Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Tony Perkins has asserted that the court has "cast[] the Ten Commandments out of the public square..."  The court has struck down some governmental Ten Commandments displays, but it has hardly cast these sacred scriptures out of public life, nor could it.  Not only do individuals frequently speak of and post these and other scriptures in public, the court has upheld a Ten Commandments monument that has stood on the Texas state capitol grounds for 40 years.  Lower courts have since relied on this decision when sanctioning other longstanding, relatively non-controversial displays of this kind.  In an appropriate case, the court is likely to use similar reasoning to uphold public school policies requiring the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the words "under God," while maintaining the option for students to refrain from saying it.

The rhetoric and advocacy positions of the Family Research Council and its partners reveal that they want the court to go far beyond rulings like these.  For example, they want to reintroduce school-sponsored prayer in a variety of settings and ensure that the government has wide latitude to erect religious monuments and otherwise endorse religion. They express a broad desire to use the machinery of the state to promote their faith.

Understandably, many non-Christians are alarmed by this agenda. As a Baptist Christian, I am alarmed as well.  All people should be free from governmental pressure on matters of faith.  We should exercise the great freedom we have to practice our faith, but we should not ask the government to advance religion for us.  Indeed, when the government promotes faith, it inevitably uses religion for its own ends, which warps religion and weakens its spiritual force.  As Baptist preacher John Leland said in 1804: "Experience, the best teacher, has informed us that the fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity has done it more harm than all the persecutions ever did."

One aspect of religious freedom -- is religious equality under the law and the constitution. When government gets in the business of promoting religion in general, and one religion in particular, it is an afront to the religious freedom of all. This is a legal, constitutional and cultural issue: the sense in which religious freedom is intended, is the right to believe as one will, including holding non-religious views.

One aspect of the right to believe as one will, includes the right to change your mind. People convert from one faith to another. People become atheists. Atheists find God.  These things happen all the time. It is only in a society that enjoys religious freedom that such things are possible.

That is one aspect of the trend towards religious orthodoxy in religiously oriented colleges and universities, notably Catholic and Southern Baptists insitutions, that was raised by Esther Kaplan regarding a professor who was fired by the evangelically oriented Wheaton College, because he had converted to Catholicism.  (He now teaches at a Catholic college.)

Religious institutions, are human institutions. Although they are loath to admit it, their  understandings of the sacred, which are necessarily collective understandings of the sacred, change over time. Because this is so, religious orthodoxies change over time. Efforts to fix a particular orthodoxy in time by institutions is unrealistic and anti-historical, even as there is a tendency in some religious institutions to try to define exactly what it is they believe and what all adherents of the faith should believe. They have the right to do this.

What they do not have the right to do is to impose their views on a society founded upon religious equality among all citizens. The lack of respect for the rights of others under the Constitution is one of the factors driving contemporary cultural and legal conflicts. I call this tendency in the dominionist movement, religious supremacism.

The framers of the Constitution were wise to recognize that people's ideas about religion are highly diverse, dynamic, and that they go to the core of who they are as individuals. That is part of why they made it a right for citizens to believe as they will, free from government coercion, or the coercion of religious institutions. It is the obligation of government, particularly the courts, to respect and to protect our rights in this regard -- and not to become shills for the heated orthodoxies of the moment.