...And the end of the semester slams into me like an out-of-control freight train, one car after another piling up on top of the other. Just when I think I'm caught up --boom!--another stack of papers or administrative duty or student emergency barrels down on me. It's been difficult to focus on my own research/reflections of late.
Nevertheless (to switch locomotive metaphors), I am seeing a bit of light at the end of the finals-week tunnel, and in that dim illumination I've noticed some interesting developments on the faith-in-public-life front.
Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times this week in which he repeated his compelling arguments concerning the vexed position of faith in an ostensibly secular state. As you may be aware, the Supreme Court recently ruled (in Salazar v. Buono) that a cross erected decades ago in the Mojave desert did not in fact violate the First Amendment's establishment clause. The Mojave Cross's history and conflict is rather complicated, not at all like the clear-cut melodramas of--say--Ten Commandment Monuments built specifically to provoke challenges to church/state separations.
Originally erected in 1934 on government land as a way of honoring WWI veterans, the cross has apparently been rebuilt a number of times by private parties, most recently by Henry Sandoz, who (without government permission) drilled holes into the rock outcropping to make the cross he built harder to remove. The cross serves as a gathering place for local Christians at Easter. Its compatibility with the First Amendment has only recently became an issue. In 1999, a request to build and place a Buddhist symbol to honor war dead was denied. In 2001, retired park service employee Frank Buono challenged the legality of the cross, arguing that it represented a clearly religious statement by the state and therefore violated the Establishment clause.
A number of complex political and legal moves and counter-moves followed; courts tended to side with Buono, but legislatures tended to act to protect the cross from removal. These conflicts culminated in the government's attempt to transfer the land around the cross to a private group, ostensibly negating the First Amendment conflict. "Tilt!" cried Buono and his lawyers. That act, they argued, was a shady dodge by the government specifically to preserve the cross, constituting yet another act of religious favoritism by the government.
The Supreme Court, then, ruled primarily on the issue of whether the government's land transfer was legal. The ancillary import of the ruling, of course, concerns whether or not the cross itself constitutes a religiously specific statement that the government cannot endorse officially. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the transfer was legal, that (in Justice Kennedy's opinion for the plurality), the cross served a secular purpose (honoring veterans) rather than a religious one.
Fish clarifies that he personally has no problems with a cross in the desert on government lands. But the reasoning Kennedy advances, Fish argues, strains credulity. The Court performs what has come to be the standard maneuver for preserving religious (and here religious almost always means "Christian") symbols on government property: it drains the symbols of religious import. The cross, in Kennedy's rhetorical scenario, is not faith-specific but generic, a common cultural marker of respect and homage. This--despite arguments from the plaintiffs that, for example, no Jewish person would consider a cross on her grave to be a generic and unexceptionable symbol of respect.
Moreover, Fish points out, Kennedy doesn't merely stop at declaring the cross non-religious; he also attempts a defense of the government's accommodating religious symbols more specifically. These two lines of argument, writes Fish, undermine each other. The court seems to want the cross to be simultaneously religious and secular, an intellectually dishonest stance that puts the lie to the court's claims to religious neutrality. Says Fish: "The Christian and conservative Web sites that welcomed the decision as a blow for Christianity and against liberalism knew what they were looking at."
To be sure, conservative Christian websites did welcome the decision. But, to extend Fish's argument a bit, I don't think it's actually in Christianity's best interests to praise the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too reasoning of t Salazar v. Buono. Surely for Christians--conservative evangelicals especially--the cross is and must be specifically, specially religious. To claim otherwise is to deny the significance of one of the key events in our faith story.
I should note that, for many conservative evangelicals, their stance on the government's display of religious symbols remains refreshingly honest. For them, the cross (like the Ten Commandments displays or nativity scenes) is specifically, uniquely Christian. Their arguments for having governmental displays of such symbols rest on the concomitant rationale that the US itself is specifically, uniquely Christian. I disagree strongly that the US is "Christian" in the sense they mean, and I therefore dispute their case for using tax dollars to pay for the construction and upkeep of massive Ten Commandments displays. But at least, in those cases, the faith status of the cross is never in question. The cross is exclusively Christian, and its display is advanced by Christian exclusivists (or, at least by people who believe it right and proper for the USA to have a primarily Christian character).
