religious unAmericanism

Here's a long piece I want to dedicate to Messers. Robertson, Reed, Delay, Bush, and their zealot-acolytry.

"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion." One wonders whether this statement can be interpreted by a sane person to mean something like "Congress shall make no law promoting religious ideals other than mine." The latter statement, of course, is the sort of thing Focus on the Family and like-minded organizations, and the ultraconservative-evangelical-political/legal movement generally, have in mind when they see the former statement.

Another statement these types often give: "America is (or, was founded as) a Christian nation." This is patently a historical falsehood. The problem, of course, is trying to claim that because the founders were mostly Christian or had been raised Christian, that they intended their new creation to be a theocracy or, the weaker and more common claim, a country by and for the promotion of the creation of the New Jerusalem or some other such utopian Christian ideal. The Puritans, and some other religious groups, did come to these shores at least in part for that express purpose.

Everyone ought to be well aware that the Puritans were escaping state-sanctioned religious persecution. The point of their emigration notwithstanding, they turned around and immediately created their own repressive theocratic persecutory community. If one looks at the world of "The Scarlet Letter", you'll see the sort of thing the religious reactionaries must have in mind when they talk about "a Christian nation." (Perhaps they will still allow the internal combustion engine.)

Already we have run into the intellectual delusion surrounding religious belief on the part of this particular bunch of true believers. It's centered on a belief they share with UBL: that their beliefs are True and Right for everyone no matter the cost of ramming those thoughts and behaviors into other peoples' lives. The delusion is this: that they have good reason(s) to believe that their beliefs are more worthy than anyone else's. This is the central falsehood at the center of religious factionalism.

Let me take a moment here to elaborate on what "beliefs" are under consideration in the above passage. These are specifically religious beliefs. One way to notice the difference between these and other sorts of belief is to see the contrast between the following two claims: (1) "unprovoked killing of another cannot be allowed because it is a threat not only to the victim's well-being and the psychological well-being of members of the community, but because to the very stability of the society provided be mutual safety-ensuring mechanisms of the state apparatus of said society"; (2) "unprovoked killing cannot be allowed because God says it's wrong, and unrelated to its wrongness are the bad effects it has on society mentioned in (1)." The thing beginning 'because' in each of (1) and (2) is a belief. Only what follows 'because' in (2) is a specifically religious belief, because it expressly denies nonreligious justifications for its validity. If such a denial were implicit, the belief in (2) would still be specifically religious.

Since David Hume wrote his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, if not before, it has been clear that religious practice cannot be founded on any sort of evidence to be found in the world. I will not belabor this point; and the gist ought to be familiar to everyone--that religious belief is lifted on a "leap of faith" and not on a rational justification (Pascal's Wager and psychological-health-pragmatism accounts notwithstanding). The upshot is that pointing to your bible of choice or to a supposed "miracle" cannot be taken as evidence for the existence of Deity. One can give an explanation for any event entirely within mathematical, physical descriptions of events at times in regions of space (and quantum mechanics gives us an even more powerful tool in such explanation--and it would seem that if all God did were make subatomic particles hop one way or another this would be a different sort of thing than what the evangelicals want to be watching over them). There is, then, nothing to be added to the account of what goes on in the world by allowing religion into such accounts.

Let us come back to the Constitution and the founders for a moment. Many of the founders would have been well aware of Hume's work, and many of them were Deists. A Deist is someone who believes that God set the universe in motion at the moment of creation and hasn't done anything but watch since; for the Deist there is no rational justification for any specifically religious belief because no evidence for preferring one belief over another could be found (by beings like us); their conception of what religious discussion should be is that there ought to be no discussion, since no conclusion can be reached, and therefore one ought to shut up about the whole thing.

A note on the Dialogues: Hume was a Deist himself, and he did think there was a sort of justification available for religious belief. That is, he bought the teleological justification for the existence of God. That justification is, roughly, the following: (i) if we look at the universe we can see its intricate and beautiful order, (ii) because of our acquintace with things that are designed, we are able to tell what sorts of things are artifacts and what are natural, (iii) the order in the universe cannot be merely natural since we can "tell" that it is the sort of order of an artifact, (iv) a deity is the only thing that could create a universe with such order, (v) therefore there is a deity. But nothing, even if one buys this account (it is not a particularly strong argument), can justify any claims about what the deity is like. And anyway, there is no evidence one can point to--one sees artificial order or one does not--that justifies the first premise.

