs. Let us meet in our own churches, synagogues and mosques, there to be comforted by the wisdom of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or whatever other faith we may confess, rather than being compelled to settle for the comfortless platitudes which are all the idolatry of American civil religion can finally offer. And if we do gather, as the people of New York will gather at Ground Zero on Sunday, to find strength in a community that transends the barriers of our varied faiths, let it be as individuals comforting one another as individuals, rather than as representatives of faith traditions which dare not be true to themselves at the very moment their essense is most needed lest somehow offense be given to those who do not believe as we do.

Civil religion trivializes faith,and trivializes all religions. And I, for one, am glad that it will be people who, as individuals of different faiths,  will comfort each other on Sunday at Ground Zero as best they may, rather than once again  having the substance- and therefore the power- of our great religions sacrificed at the altar of our national idol, the great To Whom It May Concern.

HT: Real Clear Religion