Religious politics

Defining a Place for the New Atheism

I’m moving to Brooklyn! With no internet. Hence delays. 

Andrew Sullivan, with Bryan Appleyard, together question the value of the “new atheism,” which they define as a belief system devoted to the absolute eradication of both religion, and its influence on mankind. Appleyard:

By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

For them, neo-atheism rests on equal parts atheism, cultural secularism, and Darwinism, with the latter serving as  ”the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.” The definition is hardly elegant, and relies on context for its meaning: by characterizing neo-atheism at least partially as a reaction against creationism, he denies the concept an independent existence, and so risks stopping short of identifying any error in neo-atheism except in its relation to competing ideologies. But even if Appleyard’s neo-atheism is an antithesis, rather than a free-standing concept, we can take his argument as a case for synthesis — that reactionary, militant atheism shares the flaw of exclusion with the very ideologies it opposes.

[A]bsence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t. . . . The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.

Indeed, the fault runs deeper. The problem isn’t that militant atheism excludes, though it does; nor is it that it’s an incomplete explanation of the world, though it is (for now); nor even that humanist morality, the companion of atheism, fails to resonate with some individuals as strongly as religious morality. It’s that in a pluralistic society, which we declare ourselves to be, there can be no one answer. Christopher Hitchens once argued, correctly, that “the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” That’s a battle we continue to fight against fundamentalist versions of Islam and Christianity alike. Similarly, we should recognize that atheism will have to civilize and accept difference before it can play an exclusively positive role in American society.

Thankfully, that task should not be terribly difficult. Many of the assumptions that underlie secularism and atheism are uniquely suited to American democracy, and easily adaptable to strengthen the integrity of our shared state. By proscribing the notion of a single religious Truth, atheism strongly justifies a constitutional structure that enables each citizen to discover their own personal truth. It maximizes freedom, by eschewing the kind of subjective norms that some would deploy to circumscribe the inoffensive, private moral choices of others. And it fits handily with the American Constitution’s formal declaration of its own religious neutrality, and its creation of what is (in the view of some scholars) a public, pan-American secular morality (a “constitutional faith”). As religion serves society by creating (for some) a necessary moral compass, atheism can serve the state by justifying each citizen’s decision to create that moral compass for themselves, and reminding them not to inflict it on others.

Consequentially, the only claim that atheism must renounce to complete its “taming and domestication” is the claim that other religions are, objectively and publicly, wrong and dangerous. To see itself integrated into civil society, atheism must find validation not just in an individual’s decision to abjure all faiths, but in the more common, private, and individual choice to follow one faith, and renounce others. Such decisions are, after all, declarations of atheism as to all but one (set of) god(s), made with the blessing and legal protection of our secular constitution. And there can be no greater victory over fundamentalism — atheism’s only true enemy — than to separate religiosity from orthodoxy.

But because atheism is a reactionary movement, query whether its “domestication” should precede or follow the end of religious fundamentalism in America. Until that time, militant atheists will have a point: religious fundamentalism actually is dangerous. It erodes our scientific competitiveness, justifies injustice, promotes bullying and therefore suicide, and provides moral support for domestic terrorism. We can look forward to the day when virulent atheism and fundamentalism produce, together, a stable synthesis, but in a world where Rick Santorum actually stands to win a Republican primary, we’re still a ways away.

Obama and Antiochus: the Modern Persecution Complex

Michael Stokes Paulsen, reported in Ben Domenech’s Transom, attempts to draw a shaky parallel between a campaign of oppression carried out by the Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Ephiphanes on his Jewish subject, and the Obama administration’s mandate that church-affiliated organizations cover contraceptives as part of their employees’ health plans:

The story does not have an especially happy ending (at least from a human, secular standpoint). Eleazar is tortured to death, then an entire family of brothers after him. But the story of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and Eleazar, remains a remarkable two-thousand-year-old parable about tyranny and conscience, about cram-downs, accommodations, deception, and adherence to principle.

There are relatively few instances in recorded modern western history when government has insisted on vindicating its authority and overriding religious conscience for its own sake—purely for the symbolism of power prevailing over conscience.

