The Vance doctrine: Division and suspicion

We are not a “Christian nation.” We have never been one. We should not become one. Most Christians I know agree. One who doesn’t is our vice president

Down deep, JD Vance is shallow. When his lips move, I’m not sure they are connected to his brain as limited or grand as it may be. What in God’s name does he mean when he declares this is a Christian nation? It is true that almost 70% of us say we are, but that leaves over 100 million who are not.

If Vance had his way, almost a third of us become noncitizens. Are non-Christian doctors, lawyers, professors, public officials, suddenly heretics? Think of the country without them. We’d be a Christian state on the way to chaos.

Vance would get an “f” in any high school civics class. The Founding Fathers argued the question of church and state and declared that they be separate. We have lived well with that. It is our strength and our beauty. We are one nation under God and that includes those of us who are not Christian and even those who deny the existence of any God.

Vance brings an impressive personal ecumenical history to the question. He was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical family and is today a Roman Catholic married to a Hindu woman, once a Muslim. Vance also spent about eight years when he broadcast that he was an atheist. If Gallup polled him on what his religion has been, he might check, “nearly all of the above.”

Whether we should be a Christian nation has long been a settled question. We have lived in a nation of different beliefs with a shared, common loyalty to our country.

When we talk of a Christian nation, we must think of the Spanish Inquisition where heretics were burned at the stake, huge numbers of the population was imprisoned, expelled, or killed. Today here, if Vance mirrored what went on then, millions of Americans, instant heretics, however religious, would die or disappear. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison would whirl in their graves. Turning would be insufficient.

There is no good way to die, but burning at the stake seems more heathen cruel than Christian love, certainly an ugly way to go. The 32,000, a significant number in a small population, who died in the Inquisition would equal millions of us today. There were Jews, Muslims, Protestants, as well as non-believers. Another 300,000 were put on trial and forced to do penance.

The chance of Mr. Vance leading us into the American Inquisition is slight. Why then should we care? We must because he is not a lone, single voice crying division and hate. He and Donald Trump and their MAGA buddies bring their own form of inquisition to our country and world. We don’t burn anyone at the stake today, but we lynched Black Americans during the fight for civil rights.

That willingness to kill is here, outside the law, dormant most of the time, but a religious state, like Spain in the Inquisition., would change that. I am Jewish. Can I be a citizen in Vance’s Christian nation?

Fortunately, Vance is wandering in his own wilderness. Christian clergy I know don’t agree with him and neither do most of their parishioners.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”