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God in the Pub

"We need God in our schools again" is a phrase seemingly ubiquitous on the tongues of pundits and the bumper stickers of religious-minded citizens who all appear to believe that God should be involved in some way with our American culture, and who am I to quibble with such good intentions and overt attempts at influencing my world for God? Recently, however, I have started to think that maybe a better question than "How can we get God in our schools?" might be "How can we get God back in our bars?"

Church history has a rich tradition of heroes of faith influencing their immediate communities through immediate involvement in their immediate pubs. Wesley "borrowed" bar tunes for a musical foundation to his glorious lyrics to give us the hymnody with which we worship our God, and C.S. Lewis surely drafted the Chronicles of Narnia with his fellow Oxford dons at The Bird and the Baby (their favorite pub). Most significantly, Martin Luther is rumored to have been very proud of the fact he could drink a beer and recite the Lord's Prayer simultaneously. One can only wonder why and how God has been removed from our bars without so much as a Supreme Court decision banning His entrance. ...