It is safe to assume, without providing the scholarly historical references, that the founders wanted to avoid state sanction for any particular religious faction. I realize that they probably assumed that the nation would be populated mostly by Christians and that the laws would reflect the Christian tradition--but nothing in the Constitution they provided, nor in the ideal of Enlightenment liberalism, justifies continuing to have laws in such a tradition because they are traditional or Christian. One ought to read the writings of Rousseau, Hume, Locke, and Kant if one wants to find out the sorts of things the founders would have been thinking about as reasonable ways to go about justifying legal apparatus (these writers' views can be detached from their religious beliefs).

The establishment clause's purpose, then, is to prevent the state from interfering with the specifically religious beliefs that people have or the exercise thereof unless a countervailing nonreligious reason could be provided for doing so. Such a reason would exist, in this country, if for instance a bunch of cannibals emigrated and claimed exemption from relevant laws because their religious beliefs allowed them to kill, unprovoked, non-assenting people (and, of course, to eat them); the reason would be that the state's interest in protecting its citizenry from victimization by one another is strong enough in this case that it will prevent the cannibals from acting on their beliefs.

It should be noted, carefully, that the state in this case does not have a countervailing reason of the same magnitude for preventing the cannibals from believing what they do. We can set the case of cults aside by introducing the idea that the state has some responsibility to protect its citizens from brainwashing under a similar justification and more on to mainstream religious bodies who anyway are more likely to be able to put significant pressure on government to sanction their particular beliefs. The claim I'm making is this: the state has no interest in your religious beliefs, as long as your actions do not conflict with the interest of the state.

That last phrase looks loaded, so let's unpack it a bit. The constitution is supposed to be the founding document for a nation of, by and for "the people" of that nation (thankfully the people now include women and blacks and non-landowners). The representatives in the government are trying to do what is best for those people. It would be another claim, one which I will not defend here, that what is in the interest of the state as such is what is in the interest of the people of the state, and that the state as such has no other interests (so e.g. geopolitical power gained or exercised by the government should only be so in serving the interest of the American people, as opposed to the interests of only a few, or of the government, or members of the government, or against the interests of the American people). I accept that as crucial to the understanding of a representative democracy as such, and I think we can all agree that the U.S.A. is supposed to be a representative democracy.

What is in the interest of "the people"? Well, here are two primary interests: security and education. There may be others, but let us restrict the discussion to these. The government maintains (the ability to have) a defensive force to prevent other countries from taking us over and/or killing us. The government mandates a minimum of education to prevent such problems as: poverty, demagoguery, revolution, crime, and the inner rot to the nation caused by representatives pleasing people who don't know enough to know what their best interests are. (On the last point cf. poor white southerners who voted for G.W. "deficits for your children, no retirement for the poor, exporting middle-class jobs, ruining your health, a billion pissed-off Muslims, dollar devaluation and inflation, love is evil" Bush.)

Here one could have a debate about what the purposes of elections are. I am not going to address the position of some who think that it is perfectly alright to vote in order to effect social legislation in order to impose specifically religious beliefs on other people; such a view is incoherent once one notices that it is undermined when one mentions that they should not mind if someone else's religious beliefs be forced on them. I am instead going merely to assume that the purpose is to elect individuals who will both represent their constituents best interests in areas where appropriate and also not do this in such a way that the outcome harms other parts of the country (here I am talking just about national office, and also construing 'harm' quite broadly). "Appropriate" then does not include the arena of religion. This claim is not going to be here supported in other areas such as tax law; we will leave that for another day.

Suppose we turn to education. It is in the interest of the state, and in the interest of parents, that children receive a good education. This obviously means, in large part, that they gain access to true information about the world around them. In fact, information provided in the classroom ought to be true or as close to true as possible (we need not go into detail here) and it would seem that everyone can agree on this. (We assume agreement on the need for state funding of the opportunity for universal education.) Accurate, true, or factual information is the province of history (broadly) and science.

When the state funds an educational system, in in effect endorses the things taught in the educational system. By endorsement I mean that the weight of the state's authority (and it is considerable) is behind the authenticity of the facts taught--usually, to people who don't know them and have (often) no tools for deciding independently about the authenticity of said facts. So it goes with legislation; by passing legislation the state effectively sanctions the validity and authenticity and truth and accuracy of any views about how the world is that are implicit in the legislation.

Thus it is that the founders had a need for the establishment clause. This is the way to prohibit the state from explicitly or implicitly endorsing (or promoting) any particular religion and any specifically religious beliefs. Because of course specifically religious beliefs are part of a religious system endorsement of which is necessary to make sense of endorsement of the particular belief. To sum up: the establishment clause prohibits the government from making laws that endorse (or are solely/primarily intended to dispell) specifically religious beliefs, even though they are allowed to prevent actions based on such beliefs if they are against the common interest.

Of course, we have assumed that the part of the amendment about the "free exercise" of religion allows us the action proposed in the case of the religious beliefs of the cannibals in the example above. The point being that free exercise does not allow citizens who are not agents of the state to interfere (at least violently and, I would argue, otherwise) in the lives of others. It would not prohibit us from going door-to-door trying to convert the unbeliever.

