By Harry T. Cook
8/2/13
The tumult in Egypt is traceable in part to the standoff between secularists and religious believers. In much of the Muslim world, religion and government intermingle, often -- as in Iran -- with religion becoming the controlling force. In the secular world, government is government, or at least that's the theory.
That is certainly the theory of American democracy. Our Founding Parents were careful to prohibit the establishment of religion while providing for its free exercise. That very language from the First Amendment was cited by Thomas Jefferson in his Jan. 1, 1802, letter to the Baptist ministers of Danbury, Connecticut. They had inquired of him as to whether or not freedom of religion had been recognized in the Constitution as an a priori principle or had been granted by an indulgent government.
Jefferson answered the question thus: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
The deist president seemed to be saying, without putting too fine a point on it, that ecclesiastical interference in American politics and governance was undesirable and would not be tolerated.
It was not that Jefferson was overtly hostile to religious philosophies or even to their various institutional expressions. However, he, like most of his fellow founders, were aware of the downside of establishment in British life.
Moreover, the ruinous Thirty Years War that ended fewer than 100 years before Jefferson's birth was fresh in the minds of such learned figures as he. It was a religious war fought between Protestants and Catholics in what was left of the Holy Roman Empire. Entire regions of Europe were devastated. Starvation and disease exacted a heavy toll on the population.
The United States of America was created in part to avoid such strife and disaster. And yet ...
Here we are today, fewer than 250 years into the history of the nation, with the rising waters of organized religion and its various theologies lapping around our ankles -- in some places and instances higher. The present Congress is known for the overtly religious enthusiasms of some of its members.
Climate-change deniers eagerly support the coal and oil lobbies against the known fact that carbon emissions are poisoning Earth's atmosphere to the point of no return. Why? Because they believe (or say they believe) Yahweh's apr�s-flood promise depicted in Genesis 8:22: While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. That pious hope is coupled with the earlier Genesis passage -- which those honorable members of Congress take literally -- to the effect that God gave dominion of the Earth to His human creatures, so drill, baby, drill.
When it comes to reproductive rights (which do not exist in the orthodox Catholic and evangelical traditions), so-called prolife politicians cite scripture to support male supremacy in the same way diehard segregationists did (and do) to support white supremacy. Above all, women, according to the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, do not and must not have control over their own bodies.
Or take the indefatigable zeal of creationism and intelligent design advocates. Basing their program entirely on pre-Copernican, pre-Newtonian and pre-Darwinian misunderstandings of reality, they insist that the biblical story of creation is fact and therefore "in all fairness" must be taught in the nation's public schools as long as modern science is taught. Many state school boards and legislatures agree.
To all but to the most obdurate religionists, such mixing of governance with the narrow views of Christian fundamentalism constitutes an egregious violation of the separation principle, not to mention commonsense. It is, in fact, an attempt to establish a particular religion. Such initiatives cannot be called the "free exercise" of religion. They are properly called propagandistic bullying.
David Brooks and Ross Douhat of The New York Times, together with the stable of troglodytes that puts out the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal, moan and groan about the secularization of American society. What do they mean? They mean morality without God and religion, as if millions of perfectly good and upstanding Americans largely do without the latter two in the making of sound moral decisions.
The religionists would rather put their trust (and ours, too) in the hands of an unseen and unknown deity as mediated through the priesthood of religious authority. That's precisely what Jefferson feared. Such religious authorities never miss an opportunity to arrogate power to themselves for the purpose of manipulating their flocks into obedience.
The argument for a secular state is that a people ought to be able to count on the certainty that the laws and policies governing them have been enacted on the basis of reason and pragmatism, not upon unproven notions that such laws and policies are the will of unseen and therefore imagined deities.
Those who wish to pursue relationships with such deities are perfectly free to do so under the protection of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion. But no one is entitled to force such religion on anyone who wishes to be left alone, because freedom of religion must logically include freedom from religion.
