Is Fear of Christianity deserved?
Don A. Bright
The subject for this editorial has been nagging at me for weeks. I really did not want to write it. But I think the message here, while that of my own, should at least be tossed into the realm of public discourse. So here goes.
First let me tell all of my Christian friends that this will likely displease them. For those of you that do take offense to it I ask you to please read it carefully and try to look at it from a standpoint of my being in favor of a completely non-interfering government and a secular one. One only has to look at our enemies in the Middle East to see what the dangers of having a religious tyrannical government are. Having said that, I will continue with my suggestions..
As I wrote in a previous editorial on the difference between values and morals; “Values, to me, come closer to plain old common sense. Values are not morals. Morals are individual criteria mined by each of us from some physical or ethereal quarry. Be it childhood environment, genetics or spiritual, it all comes from what I think of as the “unique experience”. No two people can have the same moral code. The differences may vary from elfin to Herculean, but they always exist.
Likewise no assemblage or class of persons can have a shared morality. It doesn’t matter how closely together members of any religious sect are, they are not, nor can they be, of a universal purity of morals.”
The purpose of that editorial was to show that the presidential election that some described as a victory from the “values” standpoint had nothing to do with morals—or for that matter, religion... Due to this misconstruction some seem to think that the manifestation of the election will be a government dominated by one faith. Instead, the results of the election came about because a segment of the voters thought their cultural values were being challenged and that this hostility was undermining or indeed destroying those values.
I had to ask myself as I worked my way through the writing of the editorial mentioned above if I was making too big of a leap in assigning a universal fear of religion (read Christian) among liberals. Was this completely a figment of their imagination or did they have at least some small reason to be legitimately concerned? My answer was the latter. The voters who were motivated by a loss of religious (or non-religious) freedom were just as legitimate in their motivation to vote as conservatives who feared the loss of their cultural values. And I think some Christian actions and writings were responsible for this legitimate concern on the part of the opposing side.
This next sentence is definitely not going to please a lot of people of faith but it is necessary to illustrate my point. I am convinced that one canonical conceit that almost all religions sects are driven by is that of theirs being the only “true” religion. Those who feel this way and follow up on it mistakenly (in my mind) use it as not just justification for, but a moral duty to do whatever is necessary to convince others that they should join them or get punished by God. Most religions even regard a different sect of their own religion as being outside the realm of the true religion.
Unfortunately, this has been the driving factor in an effort on the part of most religions to tie their beliefs to the power of government.
That is, again unfortunately, what has divided this country today. Cultural values have, by some people, been knotted with religion and government. Indeed, many are errantly using religion as the reason for government instead of government being the protector of religion through a “hands off” policy on all secular aspects of its citizens. To me that is the meaning of the phrase in our constitution that follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; …”
I don’t intend to get tangled in the web of near-philosophical thinking as to the “separation of church and state”. Whether the government should take a “separate” “hands-off” course as to the practice of religious activity anywhere as some believe or should it take a “hands-on” approach to prevent its encouragement is not of concern here. Nor is the question of what is “government” and what is “none of the government’s business”.
But I do see examples of a blind zeal to mix the two. When I hear statements like “get the government out of our schools” by some person who wants unhindered religious expression in the public schools of a certain belief, it troubles me. Those who advocate this idea – and they are for the most part Christians – suffer, in my opinion, from two misconceptions. One is that they do not look at schools as “government” (which they most certainly are) and the other is that their beliefs are part of natural law and are therefore unalienable from learning. Both are dangerous and give ample reason for others to “fear” the establishment of this doctrine in and by government.
Another statement that bothers me is “this is a Christian nation”. It is not. The fact that our founding fathers invoked a Christian leaning, indeed even Christian prayers and symbols, does not mean that they revoked all others. In fact, it is my belief that they would not have put the establishment clause in the Constitution.
For Christians to think in terms of the government not getting involved in religion seem to ignore the word “establishment”. By getting involved in religion as a non-secular ombudsman the government is not violating church and state separation – indeed it is fulfilling its obligation to keep that separation.
I would, therefore, like to hold our “values” to and fro to just that…values. If the voters that voted one way did so in a religious frame of reference it does look to the other side like a politico-religious agenda. And that can easily look to many as a road to a theocracy.
So I would ask my Christian friends to leave “religion” out of the political realm and instead conduct the national debate on the level of cultural or “value” differences. The religious argument is one we can not win. And, as the other side states, it is a very divisive and polarizing case of issue mixing.
We can easily win the cultural war.