And let us not engage in another debate with certain Supreme Court justices and others who, although no doubt they meant well, certainly allowed their beliefs to trump their reason. Said debate would be over the silly (and obviously false) claim that the state has reason to promote religious belief at all, let alone some particular one. Our institutions explicitly ("We the people") derive their authority from the assent of the populace and not from some (assumed) supreme being. And we can see easily, if we look with unclouded eyes, that atheism is a sort of religious belief, i.e. that there is no deity or other supernatural forces (contra Karl Popper, I mean to say that there are not rational grounds for denying the existence of a supreme being either; we ought to just not talk about it; most especially if we are the government).

It is a promotion of a specifically religious belief for the government ever to mention the word 'God' in a context where it is clear that the government takes it that such a being does (or does not) in fact exist. Sometimes the word has accepted uses as shorthand for "unusual circumstances" as it is on insurance contracts, or for "the very nature of the thing" as with the "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence, which by the way is not a legal document but an historical one; but in something like the Pledge of Allegeance it is obviously (as an historical fact) a reference to an actual deity.

So here is the claim it its raw form now that the preliminaries are out of the way: the government is not allowed to have (or endorse) any opinion whatsoever about any religious beliefs and can only have opinions about actions taken upon those beliefs when they violate the interests of the people (i.e. actions we have laws against for nonreligious reasons). What could be more clear, once we get down to it?

Consequences we shall find ourselves with if we think about religion carefully as I think we have just done (and I admit there are issues not addressed here which I am perfectly willing to take up elsewhere):
1. It's a real proposal to stop using the word "marriage" to designate the legal contract between two consenting adults who want to share their lives. If is a "historical" or "cultural" tradition then those promoting only heterosexual marriages need to justify why (a) this particular supposedly non-religious belief (and I guarantee it reduces to a religious belief) tradition should be kept while, say, the tradition of sanctioning the authority of the government via religious approval such as King George III had should not (b) since this discriminates against certain of the citizens that something in this tradition ought to be sanctioned by the state at all. Instead, why not keep the legal contract, which, to the state, is all "marriage" now is, and do away with the nomenclature--call the contract, say, a "partnership" or a "civil union" for everyone? This has the attractive benefits of allowing everyone the same legal rights and privileges while still allowing anti-gay bigots to feel self-righteous in regarding certain other citizens' religious practice as illegitimate (which they would do anyway).
2. We ought not to give inaccurate or incomplete information to students in public schools on spurious and specifically religious grounds. It's a simple fact that abstinence-only programs, for both sex and drugs, are utter failures. What keeps these so popular are unfounded beliefs. It's a simple fact that the earth is billions of years old, and that life has evolved (whatever that means). "Creation science" is merely an unfounded belief inserted into a framework of facts, and such disingenuousness on the part of publicly funded educators ought not to be allowed. And so on.
3. Parents need to be parents. If your are concerned that a public-school education will "contaminate" the pure and True beliefs of your religion, then instruct your children in such a way that they learn from you. The public schools exist to produce good citizens, and not to produce good believers. In the same respect, if you want your children to abstain from things you need to be a parent and let your kids know clearly what is expected of them, and to be interested in your child enough to know whether they are listening to you or not.
4. Saying the "abortion is murder" cannot be substantiated on specifically religious grounds. If you can't come up with something that everyone can accept as a reason, whether or not a good one, don't enter the debate; that's just ridiculous. As terrible as it may be to many on both sides, Roe v. Wade at least attempted to set up a framework for discussing whether certain abortions would be murder or rather justified killing, or not even "killing" as such (one might say, for instance, that you can't kill a liver even though you can kill its owner). As we have seen, the grounds for a particular abortion policy need to have nonreligious grounds, whatever the motivations of the people enacting such legislation in creating it.
5. Last, but certainly not least, is the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong when large numbers of people seem to want to transform the United States into a theocracy of some kind. This country was founded on freedom of religion, and careful individuals do not claim, as Billiy Graham spuriously suggested, that this means "freedom from religion"; it means freedom from government promotion of any particular religion, it means, freedom from you pushing your religion on me. This means you, evangelicals.

To say that this is a "Christian nation" or to claim that the country ought to adopt policies based on specifically religious principles is to profoundly misunderstand the founding documents we share as guides to what it is to be an American. Shame on you all.


[type edits...

It has been brought to my attention that there are a number of unaddressed issues (as I acknowledged) here; however, the gist of the thing is surely correct. If you would like to have a civilized exchange of ideas, even if you think I am utterly wrong, feel free to comment or email me]