Establishment Claws

The Carpetbagger Report points to a case that shows the dangers this modern pluralistic country is facing as it begins to legally enshrine religion into public life:

In Pleasant Grove, Utah, for example, a Ten Commandments memorial, donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1971, sits in a secluded area of city property that is intended to honor the city's heritage. Pleasant Grove is now facing litigation about the display, not from civil libertarians, but from another religious group that wants equal treatment.


People will pooh-pooh this case as they did an earlier one involving Wicca, in which a practitioner sued for the right to give the invocation for the legislature and was denied because her religion wasn't part of the Judeo-Christian tradition:

The Fourth Circuit upheld the decision of a county legislature which sought to ban certain religions from giving an opening invocation:

The 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield County's Board of Supervisors did not show impermissible motive in refusing to permit a pantheistic invocation by a Wiccan because its list of clergy who registered to conduct invocations covers a wide spectrum of Judeo-Christian denominations. Simpson v. Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, No. 04-1045 (April 14). Chesterfield County is in the Richmond suburbs.

"The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the opinion.


Ok. So, as long as the Judeo-Christian tradition is fully represented then everything is ok, right? Not exactly. Guess what's starting to happen:

A religious watchdog group went on the attack Monday against a Bible study course taught in hundreds of schools in Texas and across the country, saying it pushes students toward conservative Protestant viewpoints and violates religious freedom.

The Texas Freedom Network, which includes clergy of several faiths, said the course offered by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is full of errors and dubious research that promote a fundamentalist Christian view.

The council dismissed the Texas Freedom Network as a "far left" extremist organization trying to stifle academic review of a historical text. Elizabeth Ridenour, president of the Bible class group, accused the network of censorship.

"They are actually quite fearful of academic freedom, and of local schools deciding for themselves what elective courses to offer their citizens," Ms. Ridenour says in a statement on the council’s Web site.

Network President Kathy Miller said her group looked at the course after the Odessa school board voted in April to offer a Bible class. The network asked Mark A. Chancey, a professor and biblical scholar at Southern Methodist University, to review the council’s curriculum. He was not paid for his work, Ms. Miller said.

Dr. Chancey’s review found that the Bible is characterized as inspired by God, discussions of science are based on the claims of biblical creationists, Jesus is referred to as fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, and archaeological findings are erroneously used to support claims of the Bible’s historical accuracy. He said the course suggests that the Bible, instead of the Constitution, be considered the nation’s founding document.

All of those points may be acceptable to some religions, but not to others, Dr. Chancey said.

[...]

"No public school student should have to have a particular religious belief forced upon them," said the Rev. Ragan Courtney, pastor of The Sanctuary, a Baptist congregation in Austin.


Surprise, surprise. There is disagreement even within the "Judeo-Christian" tradition --- a fact which anyone who took 10th grade world history would already know. And some quite ugly problems promise to re-surface as more and more tax dollars are being funnelled to religious programs that are allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion:

A Christian adoption agency that receives money from Choose Life license plate fees said it does not place children with Roman Catholic couples because their religion conflicts with the agency's "Statement of Faith."

Bethany Christian Services stated the policy in a letter to a Jackson couple this month, and another Mississippi couple said they were rejected for the same reason last year.

"It has been our understanding that Catholicism does not agree with our Statement of Faith," Bethany's state director Karen Stewart wrote. "Our practice to not accept applications from Catholics was an effort to be good stewards of an adoptive applicant's time, money and emotional energy."

[...]

The agency's Web site says all Bethany staff and adoptive applicants personally agree with the faith statement, which describes belief in the Christian Church and the Scripture. It does not refer to any specific branches of Christianity.

[...]

Sandy Steadman said she was hurt and disappointed that Bethany received funds from the Choose Life car license plates. "I know of a lot of Catholics who get those tags," she said.

She added: "If it's OK to accept our money, it should be OK to open your home to us as a family."



You do not have to be a genius to see that even though this country is majority Christian, there is always plenty of room for religious strife among the pious. The founders understood this very well being that they were the decendents of religious refugees from a country that had been fighting these sectrian battles for centuries.

They understood that democracy cannot properly operate when government establishes religion and that religion cannot freely operate when the government endorses one belief over another. Religion and government exist in their own equally important spheres. One of the ways the US came to deal with this ia a practical manner has been this: churches didn't pay taxes and in return they didn't expect the government to proselytise for them. All churches were on their own to promote their creeds however they wanted --- except through the government. That way, we didn't ask people to pay for religious belief they didn't endorse and we didn't create conditions whereby one religion could be seen to have preference over another.

The rules were always relaxed in terms of certain non-doctrinal traditions like holidays, which heavily favored the majority Christians (who could at least all agree that the big Christian holidays were shared among them all.) And we long practiced a sort of cultural protestant Deism that didn't presume any specific political agenda. Socially, of course, we were horribly bigoted toward Catholics, Jews and anybody else who didn't accept whatever the prevailing local sects decreed, but the federal government held to sort of phony distance that at least allowed the long progressive struggle to create a truly tolerant religious environment to endure. And it finally prevailed. Huzzah.

Sadly (or maybe inevitably) just at the moment when this country seemed to have found its way to a real tolerance of different religious beliefs, where there was more varied religion per square mile than virtually anywhere else in the western world, we've decided to force the government to get involved in pushing certain beliefs because they are majoritarian. I guess we're overdue to take a little walk through the 17th century and experience some of that good old fashioned, traditional religious hatred.

People think "what's the harm in putting up the 10 commandments on a courthouse?" Who cares? Truly, not a whole lot of people do. But as you can see by the the various legal challenges being mounted on behalf of minority religions and the stirrings of sectarian confrontation among Christian faiths, it would have been better if the government had just made it clear from the beginning that it can't take sides. People would understand that, even most majority Christians.

The government should stay out of it, period. Let everybody believe what they will in perfect freedom. But it should be on private property funded by private money. The principle isn't all that tough. Sadly, it appears that we are now going to have to painfully illustrate step by step, through court cases and endless fighting for who knows how long, why it is better for religion for the government to stay out of its sphere. (The battle for secularism for its own sake has been lost for the time being.) I guess we just have to relearn these lessons over and over again.



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