This--the religious nature of the state, the state's proper boundaries for displaying or preferring one religion (or any religion) over another (or none at all)--this is a vital debate to have in a world where states find themselves adjudicating between wildly or even violently divergent faith worldviews. It's vital, too, for Christians to involve themselves in this debate, to test out how and to what extent we want a government to prefer our religion over others (even if that preference doesn't translate to exclusivism). Evangelicals and Religious Right pundits often rail about the dangers of godless governments, but really--can anyone point to an overtly/offically religious state that doesn't have a horrifying history of specifically faith-inspired violence and/or oppression? Does Christianity really thrive when it's in control of the government? Or--if not control--how might faith as such secure a voice in representative democracies? Isn't there a difficult but happier medium between theocracy and utter secularity?
And that's the problem with the "religionless religious symbols" argument. It seems to advance theocratic interests, but ultimately it contributes to a faith-less society. It renders us less able to debate about the role of religion in government or in public life.
If the goal is to ensure that crosses and Commandments displays on government land remain intact, then the legal loophole of it's-not-really-religious seems tactically advantageous; it gets immediate results (i.e., the continued display of Christian symbols). But, aside from the dishonesty involved in pretending that the cross isn't religious, the tactic contributes to a dangerous secularizing trend. It reinforces the view that faith and faith-based stances really do have no place in democratic government, that faith is always only private and personal. Religious motivations and faith-based value arguments become vaguely embarrassing, like bodily functions. They come to exist only behind closed doors or facades of neutrality. Surely such a view of faith is the opposite of what Christians and other religious viewpoints want. We want--we need--for faith to be a part of the public discourse about the Good. Otherwise, faith--and to a certain extent values in general--becomes some subterranean, mysterious force that no one has a vocabulary for.
It helps us not at all, then, to pretend that faith doesn't exist or doesn't clamor for representation in a democracy. Let the cross remain religious, and let the debate begin. Don't settle for arguments that de-Christianize a Christian image. After all, didn't Christ have some grave words for those who would deny him?
More later,
JF
Showing posts with label church and state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church and state. Show all posts
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Texas School Board Article
I want to highlight a fascinating article in today's New York Times Magazine, "How Christian Were the Founders?" by Russell Shorto.
There Shorto provides a sketch of the divisive politics of Texas's state school board, whose members have the power to re-write carefully devised curricula recommended by the state's teachers. Many of these members Shorto identifies as "Christian" in a fundamentalist sense. These Christian school board members are dedicated to correcting what they see as a recent and unjust drifting away from K-12 texbooks and curricula's emphasis of Christianity as a uniquely prominent aspect of American history and culture. Faced with curricular suggestions and text book choices that fail to so emphasize Christianity in US history and culture, these school board members simply amend the standards to reflect their own views.
Texas's standards prove unduly influential to educational standards nation-wide. Since Texas represents, after California, the largest school system, the largest texbook publishers generally follow its lead. Conservative Texas school boards, then, have the potential to produce conservative curricula more broadly.
In his article, Shorto links those board members' views to a wider sub-movement of evangelicals (though he consistently uses "Christian" as a general descriptor) who combine a particular view of US history with a specific cultural-political agenda.
Their historical view? The US is a Christian nation, meaning that it is founded within a specifically Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) ethos, by people professing a specifically Christian faith, and with the goal of advancing specifically Christian aims. Whereas many other historians emphasize the founders' Deist and (for its time) pluralist leanings, the new Christian historiography places the majority of US founders squarely within a Biblical Christian worldview.
This historical view leads its proponents to several conclusions about present-day culture and politics. They dispute, for example, the idea that the US relies on a "separation of church and state." Indeed, they tie key ideals of US liberal democracy quite specifically to Christian faith. Human rights, for instance, are God-given, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Rights' utility as a legal concept is inseparable from their religious underpinnings. (And, as a side-argument, the Declaration enjoys a "symbiotic" relationship with the Constitution proper; one cannot be considered apart from the other). The US is tolerant of other religions, yes, but it remains by design (and by Divine fiat) a Christian nation. It is thus only proper that its laws reflect specifically Christian precepts.
