Friday, February 10, 2012

Religious Freedom and the U.S. Catholic Bishops: Turning Jefferson on His Head



Timothy Kincaid's summary of what happens when a pluralistic secular democracy permits people to use their peculiar religious beliefs to discriminate and undermine the common good could have been lifted right out of Thomas Jefferson.  Kincaid is writing about the Republican-crafted bill just passed by the Virginia senate permitting adoption agencies to practice overt discrimination in child placement when the religious tenets of an agency's sponsoring group demand discrimination.


As he points out, go down this path--which is the "religious freedom" path for which the Catholic bishops and their allies of the religious and political right are now arguing in the U.S.--and you open the door to all sorts of social chaos.  Because religious freedom represents one value among other values in a pluralistic secular democracy that expects to cohere as a viable and well-functioning society.  

Whenever a religious group has begun to press its privately held religious convictions in the public square with attendant claims that it has a God-given"right" to discriminate, legal and judicial precedent has commonly eventually denied this "right" in American society.  And with good reason: discrimination, whether it is based in strongly held religious convictions or not, is antithetical to the common good.

Kincaid writes, 

The funny thing about religious beliefs is that everyone has them. Some firmly believe in a structured and pageanted theology, some firmly believe that deities are nonsense, and some believe they have no idea and couldn’t care less. And no matter what you believe, there’s a church or organization for you. If your entire faith system consists of nothing more than “I hate those people over there”, I promise you that you can find others who agree and who will happily join together, form a church, and say that God told them so. 
Only a pack of fools would look at that reality and decide that the widely ranging, vastly differing, and often irrational beliefs and rules about a subject which is, by its very nature, unknowable is the basis on which adoption and fostering policy would be based.

The preceding lines could well have been written by Thomas Jefferson, as he developed the notion of religious freedom that is foundational to the democratic society he helped set into place.  In his On the State of Virginia [1787], Jefferson wrote, 

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth . . .

Jefferson developed the notion of religious freedom for American democracy because he did not want any established church to have theocratic control of the democratic society he helped found. He and the other founding fathers feared the influence of any religious body that might gain theocratic influence in the public square, because the religious wars that preceded the immigration of the colonists to America, which were fought to establish that claim, caused the death of millions of people.

Right-wing political and religious leaders (the U.S. Catholic bishops included) who are using the argument of religious freedom these days to argue for an unrestricted religious freedom unnormed by other considerations drawn from the common good are turning Thomas Jefferson on his head.  These groups are pushing their peculiar understanding of religious freedom with theocratic intent.  Their notion of religious freedom amounts to an argument that it's right because I believe it and because I say so.

And you in the government had better be prepared to step away when I tell you that I believe it and I say so, even when your non-discrimination laws require me to act otherwise.  And even if I am taking dole from your tax dollars.

This is a theocratic application of religious freedom that runs directly counter to Jefferson's intent in enshrining the notion of religious freedom in the foundational documents of the United States.  It was precisely this theocratic overruling of laws made by a democratic society to serve the common good that Jefferson sought to combat by arguing that religious groups should be free to think what they wish--in their own sacred preserves, on the other side of the line separating church and state.  

Jefferson hoped that, in restricting religious groups to the religious side of the line separating church and state, he would defuse the power of any single religious body to intrude on the operations of government, by placing religious groups in competition in a kind of marketplace of religious ideas.  And as that marketplace ran along on the church side of the wall separating church and state, he believed, the marketplace of democratic ideas would run along on the other side of the church-state wall as an entirely secular operation, privileging no religious group and no religious ideas.

As Joan Walsh notes at Salon this morning, it's possible to imagine a religious body seeking to argue that it believes that laws prohibiting child labor violate its religious beliefs.  But it's rather difficult to imagine the government kowtowing to religious groups that might press that point and demand a "right" to employ child labor in its institutions, ignoring federal and state laws that prohibit children from working.

There are values at stake in these discussions in addition to the value of religious freedom.  When the Obama administration announces the compromise it has worked out to please the Catholic bishops today (as is now expected), there will be jubilation (and, I expect, downright gloating) on the part of many Catholic centrists who have argued blindly and with no nuance in recent weeks that religious freedom is an absolute value,  and Catholics should be permitted to do as we please with our own institutions.

Because our Catholic tribe is a fierce one and bellicose one, doesn't do interlopers.  We band together thick as thieves, and we fight to win as a band of brothers when we imagine that an anti-Catholic secular society is trampling on our beliefs. When our bishops tell us to jump, we jump--for the good of the tribe.  

And if our bishops inform us that we have a peculiar Catholic right to discriminate, even when laws prohibit discrimination and even when we're receiving tax dollars from the state, we intend to defend our tribal claims and tribal turf against all takers.  Even when we're defending discrimination, and a worldview that turns us into winners by turning you into losers.

For my part, though, I'm not entirely sure that rebranding one's religious tribe as a tribe uniquely designated to be the standard-bearer of discrimination in a democratic society is a singular or unmitigated victory.  When you become, say, the church known as a country club for uniquely privileged heterosexual white men, you rather limit your options in a market in which other religious institutions may well compete for the affiliation of all those inferior others you implicitly turn away by rebranding yourself in this way.

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