The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (13 page)

This is nothing new. When man loses God he sets about to make new gods.
Or as the philosopher Eric Voegelin puts it, “[W]hen God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”
¹⁷

Likewise man creates dogmas because man needs dogmas. The light of reason illuminates the darkness and science provides us compasses to find our way. But it does not provide us with reasons to get out of bed in the first place. As John Dos Passos said, “The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave webs.”
¹⁸
This is as true of criminals in prison as it is of monks in monasteries and scientists in laboratories.

5

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

T
he principle of separation of church and state is as rooted an ideological precept as any that exists, whether you call it ideological or not. If you don’t think so, it’s probably because you already agree with the principle. Indeed, pretty much every position regarding the role of religion in society is seen as ideological by those who hold the opposing position. Obviously, if you’re a member of the Christian Coalition, you probably think the ACLU is ideologically extremist, and vice versa.

But increasingly what counts for religious “extremism” is merely what until very, very recently was considered normal. For example, the American Atheists sued over the installation of the “9/11 cross”—a cross-shaped beam found at ground zero—at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum because “any government enshrinement of the cross was an impermissible mingling of church and state.”
¹
Anyone thinking otherwise must have overindulged in the Church wine, reasoned the AA, because “[t]he WTC cross has become a Christian icon. It has been blessed by so-called holy men and presented as a reminder that their god, who couldn’t be bothered to stop the Muslim terrorists or prevent 3,000 people from being killed in his name, cared only enough to bestow upon us some rubble that resembles a cross. It’s a truly ridiculous assertion.”

The truth is that both the ACLU and the Christian Coalition are more ideologically similar than they are different. In any place in the world where freedom of conscience doesn’t exist (Saudi Arabia comes to mind), the general notion that we should be free to worship as we please is greeted as
profoundly and ideologically radical. The space between our alleged religious fanatics and our supposed atheistic fanatics is shockingly small. That’s because our arguments are about the details of implementing a shared principle.

The separation of church and state has its roots in the West, with Jesus’ injunction to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” (and only those things, it should be noted). But it took millennia of bloodshed and social upheaval for that idea to be translated into the recognizable practice we have today. When the Roman Empire fell in the West, the sole seat of political authority transferred to Constantinople, but the religious authority remained in Rome (though the Eastern Orthodox would say, more accurately, that it split). This meant that emperors and kings retained secular power in the West, but the Church was still the ultimate moral authority. For instance, when Emperor Theodosius slaughtered the Thessalonians, Archbishop Ambrose of Milan was so repulsed that he refused to give the emperor holy communion. “No fair!,” (I paraphrase) the emperor cried. Insisting that David had done worse in the Bible. Ambrose replied, “You have imitated David in his crime, then imitate him in his repentance!” And so, off and on for eight months, the most powerful ruler in the entire world mimicked the biblical David, dressing in rags like a beggar in order to plea for forgiveness outside Ambrose’s cathedral. One wonders if John Kerry would have submitted to a similar penance back in 2004, when bishops were threatening to refuse him communion should he present himself at the rail.

Over time the papacy’s moral authority increased. Pope Leo III may have been forced to anoint Charlemagne as Rome’s emperor, but by doing so he also cemented the notion that even kings were answerable to a higher authority. When Emperor Henry IV challenged Pope Gregory VII’s power of investiture, he ended up, as legend has it, kneeling in the snows at Canossa for three days begging for forgiveness.

But the Protestant Reformation fractured Western Christianity, and with it the notion of a single source of temporal moral authority. Lutherans and Calvinists, contrary to a lot of glib commentary these days, were not moderates but ardent believers who wanted to overthrow the worldliness of the Catholic Church and replace it with more austere religious authority (see
Chapter 21
, The Catholic Church). Bloody religious wars ensued, with
brutal massacres in the streets of European capitals. “In 1555,” writes James Q. Wilson, “the Peace of Augsburg settled the religious wars briefly with the phrase
cuius regio, eius religio
—meaning that people in each state or principality would have the religion of their ruler. If you didn’t like your prince’s religion, you had to move somewhere else.”
²

The toothpaste was out of the tube. A riot of new denominations spread across Europe—Anabaptists, Quakers, Zwinglians, et al. More wars and social turmoil wracked Europe for the better part of a century. The Peace of Westphalia advanced the cause of religious liberty by carving out a few ideological and political harbors for freedom of conscience. In the words of C. V. Wedgwood, “[T]he essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword,”
³
was finally pecking its way into the European mind.

But the battle to clear space for the free exercise of conscience hardly ended there. Oliver Cromwell led a Presbyterian rebellion against the throne, but he understood that he didn’t have the power to force his faith on all of his countrymen, and that trying to do so would be a fatal overreach. He needed to recruit adherents of other faiths to his cause. To this end he persuaded Parliament to respect liberty for “all who fear God.” He even took tentative steps to welcome back the persecuted and exiled Jews of England.
⁴

Then came the bloody trading of blows, faith, and thrones that marked the late seventeenth century. Ultimately Parliament passed the Toleration Act, permitting believers of various Protestant faiths to follow their religion so long as their loyalty to the crown was not in doubt. Even then, writes Wilson, “[t]heir members still could not hold government office, but at least they would not be hanged.” Catholics and Unitarians, meanwhile, were not formally protected by law, but the English increasingly left them alone, too.
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The story goes on. Galileo had had his battles with the Church in Italy a half century earlier. The Puritans came to America to escape religious persecution. Again, these were not religious moderates (just ask the women who were burned at Salem) but devout believers who craved the room to practice their religion as their consciences dictated.