Bolstering this view are authors like David Barton, of Wallbuilders, who has written several books about how Christian (not Deist) most of the founders were and how shocked they would be at the secular bias of today's politics and culture. I've heard Barton speak and have read several of his articles. He strikes me as an autodidact, extremely well-read on facts and trivia of various Revolutionary era figures and events. But he is by no means an academic historian. He lacks a scholarly sense of history as a discipline, i.e., an ongoing conversation among experts in which participants submit themselves to mutual accountability and peer review to check and refine arguments or evidence. Indeed, his Wikipedia entry links to several of his more infamous gaffes, including using alleged quotes by the founders for which he cannot find primary documentation.
Of course, Barton's lack of formal academic credentials in no way hinders his influence and popularity among his fans, including several members of the Texas school board. Shorto interviews several of these members, noting that they make no secret of the fact that they have no professional expertise in the areas about which they dictate policy--or even education in general (one member, for example, home-schooled her children, specifically avoiding the system she seeks now to influence). The sense here is that, for these board members and those who support them, educators by and large suffer from a liberal, secularist bias. They have twisted true history--the history that reveals the hand of God at work in Instrument America--and require correction from honest believers.
To his credit, Shorto notes that many historians who otherwise do not agree with Barton et al. nevertheless concur that a history of influences on US history that ignores the religious views of major actors also errs. Religion did and does play a role in people's lives, and the founders were often quite open about that role as they saw it. To the extent that history books have shied away from exploring this reality, such squeamishness should be remedied. This is not to say, however, that historians concur that the founders saw themselves as building a specifically or exclusively Christian nation in Barton's sense. Shorto quotes a conservative author, Richard Brookhiser, who puts it nicely: "The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be."
But such nuances don't cut the mustard in the more conservative school board members' minds. Christian is Christian. To suggest that past understandings and expressions of Christian faith differed significantly from present-day ones seems incredulous to many present-day, Bible-believing evangelicals. They therefore back-read their own present-day configuration of faith into the historical narratives and legal documents US. American history becomes the story of the endurance of (their configuration of) faith.
Shorto's take on all of this (it's mainly reportage rather than editorial) is fascinating and, I think, fair. I wish, however, that he were more careful in identifying the Christians who follow Barton's lead and seek to twist educational standards to fit their faith-pictures versus Christianity more generally. At times Shorto seems to suggest that all Christians (all Christians in Texas, anyway) see US history just as Barton et al. do. The people Shorto talks to on the board--and they do say some alarming things--strike me more as (indeed, identify explicitly as) working on the fundamentalist end of evangelicalism.
A more complicated picture of what evangelicals more generally (to say nothing of non-evangelical Christians) mean by describing the US as a Christian nation emerges in such books as Christian Smith's Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: U of CA P, 2000). Smith, a sociologist, draws on a great deal of qualitative and quantitative evidence to trouble many of the preconceptions about evangelicals that Shorto's article might otherwise foster. Although a majority of evangelicals in Smith's study did affirm the notion that the US was Christian nation, they do not take that to mean that Christianity should enjoy some privileged status in US schools or laws. "Christian nation" can mean many things, from Barton's quasi-theocratic view to the simple observation that, for a long time, most US citizens identified as broadly Christian (as the UK might be called a "secular nation" even though it formally has a state church).
So the school board members that alarm Shorto represent an especially activist fringe with particularly strong views rather than the "average evangelical" (whatever that might mean). Nevertheless, as an especially activist, vocal fringe, the board members' attitudes and actions are quite troubling. The article is worth reading.
More later,
JF
There Shorto provides a sketch of the divisive politics of Texas's state school board, whose members have the power to re-write carefully devised curricula recommended by the state's teachers. Many of these members Shorto identifies as "Christian" in a fundamentalist sense. These Christian school board members are dedicated to correcting what they see as a recent and unjust drifting away from K-12 texbooks and curricula's emphasis of Christianity as a uniquely prominent aspect of American history and culture. Faced with curricular suggestions and text book choices that fail to so emphasize Christianity in US history and culture, these school board members simply amend the standards to reflect their own views.
