Letter to President Obama #30 | Subject: Patriotism and Religious Symbols

Letter to President Obama #30 | Subject: Patriotism and Religious Symbols

Dear President Obama,

As you know, I’ve been writing you letters fairly often, once a day for about a month now. But in the last few days I haven’t written much at all; I have a pretty good excuse—I was in the emergency room for most of Wednesday afternoon. As it turns out, I’m fine, but it took a while for the doctors to find that out. In the interim, I hung around at the hospital for a while, and I read every good magazine that they had—two copies of Smithsonian and one of National Geographic. After that, the only magazines left were things like Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal, so I reluctantly started reading those. I don’t remember which magazine I was looking at, but I was taken aback by the cover of one of the magazines, which had the phrase “God Bless America” prominently displayed on the cover.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against America, or God, or God blessing America. On the contrary, I think it’s quite clear that God has done so, and quite abundantly. The phrase just seems to be a little obvious—it kind of goes without saying. And it seems like an unnecessary addition; I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever wished for the converse—for God, or any other deity for that matter, to damn a particular nation. Now that I think of that, it’s a little disappointing that I haven’t. It would be kind of fun to yell out “God damn you, Swaziland!” in the break room or have “Shiva, please destroy Iceland!” emblazoned on a button or a bumper sticker.

Then again, I don’t have any real beef with the phrase, it’s their magazine; they can put whatever they want on the cover. I’m writing this because those covers made me think of the fish symbols that some Christian folks put on their cars. I’ve always been disappointed that car dealerships only offered a few different choices—the fish symbol, the Darwin one, and the fish eating the Darwin symbol. That seems like a pretty limited selection to me, and certainly not one representative enough to cover everyone’s religious and metaphysical beliefs. So I went to my local car dealership and asked if they had any other symbolic options.

I started out with the big three monotheistic religions, thinking it was my best bet. I asked if they had Christian symbols, and of course they had the fish and the anti-Darwin fish (which has no teeth, oddly). I then asked if the symbols got more specific. The salesman was confused. I told him that I was Catholic and wanted an outline of the Pope’s hat or maybe the Popemobile for my car. He said they didn’t have that. I was surprised, and so I thought they had only one symbol per general monotheistic religion. So I asked if they had the crescent moon symbol. He didn’t know what I was talking about, so I told him it was Islamic. He looked like he was going to call the police. After that, I didn’t bother asking whether he had an agnostic question mark or a symbol for Rastafarianism; I simply asked if he had other biblical symbol options, like the burning bush, Jacob’s ladder, or David’s sling, or maybe even a sheep, but they said no, they just had the fish. I asked if they had chips, but they didn’t get it.

Needless to say, I think this is an area where American automakers could certainly take the initiative and beat the competition. Specifically, I’d like to have a Noah’s Ark symbol; I’d put that on my car. Maybe just the outline of the ark with a pair of giraffes’ heads peeking out of the top? (Though in that story I’ve always thought that Noah would have made the giraffes little umbrella hats—I mean, if he didn’t that’s not very nice. 40 days of rain would get pretty old if your head was sticking through the roof.)

I just thought of this—if the 10 plagues of Egypt could be encapsulated in car-symbol form, that’d be pretty sweet too.

Finally, it’d be nice if the automakers made those symbols a bit easier to remove. One of my pals, an ardent atheist, bought a used car and a nice one at that, but it had one of the fish symbols on it. Like I said, he was an ardent atheist, but he was even more particular about keeping his car in immaculate shape. This led to some odd meetings—people would see the symbol and think he was quite religious and then invited them to church or tried to discuss Scripture, and he’d have to try to explain the situation. In this respect, it was sort of like a pass code, but he didn’t really belong to the club.

In any case, let me know what you think about these comments and thanks.

Brett