Nothing gets me posting as much as e-mail it seems. I got one from a friend recently lamenting that the motto "In God we trust" is being left off the new dollar coins being issued. He wrote back shortly when he realized that the motto, the phrase e pluribus unum and the year are stamped on the edge of the coin rather than the faces.

I had actually run across this a couple of weeks ago. The good folks at www.snopes.com have an article about an e-mail going around which is trying to remove the new coins from circulation because... "It does not have 'In God We Trust' on it. Here's another way of phasing God out of America."

(The full article is at http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/dollarcoin.asp)

The thing that gets me about this is the apparent dishonesty of the e-mail. It could have started as a genuine oversight, as with my friend. Who thinks of reading the edge of a coin after all? But anyone who bothers to examine the coin closely will quickly spot the truth, and anyone who is honest will correct the mistake (as my friend did).

It annoys me no end that someone hoping to "defend God" would deliberately circulate untrue information.

That's nothing new. There are scads of untrue rumors and petitions that circulate. I'm frustrated by the number of them that have ostensibly Christian origins, but that seems to be something I'll have to live with.

There's something else about this that bothers me. That is the idea that removing the motto from the coins (if it really were happening) would constitute "phasing God out of America." I don't believe that would work, any more than I believe putting the motto on the coins brought God into this country in the first place. What is written on coins and monuments is of very little consequence compared to what is written in people's hearts and minds.

There's an irony in having the motto on American coins that this matter has me thinking about. In Matthew 22 (there are parallels in Mark 12 and Luke 20) the Pharisees come to Jesus with a question about paying taxes to the Roman government. Rather than respond with a "yes" or a "no" Jesus finds a roman coin and asks whose face is stamped on it.

Coins are traditional stamped with the images of great national leaders. In Jesus' time the image was that of Caesar. In our country money bears the images of Washington, Lincoln, FDR and other historically significant leaders. Some, like Ben Franklin, aren't presidents but all are figures who represent the government. (Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea are very interesting exceptions to this rule.)

Jesus' point is that things that have the image of the government stamped on them belong to the government. Caesar has a right to claim a tax on the money his government minted. But God's image is stamped on something too. Genesis tells us that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.

When you understand that parable you may see why I think the motto "In God We Trust" is an odd thing to put on money. It seems to me as if we are trying to stamp God's image on the coin right next to Caesar's. That's a dangerous practice because it can fool people into thinking that God and country are more-or-less the same thing.

They aren't, and they can't be. There are many Christian kingdoms that tried this through the Middle Ages and down to the Enlightenment. They tended to come up with chains of logic that said that the national interest, or the will of the king, must also be the will of God in a Christian country. Terrible acts of violence, repression, and corruption were justified in God's name and the Church has never fully recovered its credibility.

As I said before, it’s not what's stamped on the money that concerns me. It's what's written in our leader's hearts, and on ours.