Texas's standards prove unduly influential to educational standards nation-wide. Since Texas represents, after California, the largest school system, the largest texbook publishers generally follow its lead. Conservative Texas school boards, then, have the potential to produce conservative curricula more broadly.
In his article, Shorto links those board members' views to a wider sub-movement of evangelicals (though he consistently uses "Christian" as a general descriptor) who combine a particular view of US history with a specific cultural-political agenda.
Their historical view? The US is a Christian nation, meaning that it is founded within a specifically Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) ethos, by people professing a specifically Christian faith, and with the goal of advancing specifically Christian aims. Whereas many other historians emphasize the founders' Deist and (for its time) pluralist leanings, the new Christian historiography places the majority of US founders squarely within a Biblical Christian worldview.
This historical view leads its proponents to several conclusions about present-day culture and politics. They dispute, for example, the idea that the US relies on a "separation of church and state." Indeed, they tie key ideals of US liberal democracy quite specifically to Christian faith. Human rights, for instance, are God-given, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Rights' utility as a legal concept is inseparable from their religious underpinnings. (And, as a side-argument, the Declaration enjoys a "symbiotic" relationship with the Constitution proper; one cannot be considered apart from the other). The US is tolerant of other religions, yes, but it remains by design (and by Divine fiat) a Christian nation. It is thus only proper that its laws reflect specifically Christian precepts.
Bolstering this view are authors like David Barton, of Wallbuilders, who has written several books about how Christian (not Deist) most of the founders were and how shocked they would be at the secular bias of today's politics and culture. I've heard Barton speak and have read several of his articles. He strikes me as an autodidact, extremely well-read on facts and trivia of various Revolutionary era figures and events. But he is by no means an academic historian. He lacks a scholarly sense of history as a discipline, i.e., an ongoing conversation among experts in which participants submit themselves to mutual accountability and peer review to check and refine arguments or evidence. Indeed, his Wikipedia entry links to several of his more infamous gaffes, including using alleged quotes by the founders for which he cannot find primary documentation.
Of course, Barton's lack of formal academic credentials in no way hinders his influence and popularity among his fans, including several members of the Texas school board. Shorto interviews several of these members, noting that they make no secret of the fact that they have no professional expertise in the areas about which they dictate policy--or even education in general (one member, for example, home-schooled her children, specifically avoiding the system she seeks now to influence). The sense here is that, for these board members and those who support them, educators by and large suffer from a liberal, secularist bias. They have twisted true history--the history that reveals the hand of God at work in Instrument America--and require correction from honest believers.
To his credit, Shorto notes that many historians who otherwise do not agree with Barton et al. nevertheless concur that a history of influences on US history that ignores the religious views of major actors also errs. Religion did and does play a role in people's lives, and the founders were often quite open about that role as they saw it. To the extent that history books have shied away from exploring this reality, such squeamishness should be remedied. This is not to say, however, that historians concur that the founders saw themselves as building a specifically or exclusively Christian nation in Barton's sense. Shorto quotes a conservative author, Richard Brookhiser, who puts it nicely: "The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be."
But such nuances don't cut the mustard in the more conservative school board members' minds. Christian is Christian. To suggest that past understandings and expressions of Christian faith differed significantly from present-day ones seems incredulous to many present-day, Bible-believing evangelicals. They therefore back-read their own present-day configuration of faith into the historical narratives and legal documents US. American history becomes the story of the endurance of (their configuration of) faith.
Shorto's take on all of this (it's mainly reportage rather than editorial) is fascinating and, I think, fair. I wish, however, that he were more careful in identifying the Christians who follow Barton's lead and seek to twist educational standards to fit their faith-pictures versus Christianity more generally. At times Shorto seems to suggest that all Christians (all Christians in Texas, anyway) see US history just as Barton et al. do. The people Shorto talks to on the board--and they do say some alarming things--strike me more as (indeed, identify explicitly as) working on the fundamentalist end of evangelicalism.