Indeed. Per Paulsen, forcing an employer to subsidize their employees’ contraception violates religious conscience as surely as commanding a Jew to eat pork. It’s this kind of tortured logic, and apparent conviction that a democratically-elected leader is out to “get” the faithful as surely as an ancient despot, that together signal a religious lobby that’s overplayed its hand. Paulsen’s legal argument is worse, still:

The legal case against the Obama HHS policy was (and remains) shooting-fish-in-a-barrel easy. The policy violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise of Religion clause, under any interpretation. It is not neutral toward religion, exempts some religious employers and not others, and vests government bureaucrats with broad discretion as to who will be exempted. Even more clearly, the policy violates the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” of 1993, a federal super-statute that protects religious liberty and applies to the operation of all other federal laws unless a new law explicitly removes itself from RFRA’s requirements. Under RFRA, any federal law or regulation that burdens the exercise of religious convictions must give way to such beliefs, unless justified by a “compelling” interest that can be achieved in no other way. The contraception cram-down cannot possibly pass such a stringent legal test: what makes compulsory contraception, paid for by religious groups, “compelling”? How can it be so important, given other exemptions from the requirement?

The critical legal error duplicates the flaw in the historical analogy: the parallel isn’t to a king commanding his Jewish subjects to eat pork. It’s to a king commanding all of his subjects to provide their household servants with a living wage suitable to buy — if the servants so choose — pork, and preserving the new rule of general application over isolated Jewish objections. HHS’ expanded coverage allows American women to take home more of their paycheck, and spend less on drugs that are either an incident of modern life, part of modern reproductive medicine, or now-standard treatment for regular gynecological conditions (“the Pill” is more than prophylaxis — it’s regularly used as medicine for hormonal imbalances). “Discrimination” against the faithful occurs only insofar as they’re asked to contribute, with the rest of society, to expanding this new coverage to a majority of the workforce. Viewed from this perspective, the burden on religious expression occurs only through the attenuated connection between employer and employee, and only as an incident to otherwise valid and rational regulation, falling squarely into the rule of Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990) (holding that religious belief — here, in the transcendental qualities of peyote — cannot defeat a general rule barring drug use by state employees).

HHS’ expanded coverage requires employers to take no immoral act, other than forfeiting their right manipulate the scope of insurance coverage to control the private moral choices of their non-clerical employees. It makes a full 50% of the population freer, happier, and healthier — but cuts one of the few remaining tethers the religious elites use to control the rest of us. That’s what this fight is really about.

The Populist Case for Tradition

At RedState, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, one poster manages to, between an incomprehensibly wrong argument against the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision on Proposition 8, say something interesting. I recommend you skip over everything but the last two paragraphs, reproduced below:

As I’ve written before, democracy, free markets, tradition and the rule of written law are all valuable for the same reason – they include the largest number of people in the making of decisions. Tradition protects us from the tyranny of small sample sizes, by delivering to us the lessons drawn from experience of prior generations. Tradition is not stasis; it is the gradual accrual of the lessons of trial and error of countless individuals. It changes when new things are proven to work, and old things are found to have become unuseful. In fact, you cannot believe in moral progress of any kind if you do not believe in tradition, only a sort of moral Brownian motion in which nothing learned today has any guarantee against being unlearned tomorrow.

But the myriad individual and social judgments that compose tradition are made by the common man (who is valuable precisely because he is so common), and far less reliable when made by a small and insular number of lawyers. Voters gave us the Bill of Rights; judges gave us Dred Scott. Indeed, if voters’ views of same-sex marriage change, as they have in some states, the law will change with them. But if we continue down the path of decisions like Perry, the voters of tomorrow may find little left they are permitted to decide. And that, far more even than the specific policy question at issue, is something worth getting upset about.

The point on the presumptive validity of tradition is well-taken; indeed, as we’ve noted before, tradition serves as evidence that a certain practice probably used to work. But we’ve also noted, to answer the author’s narrow conception of when tradition should change, that proof of a new, superior value system is probably too high of a standard for the rejection of tradition. Moreover, it’s not one that we’ve followed. Popular rule was, at the time of its institutionalization in the American Constitution, an unproven system; we had no reason to expect that republican democracy would work for a country as large as the United States, but were impelled to the experiment by a conviction that Europe’s tradition of monarchy simply no longer served. Tradition deserves its due, but its presumption of validity does not deserve to endure until something better comes along.

Separately, we’re handed a populist argument for tradition — that:

The myriad individual and social judgments that compose tradition are made by the common man (who is valuable precisely because he is so common), and far less reliable when made by a small and insular number of lawyers.

No, for several reasons. First, the author’s example fails on its face: the Bill of Rights was enacted wholly by an educated, upper-class elite, acting uniformly against the tradition of the previous millennia of human history. Mankind had at that point no history of institutionalized religious freedom, and yet we have the First Amendment; and to the extent that the Bill of Rights was meant to secure the rights of Englishmen, to which the colonists felt themselves entitled, it secured those rights through the novel concept of a government ordained by law and by men, rather than by God. “An insular number of lawyers” crafted the American system, with the ratification of the colonists, after a prolonged, top-down publicity campaign. Our government is the product of hard-won knowledge, thought, and rigorous debate — not simple homespun wisdom.

