At Liberty to Enchain Others     

By Harry T. Cook 

2/15/13

Harry T. Cook

Personally, I am weary of the faux martyrdom being so overtly acted out by so-called religious groups. As much to oppose President Obama than anything else, they are battling the requirements of the Affordable Care Act over its requirement that health care providers include birth control to women free of charge via their insurance.

"Religious liberty!" is the full-throated cry.

My least favorite former baseball team owner Tom Monaghan, he also of pizza fame, has actually sued the Department of Human Services in a huff, saying that birth control is "a grave sin." In his super-charged Catholic world it is. It is not so for some of my Catholic-reared relatives and friends. Considering their low birthrate, either they have been pretty chaste over the years or have used forms of birth control other than the unreliable rhythm method.

Speaking of the rhythm method, I have often wondered why arithmetic, but neither physics nor chemistry is acceptable to Rome. Connected to the natural-law theory, Monaghan's "grave sin" is any action that prevents spermatozoon from reaching its target and doing its thing. Certainly a diaphragm or a prophylactic (physics) can do that. So can Plan B or a spermicide gel (chemistry). Is choosing abstinence not an act in itself if sexual intercourse is a natural human function?

Notwithstanding, the Roman church is absolutely entitled to teach its willing adherents that birth control is a "grave sin." The adherents can nod in obedience or ignore the teaching. I'd bet there is more ignoring than nodding.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what troubles the Catholic hierarchy. Ever since Humanae Vitae -- a reaffirmation of the church's ban on contraception -- was promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1968, the size of Catholic families in the developed world has become smaller -- more couples having fewer children. Plenty of Catholics -- some who are very dear to me -- have quietly demonstrated their disagreement with the application of natural law to the privacy of their marriages. Nevertheless, they regularly attend mass and financially support their parishes and the charities connected to them.

The ACA's requirement that women receive free birth control via their employer-paid insurance plans was strategically spotted by the church as a way to prevent their women adherents from using contraception. Its protest is a back-door way of trying to require the government to enforce what its authority figures cannot.

Recently I gave a lecture to a southeastern Michigan audience with the title "Why We Must Restore America's Secular Origins," in which, among other matters, I touched on the growing encroachment on the political process by religious groups. And not only on sexual and reproductive issues.

Boards of education in some states and communities, firm in their fundamentalist beliefs that the Bible must be taken literally or not at all, are trying to drive the teaching of evolutionary biology out of public schools.

A determined cadre of U.S. senators and members of Congress, who owe their elections in some part to Christian evangelicals, do all in their power to undermine legislation that would help set to right this country's willed ignorance of the perils of climate change. They offer as explanation for their views Yahweh's post-flood promise to Noah: While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22 KJV)

The idea is that when Earth is laid waste, the saved will have been raptured into heaven and will have no further need of the planet, so what the hell.

That such nonsense is allowed to affect the writing and passage of legislation is an outrage, just as is the religion-based objection to allowing health insurance for women to include birth control options they may want to claim. If women who work in religion-associated universities, hospitals and nonprofit charities are to be denied direct access to birth control while others whose employment is entirely in secular settings can get it without difficulty, would it not be a violation of the constitutional principle of equal justice under the law?

No matter, says religion. "We must obey God rather than man." (Acts of the Apostles 5:29). Or, for the other side of the coin, see the Epistle to the Romans 13:1: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities." But not, of course, to a Democratic president who had the audacity to win a second term and neither to his eminently egalitarian and economically sound health care law.

As Thomas Jefferson and James Madison saw it, the United States was to be a nation whose citizenry would enjoy the free exercise of whatever religion each might choose. Likewise the nation should be free of the establishment of any religion. The logical extension of that principle would be freedom from religion for those who choose it.

It is in just such an arrangement that organized religion has flourished in America. All research demonstrates that the United States is the most self-consciously religious of countries in the developed world. Religion in America is a marketplace of ideas both profound and wacky. You can take your pick, or not buy at all. The idea is genius. It has helped hold our republican democracy together.

What America doesn't need is a Shariah-like situation in which religious authorities call the shots. It sometimes seems as if such a thing were creeping up on us. It should be stamped out. A good place to start is to stop giving in to whining bishops and preachers.

re essay of 2/8/13 Why Let Facts Spoil a Good Story?         