Religious pluralism in colonial America continued to evolve. Maryland for Catholics, Georgia for Baptists, Massachusetts for Red Sox fans, and so
on. The Founders barred the establishment of a religion by the federal government—in no small part because they remembered the repression of minority sects under the state church of England. But they saw no problem with the various American states establishing their own official churches. And they certainly had no objection to official displays of religiosity. One of the first acts by the new Congress was to hire a chaplain. Until well into the nineteenth century, the largest weekly church service in the United States took place in the U.S. Capitol building. At the request of President Jefferson, music was provided at federal expense by the United States Marine Band.
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Today you could argue—and if you don’t I will—that the project of cleansing religion from the public square has gone too far. Whereas we used to have official national days of prayer and fasting, now we’re almost at the point where we have a constitutional crisis if a kid says “God bless you” to a sneezing public-school teacher.

Whatever the right balance is between church and state, the point is that our overwhelming commitment to religious freedom isn’t some purely abstract notion yanked out of a seminar discussion. As we’ve seen, whereas many academic debates can be over how many angels are on the head of a pin—wait, sorry, that’s a theological question, how about, How many different kinds of evil are dead white European men?—ideological debates are not impractical distractions. They get at the core of what kind of civilization we want to live in. And there is no way to wall off religion from those debates. Yes, we can separate, to one extent or another, the role of religion in our society, but it is impossible to separate the role of religion—or the lack of it—in our own hearts. This is true at a very practical level insofar as it is impossible to know what someone’s true motivations for any decision are. We can only judge people by the arguments that they make and the decisions that they take. But it’s also true at a very high philosophical level.

It is beyond absurd to say that your religious faith informs your conception of the cosmos and your place in it, morality, and human purpose, but then also to say that your religious faith will have nothing whatsoever to do with your decision making as an elected official. This does not mean that you have to impose your religious views on others. John F. Kennedy confronted the issue of his Catholicism head-on and said it would not bind him to
policies he deemed contrary to American interest. One can certainly gainsay some of his decisions, but most reasonable people would have a hard time detecting a relentlessly pro-Catholic bias.

One might even ask, “So what if a politician did have a proreligion bias?” I’m not talking about the unconstitutional imposition of Sharia or kosher laws for everyone. But what if a Catholic president had a soft spot for the wonderful work that parochial schools do? Or if a Druid president had a keen interest in forestry? Save the trees for they are our brothers and sisters! If a politician runs openly and honestly on his values, we should not be scandalized when those values inform his decision making, and we should not be surprised that his values are informed by his religion. In short, there’s nothing essentially, fundamentally, wrong with religion guiding your politics.

Letting your politics guide your religion is another matter altogether. “I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people,” Senator John Kerry explained during the third presidential debate in 2004. “I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith.”

That sounds reasonable enough, right? It’s not how I would frame the issue, but it’s a defensible position to be sure. Not surprisingly, this answer came up in the context of abortion. It is a dogmatic article of faith among many staunch defenders of abortion rights that abortion foes are driven by religion, and therefore banning abortion is an unjust religious imposition. “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” and all that. And ever since Mario Cuomo’s famous Notre Dame speech, Democratic politicians have been invoking the “Cuomo defense.” In short, you can be
personally
prolife and still
publically
enforce prochoice policies. I find this to be a theological mess, but it is not my place to criticize others about their religious convictions.

But the whole thing comes off the rails of logic when Kerry says that his religious conviction is “why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief
of faith.” Over and over during the campaign he zinged President Bush—or seemed to think he was zinging him—by pointing out that one must “demonstrate faith with deeds.” And these were Kerry’s deeds.

But wait a second. Kerry says his religious faith drives him to fight for the poor and the environment and all of that stuff. But when it comes to abortion, he suddenly cannot impose an article of his faith. Really?

I understand why abortion-rights activists see prolife policies as an imposition of faith (and I can see why a fetus would feel much the same way about prochoice policies, if he or she had a chance to live). But how are environmental or antipoverty policies driven by faith not an imposition of faith? If your faith tells you to pass (often misguided) environmental regulations that cost a father his job or a community its livelihood, you are making quite an imposition on others. Equality, in John Kerry’s formulation, means denying some people opportunities for the benefit of others. And justice, however defined, usually involves guys with guns, courts, judges, prosecutors, and the like—all of whom are empowered by the state to use violence, even to kill you if necessary. Those sound like impositions to me. Indeed, as libertarians are fond of pointing out, pretty much all law comes with the implicit threat of violence. Don’t believe me? Refuse to obey even the most picayune law and eventually a man in uniform with a gun on his hip is going to come talk to you about it.

President Obama is explicit in his overt claims that he is driven by a modern-day social gospel quest for social justice. One of his standard lines is that he is fulfilling the biblical injunction to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper. By the way, there is no such injunction. The only time the phrase “brother’s keeper” appears is when Cain is trying sarcastically to dodge a murder rap. Some argue that Matthew 25:40 is what Obama and other liberals are getting at: “Verily I say unto you: Inasmuch as ye have done
it
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done
it
unto me.” But that’s not a commandment to be your fellow man’s keeper (keepers keep animals). Moreover, even if you’re generous in how you interpret all of this, I’m unaware of any passage in the Hebrew or Christian bibles where God says that doing good to others means supporting bloated, inefficient, and often counterproductive government programs.