'E pluribus unum' sought by Thomas
Eileen Rush
Issue date: 3/31/08 Section: News
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Thomas said that our First Amendment rights are under attack, and echoed our founding fathers in the call for "constant vigilance."
"The story of America is the story of a nation struggling to live up to its own ideals," Thomas said.
America, he said, is an experiment in liberty. "It is the nature of experiments that they can fail," Thomas said. "America is never finished."
The unfinished work that Thomas, a minister and a lawyer, referred to is the need for a separation of church and state in the United States. His speech, a part of the Dr. Roy S. Nicks Distinguished Lecture Series, focused on the importance of the separation of church and state as well as "freedoms at risk" within the United States and abroad.
One of the major issues facing the world is "how to live together with our deepest differences - that is, our religious differences," he said.
As an example of the separation of church and state, Thomas asked the audience what the United States' mottos were. Audience members answered "In God We Trust" quickly, but hesitated to find the second.
"E pluribus unum," Thomas said. "Out of many, one. As I travel around the country I see plenty of plurals, but very little unum."
The glue that holds our nation together is not our religious consensus, but our civil consensus.
"Gone are the days when diversity meant Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian," he said. Some scholars identify as many as 2,000 religious groups in the country, according to Thomas.
"There is no religious consensus in America," he sad. "There never was … The only common ground we are able to form our 'unum' from is civic."
The series is co-sponsored by the Claudius G. Clemmer College of Education and the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Staying true to those educational roots, Thomas took a moment to tell the audience that a teacher's job is not only to educate their students, but to equip them for citizenship. One way to equip students for citizenship is to make sure they know that the American arrangement is still a minority view, he said.