Blayney Colmore, La Jolla, CA:

Do you suppose you're writing at least as much about different personalities as you are about reality versus myth? I write a weekly piece, often about people and/or events that some of my readers (notably, my wife) are familiar with. From time to time one of them (notably, my wife) responds, "But that's not the way it really was." I have given up trying to explain about myth etching truth deeper than mere recitation of facts can. In some ways I see this as a parallel matter to the one you raised in your previous piece, about Diamond and the behavior of people in small villages versus their behavior in the anonymity of large urban places. I have dipped into his new book and, fascinating as I always find his writing, I think there is some irrelevance to his observations, because, barring a plague or nuclear war (neither of which do I discount), we're not returning to village life. The larger question -- if we still have the capacity to ask large questions -- is how in the world tribal people, which we all are, might choose cooperation over competition? The proposition that cooperation ultimately serves the commonweal better than competition (I may get investigated for this) may be a tautology, if not a hackneyed thought, but nothing in human history suggests we are much invested in trying it. Along with you, I prize my theological training for its having conditioned me to think in nuance, learning patience with reality that seldom lends itself to strictly linear consideration. And biblical studies for providing a long (by human measure) view of the vagaries of our attempts over history to make some sense of the mystery of finding ourselves here. And that the wisest thinkers have chosen myth as the most helpful and gripping way to go at that. Short of suggesting that the world ought be ruled by a few wise people, tutored in theology and sacred writings -- a polity that has proved no more successful than any other -- I'd say we remain dependent on the usual forces to sustain us here: mostly luck.

Beulah Atkinson, Spokane, WA:

I will be taking your essay on fact-fiction to my Bible study class next week. I've taken your writings there before. It is great fun to upset the pious.

Connie Williams, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada:

Your articles reach me via the Progressive movement here. They are so refreshing. I think I cannot stand one more sermon from our rector, as he remains of the conviction that every thing in the Bible is factual.

Fred Fenton, Concord, CA:

When will seminaries begin to teach the object of Christian devotion is "some number of persons" rather than a personal savior named "Jesus"? We need to move from magical thinking about a composite Lord to practical implementation of Judeo-Christian teaching about neighbor love. The first step is fearless, critical scholarship rather than the doctrine-bound approach of schools that prepare women and men for ordained ministry.

Henry Sutton Jr., St. Louis, MI:

Where were you when we needed a new minister in our church? You would have driven out some people, which would have been good riddance, but caused more to join up. Thank you for your continued scholarship and well-written articles. You must be a rare bird.

Michael Fultz, Clarkston, MI:

I don't have a problem with story telling, but I do have a problem with the stories being passed off as truth, and I do have a problem with the fact that the people who disagree with the story are usually marginalized or silenced in some way. There is a dilemma here, especially when it comes to young people. Should we tell them the truth, no matter what?

Joel Pugh, Dallas, TX:

As for the "truth" and miracles, I have one for you. Goliath is three cubits and a span in our modern bibles. Go back to some earlier versions, the Septuagint, Josephus, and Dead Sea scrolls; ole Goliath is two cubits and a span in older times. Seems like this guy grew two or so feet taller a thousand years after his head got cut off. Now that is a miracle!

Brian McHugh, Silver City, NM:

We keep trying, but I suspect 95% of Christians will still believe the ignorance.

Rudolph McCracken, Rochester, NY:

Good for you. That essay puts things in perspective. I left the church years ago because it was peddling fiction as fact. I loved the fiction for itself. I love the mythology still. But they cut and dry and sell it in little bits of "truth." It gives the phrase "Honest to God!" new meaning. Keep up your essential work.

Tracey Morgan, Southfield, MI:

The truth (a fiery civil rights worker waiting for the moment to deliver unto us a Dr. King, ultimately) is far the more dramatic and inspiring than the weak little fiction (a tired seamstress too weary to stand up). I've not read his bible, but didn't Thomas Jefferson (attempt to) separate the moral wheat from the religious chaff? And give us a Jesus as a truth worthy of our admiration instead of a Jesus mired in Grimm myth worth at best a courteous snicker? [Editor's Note: He did.]