Church and state… how do we navigate?

Who needs God? Without God, can a secular society find its way towards any right relationships, between self and others, employers, our earth and seas and skies? Is there a third way, between the totalitarianism of the radical secular extremes and the totalitarianism at the radical religious extremes?  At nonharming.com, we certainly hope so.

While Church and state should be separate so that all may have their freedom, it sometimes feels that, to anyone whose viewpoint allows for a transcendent aspect outside the domain of science, there is almost a dismissive shunning. Has this, perhaps, gone slightly too far, towards worship of the secular, where all that is ‘of God’ must be stricken as anathema? This is what Chris Hedges wonders, in his little book When Atheism Becomes Religion.

Our webmaster is the songwriter of the awareness-raising song Such a Crime. This song, performed by the band Commodore Callahan, was meant to raise awareness about the criminalization of poverty and the rising tide of inequality. The thought was to simply write a ballad, a story of how one person with pretty inarguably good credentials was affected. That person? A disabled, Vietnam-era veteran, who was a minister, to boot.  He was swept up in the criminal legal system when the police swept through a homeless shelter looking for outstanding warrants. His warrant? Criminal vagrancy (that is, homelessness). The city? Washington, the town responsible for his disability. This story was inspired by an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Barbara Ehrenreich.

What’s wrong with the song? We are told (off the record) by administrators in the San Francisco public school system, the song is too “Christian” to be appropriate for school children, because the subject of the song happens to be a minister.

In this ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation. Commodore Callahan will be producing a vanilla version [words say 'that man Al' instead of 'our reverend' for example], but by not telling the whole story of this individual the song is less powerful, and the case against the criminalization of poverty is also weakened.   Check out the youTube channel and judge the song for yourself…  and if you are a famous country singer and would like to help us out, please do contact Commodore Callahan, because the band needs your voice for the vanilla version!