Further, it’s true that judges gave us Dred Scott. But that blight on American history was emphatically a defense of the status quo – of Southern tradition, but tradition nonetheless And later judges gave us, in anti-populist top-down fashion, Brown v. Board of Education. Any defense of tradition against its sudden modification by “elite” lawyers must contend with this example, among others, or risk entirely dodging the part of the debate that makes it interesting in the first place.

Finally, query whether “traditional values” can actually claim a populist provenance at all. Many modern religious traditions were the creations of elites, ignored by them but imposed on the people, like (for example) the much-eroded “tradition” against divorce. Others were roundly proclaimed, but rarely followed. Abortion is controversial today only because it’s never been talked about openly until the modern era; the practice dates at least to Roman times, where (extremely dangerous) chemical abortions were regularly practiced among the nobility. Maybe that’s not an argument against the moral value of tradition, but it’s proof that viewing tradition as the result of generations of trial and error doesn’t quite hold up.

Modernity requires us to square practices designed for insular, homogeneous communities with an increasingly interconnected and diverse world. Conservatives like RedState would see us abdicate this duty, close our eyes, and pretend to live in an idyllic past that never actually existed. But, it’s good to see that the author is at least consistent: reflexive opposition to a liberating society is the conservatives’ proudest tradition, even if it’s not one that’s served them well.

Speaking to Your Enemy

Matt Taibbi’s polemical piece on the self-anointed prophet of tea part evangelism, Michele Bachmann, is worth a read, but suffers for its tone. If half of the facts he’s dredged up about Bachmann are true — multiple, abortive attempts to turn the machinery of state into a proselytizing organization, for example — then the thing speaks for itself, and requires none of Taibbi’s invective to prove just how dangerous representative Bachmann truly is. He makes one exceptionally useful point, though, that deserves its own separate treatment:

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies. [. . . .]

All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us.

The first paragraph feels like a conclusion; the second is. Views like Bachmann’s are objectively unreasonable. But we live in a country where more than a few of us reject inferential reasoning, and substitute belief, to define the boundaries of their reality. As hard as it is to admit, we can’t win battles like this by disputing first premises. Matt’s right; we’ll lose, and come off worse in the process. We need to understand these beliefs, and be able to articulate not why they’re bad, but why they’re not appropriate to govern a diverse nation.

We may not even be able to win that. It’s been painfully clear for a while now that, for the religious right, faith trumps constitutionalism. But we can try.

Can Legislators Properly Consider God in the Decisionmaking Process?

I’ll preview the conclusion: if it’s outcome determinative… no.

Disgraced former Senator Rick Santorum grabbed headlines yesterday by saying he was “frankly appalled” by President Kennedy’s “radical” statements during the 1960 campaign, which amounted to the following, now sadly somewhat controversial but succinct statement of a basic, foundational principle: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Jack Kennedy is now one of America’s favorite former presidents. Nevertheless, says Santorum, for JFK’s sins, “Jefferson is spinning in his grave.”

We’re seeing how Catholic politicians, following the first Catholic president, have followed his lead, and have divorced faith not just from the public square, but from their own decision-making process.

It’s a hallmark of the tea party’s de facto religion – ancestor worship of the founding generation — that its adherents in fact have no idea what the Founders believed, or what they fought for. Santorum demonstrates and compounds that ignorance on the pages of other papers, in a long screed ably taken down elsewhere, but to that let us add some. Jefferson was a deist, openly hostile to organized religion (and especially Catholicism) as it was practiced in his time, whose approach to the Bible was precisely River Tam’s [YouTube]: to tear out the pages that don’t make sense, resulting in a slimmer, simply moral document. It’s for this sin that the Santorums of Texas eliminated Jefferson from the curriculum.

Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was very real, very present in the early Republic, and defined how he saw his position: as a temporal officer, with responsibilities exclusively to the office, and no higher power. Hence, for example, Jefferson’s remarkable decision to forgo a thanksgiving prayer, for fear of converting the early Presidency into some American pontifex maximus. That understanding should control today.

We elect legislators to serve the people, the office, and the Constitution. Not God. In discharging that role, legislators must exercise moral judgment, a task that will often require reference to religious morality. That’s fine, and moreover, unavoidable. But legislators should not be in the business of making legislative decisions exclusively to appease their favored interpretation of their favored deity. Where the law of the land and the principles of the Constitution point in one direction, and God, as interpreted by man, points in another, the former should always control, as a function of the oath of office, and the basic principles of democracy.

