Religious Freedom to Do What?

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
4/10/15

 

It is time, I guess, to remove the shackles that have so long bound Americans from going to church and shul.

Too many avowed Christians have feared leaving the comforts of the croissant, fresh-brewed coffee and the Sunday New York Times to sneak through the early morning hours to mass. Why should the indolence of the urbane be permitted to keep the would-be faithful from the worship of their choice?

Likewise, enduring the Friday night dinner out and a movie after have deprived Jews who would be observant from attending upon the Shabbat service. That outrage, too, should be brought to an end. Free the sons and daughters of Abraham from the secular mores that circumscribe their religious freedom.

Brava and bravo to our Muslim sisters and brothers in this country who simply seize their religious freedom and crowd into mosques midday on Friday, regardless of it being a workday. More power to them. They take their religious freedom seriously. They wish to go to their place of worship and worship as they please, and no one lays so much as a straw in their way.

Consider, too, those who by the thousands crowd into the evangelical mega-temples, there to exercise religious freedom to hear and believe such propositions as climate change and global warming being satanic lies created by godless liberals, that the Bible's God will punish unbelievers and leave them behind in the Rapture to wither away into obscurity, that God created the world in six days and that Darwin was an atheist anyway.

In the not too distant past, one could go to almost any church below the Mason-Dixon line and receive for their trouble learned justifications for racial segregation and indentured servitude. The Bible and all the better people so believed. And they had the freedom so to do.

We see that religious freedom turns out to be a quite different matter depending on the group involved. So questions: 1) Whence that much-demanded freedom? 2) How account for what "religious freedom" has come to mean in America? 3) Why is it a major legislative issue just now?

1) In only two places in the founding documents of American governance is religion mentioned and only a single instance in connection with the word "free." Article VI of the Constitution says: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office of public Trust under the United States." Notwithstanding, there was a general uproar during the presidential campaign of 1960 in which John F. Kennedy had to defend his being Catholic against the hysterical claim that the Vatican would dictate American policy if he were to be elected. In more recent races, it is the evangelical bona fides that are of concern to regional and partisan voters.

The other mention of religion in the Constitution appears in the First Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..." There is no mention of a separation between church and state. It was left to President Thomas Jefferson to frame that idea in a letter of reply he wrote to the Baptist ministers of Danbury, Connecticut, in January 1802.* The First Amendment means that the Congress of the United States may not legislate a privileged status for any single institution of any religion. It also means that religions in the plural are free to practice their faiths, recruit people into their folds and preach to them whatever they are willing to hear -- excepting, perhaps, sedition.

2) The present understanding of "religion freedom" is far from what it was conceived to be by our Founding Parents. How, for instance, does "religious freedom" mean that parents on the basis of bootleg science can demand a religious exception to state laws requiring public school children to be vaccinated against contagious diseases? Can there be freedom to infect other people's children?

As a draft counselor during the Vietnam war years, I struggled with the conscientious objector exception to military service, realizing that almost any intelligent and articulate 18- to 21-year-old could make a sincere-sounding case for his belief that his God had forbidden war. Alternative service was, in a sense, a cop-out whilst other young men unable convincingly to build a case for themselves went off to Southeast Asia to kill and be killed.

Despite what governors and legislators plead, most so-called "religious freedom" acts open the door to the denial of the human rights of the LGBT community and other minorities. To the strict evangelical who believes the entirety of the Bible is of direct divine origin -- no interpretation or analysis necessary or even permitted -- certain of its texts read uncritically can be taken as divine commands deliberately to dishonor and disrespect gay men, lesbians and African-Americans.

3) What is there about this time in American life that its state legislatures are making themselves busy churning out religious freedom legislation that, for instance, could permit the horror of unvaccinated children or allow a person doing business along a public street to refuse to sell or provide services to someone he or she perceives as gay or lesbian? The question cannot be answered in any helpful way apart from a lot of sociological and political research. A little psychiatric probing might also help. Regardless, on a purely moral basis such so-called freedoms cannot reasonably be brought under the umbrella of free exercise.

Those self-conscious Christians, whose quest is to exclude and, in effect, persecute others they perceive to be deviants from what they believe is the divine plan, per force must reject the Jesus they find in their New Testaments: he who was depicted as touching the leper, befriending the prostitute and dealing humanely with the low-life tax collector Zacchaeus of Jericho and praising the hated Samaritan who nonetheless bound up the wounds of one whose co-religionists hated the Samaritan for being who he was and wasn't.

For the Jew and the Christian, religious freedom is encouragement to reach out to any and all needful and deserving of care. It is both encouragement and a commission to respect the dignity of every human being.

All the bilge in recent religious freedom legislation is contrary to the basic premises of Judaism and Christianity. Those things that are done or left undone which cause injury or deprivation cannot be said to proceed from religious freedom but from the exercise of base, unwarranted license.

*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.