A more complicated picture of what evangelicals more generally (to say nothing of non-evangelical Christians) mean by describing the US as a Christian nation emerges in such books as Christian Smith's Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: U of CA P, 2000). Smith, a sociologist, draws on a great deal of qualitative and quantitative evidence to trouble many of the preconceptions about evangelicals that Shorto's article might otherwise foster. Although a majority of evangelicals in Smith's study did affirm the notion that the US was Christian nation, they do not take that to mean that Christianity should enjoy some privileged status in US schools or laws. "Christian nation" can mean many things, from Barton's quasi-theocratic view to the simple observation that, for a long time, most US citizens identified as broadly Christian (as the UK might be called a "secular nation" even though it formally has a state church).
So the school board members that alarm Shorto represent an especially activist fringe with particularly strong views rather than the "average evangelical" (whatever that might mean). Nevertheless, as an especially activist, vocal fringe, the board members' attitudes and actions are quite troubling. The article is worth reading.
More later,
JF
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Clarifying Warren's Stance re: Uganda
I need to make a couple of corrections to statements I made yesterday regarding Rick Warren and the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill. A story on Newsweek's website quoted him from two different contexts, one related directly to his stance on the bill itself and one (from Meet the Press) on an entirely different subject. The article noted that the two quotes came from different contexts; I overlooked that clarification in quoting him.
To be clear: the quote from Warren about Uganda is as follows:
That being said, placed side-by-side as they were in the article, the two quotes appear to be speaking about the same subject, giving the impression that Warren advocates a general stance of neutrality--at least on issues of homosexuality. The subtle suggestion in the article (which notes that Warren calls abortion "a holocaust") is that Warren's neutrality is selective and a shade disingenuous. I reacted strongly to this yesterday, wondering how a pastor like Warren could so advocate a stand-offish position.
Having checked the Meet the Press interview myself (transcript only here), I now think the Newsweek article misrepresented Warren's position--or at the very least that I got an incorrect impression of Warren's views from this article (which has been widely linked on gay religious-right watchdog sites).
In the Meet the Press interview, Warren is speaking broadly about his transition from the pastor of a single church (Saddleback) to being a national spokesperson whose opinions on a range of issues is regularly sought. The interviewer, David Gregory, presses Warren on a number of specific issues, from Proposition 8 to abortion to health care. In most cases, Warren acknowledges his (conservative evangelical) beliefs while declining to occupy the role of culture war pundit.
He expresses regret, for instance, about making a video for his church in which he elaborated on his views about gay marriage during the Prop 8 debate. Indeed, Gregory notes that Warren has been quite active on AIDS issues. He asks Warren if working with AIDS patients has caused Warren to think differently about homosexuality. A full quote of Warren's response here is appropriate:
I would like to think this quote similarly contextualizes Warren's views about the proposed Ugandan bill. From what I know of Warren's convictions, he himself, personally, would be against this bill. But in his public statements, Warren maintains a separation of church and state. It is not appropriate, in his view, for him to express an opinion as a pastor on a matter of internal Ugandan politics.
I'm not sure I agree with this stance, particularly on this issue, particularly as other Christian groups and leaders have decided that vocal resistance to this bill is appropriate. I respect, however, the fact that his stance is more complex than it has been portrayed of late, and I regret that I joined in the chorus of condemnatory voices prior to having a fuller context.
More tomorrow,
JF
To be clear: the quote from Warren about Uganda is as follows:
"The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations."The Newsweek article followed that quote with another, taken from Meet the Press:
"As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides."Now, the article mentioned that in the latter quote Warren expressed a preference for a neutral stance "in a different context." I should have looked before I quoted. Mea culpa.
That being said, placed side-by-side as they were in the article, the two quotes appear to be speaking about the same subject, giving the impression that Warren advocates a general stance of neutrality--at least on issues of homosexuality. The subtle suggestion in the article (which notes that Warren calls abortion "a holocaust") is that Warren's neutrality is selective and a shade disingenuous. I reacted strongly to this yesterday, wondering how a pastor like Warren could so advocate a stand-offish position.
