Ceres was lifted back to the top of the Capitol Tuesday morning. Not everybody was happy about it. The reason why is part of our national faith and national political history.

At a couple of the several pre-Christmas events we attended last weekend people asked if your observer had observed Representative Mike Moon’s letter in the local newspaper objecting to a pagan goddess being put back on top of our Capitol and what our observations were about his position that a statue of Jesus would have been better.

The tones of their voices as they asked those questions was indicative of their feelings that Rep. Moon was—–I guess “mistaken” is a generic way to put it.

My observation was that I disagreed with Rep. Moon, not because I am not a Christian—I shall let a much higher power than public opinion decide if I am and if being so entitles me to some eternal benefit—but because I am an American.

This incident and the attitudes implied in those brief discussion is both a commentary on some of the unfortunate polarization within our national community in which people tend to stake out a position and those who disagree are branded as political heathens, enemies, liberals, conservatives—whatever disparaging brands you can think of with which we brand people today instead of respecting their right to think differently from us.

There is nothing wrong with disagreement. Our nation, or at least the New England version of it that has been part of our school history lessons, was founded on disagreement. Unfortunately, our history tells us that those who disagreed with the Church of England enough to flee England often did not tolerate disagreement on matters of faith within their own ranks once they got here.

The discussion of Ceres vs. Jesus is part of our national faith fabric that we’ll explore a little bit later. But first, allow your faithful servant to explain why he comes down on the side of Ceres in this discussion.

Ceres is a symbol. Jesus is a person of worship. We do not worship Ceres by having her on our capitol. She symbolizes our greatest industry—agriculture—among other things. We do not worship agriculture although without it we could not exist. So her importance is in that quality of Missouri that is essential to all who live here. She might have been a goddess to be worshipped by ancient Romans and Greeks (who called her Demeter), but today she is but a symbol of a bountiful state.

The other day I drove past the Vipassana Buddhist Church, Center for Buddhist Development in Jefferson City, which has been in town since 2001. A few minutes later I drove past Temple Beth-el, the oldest synagogue building still in use west of the Mississippi River, built in 1883. Had I driven a little longer I would have gone past the Islamic Center of Jefferson City. Just outside of town is the Unity Church of Peace. And I have spoken several times at local Unitarian Universalist meetings. There even is a loose-knit organization of Atheists that gets together from time to time in Jefferson City.

Most Sundays you’ll find me at the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), one block from the Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal Churches, kind of a mainstream nest in downtown Jefferson City.

All of these mainline and other organizations are free in this nation to worship as they please and who they please or to worship nobody if they please. This nation for centuries has tried to keep church and state apart. The degree to which that has succeeded has been discussed for as long as the effort has been made. But the underlying sentiment behind it has been that this nation is a nation where believers or non-believers of various ilks are equal in the eyes of the law and as such are to be respected as citizens of this country. Refining that concept has produced court rulings by the dozens without eliminating the attitudes by some that they are closer to God than others are. In the end, however, we think as an individual that God will decide who is closest to God and that the human tendency to separate ourselves on that basis is spiritually counterproductive.

Putting Jesus atop our Capitol would not recognize the diversity of faith or non-faith that is a perpetual part of American history, one of the things that sets our nation apart from many others.

Representative Moon sees things differently and he is entitled as a citizen and a man of faith to do so. Those who dismiss him out-of-hand are being dismissive of our heritage. A healthy and respectful discussion of the issues surrounding his feelings is not likely to produce many converts in any direction but the freedom we have to explore competing points of view on subjects such as this is part of who we are as a nation.

I’m reading George M. Marsden’s Religion in American Culture, a broad survey of the role of religion in creating and shaping our country. One of the things he writes about early in the book is the world that produced those we call Pilgrims and Puritans, people who came out of a Europe in which the Catholic Church only a century earlier had split into the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, and in which more recently the Roman church had divided through the Protestant Reformation (“Protestant,” as in one who protests), and the further divisions within Protestantism that was free of Catholic doctrine. In England, where King Henry VIII created his own church rather than follow dictates from Rome, a further split occurred between those who believed the Anglican Church could be cleansed from within and those whose disagreements with that church led to persecution and their eventual flight to Holland and ultimately to the New World.

But those who landed here in 1620 and the Puritans who came a few years later had a low tolerance for non-traditional interpretations within their ranks, the foremost result being Roger Williams’ banishment from Massachusetts Bay to found what is now Rhode Island as a refuge for those who felt church and state should not be one.

Williams was a co-founder of the Baptist Church in America with Dr. John Clarke. Marsden says, “Baptists carried the Puritan emphasis on conversion a step further by insisting that baptism of adults symbolizes spiritual separation from the world. Interested above all in the spiritual purity of the church, early Baptists believed in separation from the state Church of England, rather than working for reform from within, as most Puritans believed…Williams thus championed the separation of church and state, but not for the same reason that later Enlightenment thinkers, such as Thomas Jefferson, did. Jefferson was concerned that the church would corrupt the state. Williams feared that the state would corrupt the church.”

The challenges of survival by settlers who faced another new world beyond the Alleghenies led to new denominations that recognized individual responses to God rather than responses to the structured and creedal churches of the colonies.

We might have oversimplified what Marsden spent many pages explaining, but we remain today a nation of conversion-oriented, structured religions and religions that place greater emphasis on individual responses to faith outside of church-required adherence to doctrines.

One might be more likely to insist Jesus should be atop the Capitol. The other might be more likely to insist a state showing a preference for a particular faith tradition should not be what the country is all about. This discussion about the proper place of religion in American life is an ongoing one. Fortunately, we live in a nation that allows that discussion. We must be vigilant in protecting that right.

So Representative Moon is neither wrong nor right. He’s just being an American citizen and in his advocacy for Jesus being on top of the Capitol, he has reminded us of the differences that have shaped our free country and remain part of the diverse dialogue that is welcome here. We are glad that he can be such a citizen. And glad that those who respectfully disagree with him are Americans, too.