Dear Editor,
I am writing this letter fully aware that the topic of "separation between church and state" is already being discussed. I will try to not repeat what has already been said by others. Needless to say, freedom of religion is essential to any free country, and the government funding churches opens a nasty can of worms – neither entity should be able to control the other.
As soon as I heard about the statements made by Frans Richardson and Hyacinth Richardson, I had a feeling what sentiments were behind them. My suspicions were confirmed upon later reading the newspaper article. I in no way think that they wanted their intentions to come across as oppressive or impede on freedom of belief.
St. Maarten is experiencing the same as countries everywhere – we are affected by immigration, emigration, globalisation, tourism – everything is changing on a global scale that has not been seen before. We feel that we are losing identity and have no say in what our own island is turning into.
Globalisation, in our case also tourism, forces us to change and accept standards according to what the "powerful" countries see fit. When these countries change their minds about any controversial issue (abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage, euthanasia), we are expected to follow suit if we want to secure their development funds or tourist dollars.
Our culture is also changing through contact with other cultures, which can always be seen as bad simply because it's a form of change. Loosely controlled immigration leads to its own set of social issues, both good and bad.
With all the bad things that are happening, you always hear people blaming it on our distance from God: "We took God from public places – of course there's senseless crime; we took God out of schools – of course they're going to the dogs." This is echoed every time another injustice happens, and I think it was this emotion that lead to the controversial statement by members of the N.A. They probably thought more people would agree with them.
By the way, that sentiment is also something we are copying from America, popularised as a scapegoat for why schools had increased drugs, violence and shootings, and performed increasingly lower. We don't have the same scale of those problems in our schools, but even though we criticise too much American influence, we always worship their politics, whether or not we even understand their politics.
Separating government and church has absolutely nothing to do with separating God from man – it in fact protects the church's belief system from government interference.
It makes perfect sense to want to counteract the cookie-cutter image that globalisation pushes on us. But this will not change unless St. Maarteners have some sense of dignity and self-determination. This is hard enough when we have the sense that development on the island has nothing to do with how we want to develop. Any project that can make money goes through, whether or not "the little people" agree with it, or are affected by it negatively. People have so little trust in the government that many think of voting as a joke.
Development is not a predetermined line; we can take steps in different directions based on our own ideas. What we cannot do is take steps backwards out of fear of becoming too Americanised or Europeanised – too much like "the outside world." We can't reject ideas simply based on who came up with them, or agree with something just because it's the exact opposite of what another country is doing.
Government needs to get in tune with what people are saying and actually take it into consideration. Learn from the outside world without following their models of development blindly. Unfortunately, this misuse of political slogan will have offended non-Christian residents, will produce a backlash on the Methodist community, and will endorse the stereotype that Christianity is not about God but about control of the public.
D. Hodge