Having checked the Meet the Press interview myself (transcript only here), I now think the Newsweek article misrepresented Warren's position--or at the very least that I got an incorrect impression of Warren's views from this article (which has been widely linked on gay religious-right watchdog sites).
In the Meet the Press interview, Warren is speaking broadly about his transition from the pastor of a single church (Saddleback) to being a national spokesperson whose opinions on a range of issues is regularly sought. The interviewer, David Gregory, presses Warren on a number of specific issues, from Proposition 8 to abortion to health care. In most cases, Warren acknowledges his (conservative evangelical) beliefs while declining to occupy the role of culture war pundit.
He expresses regret, for instance, about making a video for his church in which he elaborated on his views about gay marriage during the Prop 8 debate. Indeed, Gregory notes that Warren has been quite active on AIDS issues. He asks Warren if working with AIDS patients has caused Warren to think differently about homosexuality. A full quote of Warren's response here is appropriate:
This passage more accurately contextualizes the second quote repeated in the Newsweek article, reflecting not a laissez-faire neutrality about political things but a nuanced view about the separate roles of church and state, pastor and politician.
Oh, oh, absolutely, much more sympathetic and understanding the pains and the reactions. I, I have understood that so many people today get stigmatized for different things. Now, of course, I have biblical beliefs on--about homosexuality. But when somebody's dying on the side of the road, you don't walk up to them and say, you know, "What's your nationality?" or, "What's your lifestyle?" or, "What's your, your gender preference?" or, you know, anything else. You just help the guy. And this is the, by the way, the difference--I was asked the other day about illegal immigration, things like that. The role of a pastor and the role of the government are different things. My role is to love everybody. I am called to love everybody. In fact, the Bible says love your enemies. I am forbidden to hate anyone, OK? So I can't--I am to love everybody. And if someone's hurting, I don't walk up and say, "Are you illegally here?" I just want to hurt--help the person. But the government does have a right to decide who's in and who's out and things like that.
I would like to think this quote similarly contextualizes Warren's views about the proposed Ugandan bill. From what I know of Warren's convictions, he himself, personally, would be against this bill. But in his public statements, Warren maintains a separation of church and state. It is not appropriate, in his view, for him to express an opinion as a pastor on a matter of internal Ugandan politics.
I'm not sure I agree with this stance, particularly on this issue, particularly as other Christian groups and leaders have decided that vocal resistance to this bill is appropriate. I respect, however, the fact that his stance is more complex than it has been portrayed of late, and I regret that I joined in the chorus of condemnatory voices prior to having a fuller context.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Two Interesting Church and State Pieces from the WaPo
A brief post today, due to end-of-semester busyness.
Two items of interest to my recent ruminations about church/state relations have appeared on the Washington Post website. First is a commentary by Asima T. Uddin, an attorney specializing in religious liberty issues. She tackles the Swiss ban on minarets, citing it as an instance of the French concept, laïcité (alas, diacritical marks don't come easily to this blog, so the term will likely appear as laicite here on out). Distinct from our "separation of church and state," laicite positions religion as not just different than public state functions but actively dangerous, meant to be contained in private spheres and invisible/undetectable outside of such spheres. It is laicite that fuels conflicts in France currently about whether young women may wear Muslim head coverings at school.
Uddin argues that laicite backfires, producing more rather than less religious-based influence/presence in public life. From the piece:
Religious right commentators (some of them, anyway) often point to countries that practice laicite as evidence of the dire ends that church/state separation policies create. Actually, I get the sense at times that some of these commentators look forward to such a faith-hostile government, awaiting with grim eagerness the day when they can martyr themselves in the name of their faith. Consider, for instance, the success of the Left Behind series and its imitators. There's an almost romantic fascination with the idea of the underground church that holds its prayer meetings on the sly or keeps its cross-shaped jewelry hidden.
Of course (and this is the point most religious right commentators gloss over), the US's tradition of church and state diverges from that of France. Any country with "In God we trust" printed on its coins or where Judeo-Christian professions of faith are obligatory for major politicians is a long way from laicite.
