In their ongoing effort to prove they deserve a 9 percent approval rating, members of Congress voted 369-9 last week to reaffirm “In God We Trust” as the national motto.

As anyone with eyes, ears and a short-term memory can attest, there are clearly more pressing issues Congress should address.

Their efforts would be best spent affirming the validity of the American experiment by showing that representative democracy is in the best interests of the people. For example, creating jobs, regulating carbon emissions, fixing our immigration policy or establishing national Free Lollipop Day, would at least affect the lives of the people they represent.

But, in lieu of effective legislation, reaffirming American values in troubling times is not an altogether terrible idea. The problem is that trust in God is not an American value. About 10 percent of Americans are non-believers and about 20 percent identify themselves as non-religious, according to Gallup. If a national motto is patently false for one out of five citizens, it’s probably not a very good one.

It’s not even historically accurate. Most of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison and James Monroe, were Deists. Deists believed a supreme being created the universe and its laws, then removed itself from the picture entirely. They believed that human reason could solve the problems of man. They trusted in man, not God, and expressly set out to create a nation built on that belief. The first Assemblies would almost definitely have rejected “In God We Trust” as the national motto.

It wasn’t established as the national motto until 1956, when a paranoid Congress decided it was necessary to distinguish Americans from the godless communists. Of course, this didn’t even make sense at the time. Though communist ideology is inherently secular, there is nothing about capitalism that is inherently religious. It wasn’t God they were fighting, it was capitalism and democracy, and the motto had nothing to say about either. We’d have pissed them off more by bringing back the words Benjamin Franklin put on the first penny in 1787: “Mind Your Business.”

So what if we affirmed a new motto, one that truly reflects the American people and our ideals rather than reactionary fears from our past?

Why not keep three quarters of the motto and replace the word “God” with “Democracy” or “the People”? Better yet, what about “In Freedom We Trust”? We are founded in the freedoms iterated by the Bill of Rights. These criteria have been embraced by the Western world as the fundamental goals of a modern society. Unlike God, freedom is a concept every American can embrace. Unlike piety, freedom is a value we can all aspire to.

It also reflects our message to the rest of the world. We are an interventionist nation and we defend our right to intervene because we hold freedom sacred, not God. In fact, oftentimes we intervene to protect people from the tyranny of zealots whose trust in God far outdoes our own. Nobody trusts in God like a suicide bomber.

“In God We Trust” is such a backwards message to send to the world, especially to the Arab world, whose people have taken to the streets and risked their lives in pursuit of the same freedoms our founders sought.

And what do we tell those who have thrown off the shackles of theocratic tyranny? What do we tell ourselves? We say that, in the moment when the world needs us to lead with the courage of our convictions, we are too encumbered by the delusional fears of our past. They look for a torchbearer and we’re still running from shadow puppets.

Dave Balson is a senior journalism major.

He can be reached at 581-7942 or DENopinions@gmail.com.