OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
God and Man in Tennessee
By AMY GREENE
Published: April 27, 2012
EARLIER this month state senators in Tennessee approved an update to our sex-education law that would ban teachers from discussing hand-holding, which it categorizes as “gateway sexual activity.” The bill came fast on the heels of a new state law that effectively allows creationism to be taught in our classrooms. Though he voiced misgivings, our governor, Bill Haslam, refused to veto it.
It’s election season, and there’s no doubt these politicians are pandering to Tennessee’s conservative Christian majority. They’re right in one sense: most of us, myself included, are faithful Christians. But by politicizing our faith, they are ignoring Tennessee’s true religious roots and threatening the liberties they claim to protect.
Our governor, like many of our state’s political leaders past and present — from Estes Kefauver and Cordell Hull to Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander — was born and raised here in East Tennessee, and he knows well how deep-rooted our spirituality is in Appalachia.
But he seems to have forgotten where it comes from.
The first Scots-Irish settlers to move into these mountains, the ones who saw the fog lying thick between the trees and called them the Smokies, were religious dissenters. They refused to live under the Penal Laws that forced them to accept Christianity as the English defined it. The churches they established rejected formalized, state-sanctioned religion and embraced diversity and individualism.
During World War II, my grandfather was a pastor at seven different churches across the Tennessee Valley. Over the course of his life he preached to Holiness, United Methodist and Baptist congregations. The church he founded in his last years was nondenominational: he could no longer stand for his beliefs to be governed by any organization.
He wasn’t alone; religious individualism ran deep in Tennessee. An old hymn that was popular in his time began, “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine / but let’s walk along together / Our fathers built them side by side / So let’s walk along together.”
But this legacy is increasingly threatened. During the 2010 gubernatorial race, Mr. Haslam, a Republican, insinuated in his campaign ads that we should choose him for governor because he attended Bible study every week.
Meanwhile Bo Watson, the Republican state senator who sponsored the creationism law, claims the legislation is meant to encourage students to challenge the merits of current scientific thought, and to protect teachers who might criticize evolution in the process; he also stresses that the bill prohibits teachers from interjecting their personal beliefs.
But a belief in “intelligent design” is by nature personal and not scientific. These teachers are in our classrooms because they meet the state’s standards for instructing our children in science, not to tell them about God.
Everyone knows the law’s true intent. It’s easy to see how this bill might open the door for teachers to discuss their own religious views in the classroom; given the impassioned feelings most of us here have about our faith, it would be hard for them to hold back.
By politicizing our faith in this way, Mr. Watson and others assume as well that we all vote Republican. As if, despite the religious diversity we come from, all Tennessee Christians believe and want the same things. Or worse, that we should want the same things, based on what they tell us it means to be a Christian.
My belief is an intensely personal thing. I believe my relationship with God is sacred, and all my own. It’s important to me to instill the values I’ve been passed down in my two children. But it’s equally important that I have the right to choose the churches and Sunday school classes they attend, that I know and trust the people who introduce religious theories to them.
A lot has changed in Tennessee since frontier times, but our feelings about religion remain strong. I know our hearts are in the debates we have over whether biblical theories should be discussed in public schools, whichever side we come down on. But I’m not sure the politicians’ are.
They claim their goal is to better our education system, and to give us more freedom of religious thought in the bargain. But it seems to me they’re taking away the individualist liberties we’ve always prized and giving us more government regulation instead.
I fear that these bills, written to give us what they think we want, will have the opposite effect. By legislating our Christianity, what they’re really doing is taking it away from us.
Amy Greene is the author of the novel “Bloodroot.”
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