Laicite, Uddin notes, arose in France during the 1700s and 1800s as a means of checking the percieved influence of Roman Catholicism. Coincidentally, the other piece that caught my attention dealt precisely with the Catholic church's influence on Catholic politicians. Specifically, Joseph A. Califano, Jr. (a former cabinet member in the Johnson and Carter administrations) argues against what he calls "a sort of nuclear option"--the denial of the Eucharist to Catholic politicians who are pro-choice. Such an option was unthinkable, he insists, in previous decades.
Why, he asks, do Catholic Bishops so keen on denying Eucharist to pro-life politicians not also deny the Eucharist to pro-death penalty politicians or pro-Iraqi War politicians? Califano takes no stance on abortion himself in the piece. Rather, he contends, no politician can be expected to kowtow to any particular brand of faith-based ideological purity. To insist that politicians only make or vote for policy utterly consonant with one faith's doctrines is wrong. Yes, he concedes, politicians can and should allow their faith convictions to influence their policies, but he qualifies this concession nicely:
Nicely put, I think.
More tomorrow,
JF
Two items of interest to my recent ruminations about church/state relations have appeared on the Washington Post website. First is a commentary by Asima T. Uddin, an attorney specializing in religious liberty issues. She tackles the Swiss ban on minarets, citing it as an instance of the French concept, laïcité (alas, diacritical marks don't come easily to this blog, so the term will likely appear as laicite here on out). Distinct from our "separation of church and state," laicite positions religion as not just different than public state functions but actively dangerous, meant to be contained in private spheres and invisible/undetectable outside of such spheres. It is laicite that fuels conflicts in France currently about whether young women may wear Muslim head coverings at school.
Uddin argues that laicite backfires, producing more rather than less religious-based influence/presence in public life. From the piece:
"When faith and the faithful are denied full participation in civic life, they don't fade from it: instead, they seek alternative means to influence it. At its best, this takes the form of faith-inspired peaceful protest. At its worst, it takes the form of faith-inspired terror."
Religious right commentators (some of them, anyway) often point to countries that practice laicite as evidence of the dire ends that church/state separation policies create. Actually, I get the sense at times that some of these commentators look forward to such a faith-hostile government, awaiting with grim eagerness the day when they can martyr themselves in the name of their faith. Consider, for instance, the success of the Left Behind series and its imitators. There's an almost romantic fascination with the idea of the underground church that holds its prayer meetings on the sly or keeps its cross-shaped jewelry hidden.
Of course (and this is the point most religious right commentators gloss over), the US's tradition of church and state diverges from that of France. Any country with "In God we trust" printed on its coins or where Judeo-Christian professions of faith are obligatory for major politicians is a long way from laicite.
Laicite, Uddin notes, arose in France during the 1700s and 1800s as a means of checking the percieved influence of Roman Catholicism. Coincidentally, the other piece that caught my attention dealt precisely with the Catholic church's influence on Catholic politicians. Specifically, Joseph A. Califano, Jr. (a former cabinet member in the Johnson and Carter administrations) argues against what he calls "a sort of nuclear option"--the denial of the Eucharist to Catholic politicians who are pro-choice. Such an option was unthinkable, he insists, in previous decades.
Why, he asks, do Catholic Bishops so keen on denying Eucharist to pro-life politicians not also deny the Eucharist to pro-death penalty politicians or pro-Iraqi War politicians? Califano takes no stance on abortion himself in the piece. Rather, he contends, no politician can be expected to kowtow to any particular brand of faith-based ideological purity. To insist that politicians only make or vote for policy utterly consonant with one faith's doctrines is wrong. Yes, he concedes, politicians can and should allow their faith convictions to influence their policies, but he qualifies this concession nicely:
"But to have convictions of conscience and be guided by them is not a license to impose such convictions indiscriminately on others by uncompromisingly translating them into policy. If public policy is to serve the common good of a fundamentally just and free, pluralistic society, it must brew in a cauldron of competing values such as freedom, order, equity, justice and mercy. Public officials who fail to weigh these competing values serve neither private conscience nor public morality. Indeed, they offend both."
Nicely put, I think.
More tomorrow,
JF
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