We expect that God will guide our magistrates, our courts, and our nation. But how vain to imagine he needs our help to do so?

Glenn Beck’s Christmas Paean to the Constitution

WordPress won’t let me embed the video, and thank God; I’d rather not profane our pages, anyways. But please don’t miss this video of his, describing, four days before Christmas, the “birth of the Constitution.”

The timing and phrasing of it all suggests a not-so-subtle dog whistle to devotees of obscure quasi-historian Cleon Skousen, Beck’s epistemological inspiration, who holds the Constitution out to be a divinely inspired document enshrining Christianity (specifically, Mormonism) as the backbone of an America deliberately designed by God as the vehicle of the world’s cap-s-Salvation. It’s… creepy stuff. Naturally, in Beck and Skousen’s America, the separation of church and state becomes a necessary casualty of America’s eschatological role. And history goes out the window, too. Take Beck’s assertion that, for Thomas Jefferson, one of the prime functions of government is the “adoration” of God. Let’s go to the text:

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Jefferson — who refused to offer a Thanksgiving prayer rather than risk setting a precedent that the state should take as a prime function the adoration of God — drew a clear line between the religious beliefs of the people, and the religious activities of its government. One could spend a lifetime policing these little infractions, committed by amateur historians like Beck and his peers, either too poorly read to notice such vital distinctions or too dominated by their agenda to care, and still come up short. I feel compelled to note this one only as an example of how brazen our opposition has become in selecting, and blowing out of context, vital elements of our shared history. This is a religious Nation, but we must carefully protect the stoic nature of our  State, as a bulwark for the protection of both men of conscience, and men of faith.

Theologies of Governance

Conservative websites justly criticize Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) for the bold assertion that fiscal conservatism requires “social conservatism,” by which he means a dedication to God, by regulating society to conform to and mirror his subjective idea of what religious righteousness requires.

Setting to one side the arrogant assumption that Jim DeMint, and the Republican Party, are exclusive conduits to the Almighty (no-one comes to the Kingdom, but through the GOP?), DeMint’s theory seems to satisfy neither his theology, nor the strictures of common sense, nor align with the actual meaning of American exceptionalism. 

His theological hook is some neo-gnostic notion that a large government displaces God, by focusing the people on “Caesar,” rather than God. But when government forces the people to God, this is itself an exercise of Caesar’s will, and an accentuation of the “size” of government, both of which DeMint should view as inimical to true faith. Coerced religiosity is no religiosity at all; it’s a tenet of both Christianity and constitutionalism that government intrusion corrupts faith. Properly viewed, “social” conservatism is the enemy of, God, small governance, and any fair understanding of America’s unique place in the world. Theocracy creates the illusion of piety, but this ought not be enough for a religious man, as DeMint purports to be.

Politically, one wonders whether (and when) pronouncements like these will cause tea party groups to finally sour on the Republican Party. If tea party “patriots” actually cared for small government values — and to be clear, I don’t think they do — we would never have come to this pass. But as we get deeper into Republican “governance,” such as it is, we can expect the cognitive dissonance to become increasingly difficult to reconcile.

Our Sharia

Although the protections afforded Jews and Christians by Islamic law were, in many ways, ahead of their time, this grace, such as it was, had its limits. According to the Pact of Umar, which defined the relationship between the Peoples of the Book,

[Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians] shall not build, in our cities or in their neighborhood, new monasteries, Churches, convents, or monks’ cells, nor shall we repair, by day or by night, such of them as fall in ruins or are situated in the quarters of the Muslims.

This strict limit was not absolute, in practice. But how interesting that the very groups that oppose Sharia law as a looming threat to the American way of life would now duplicate it, to repress Muslims.

Facts on the Ground

There’s a large police presence in downtown Manhattan today — but comparatively fewer protesters. Most of them, too, are marching in support of Cordoba House. It’s actually quite refreshing.

Someone put up sheets to note, and presumably discuss, reasons to support or oppose the center. Who doesn’t want a swimming pool? I talked to one person who was incredulous that this could be a reason to support the center, but in a way, it goes to the heart of the issue. Downtown (TriBeCha?) needs community services; the Cordoba House will provide them. The inoffensive faith of the builders really shouldn’t matter.

This seems to pretty accurately sum up the state of public discourse, miserable as it is. (But hats off to the serviceman writing on the bottom right, in support of the rights for which he fought.)

This guy is the only anti-Islamic protester I could find in the area. Notice he’s also the only person with press coverage.

“One Nation Under God”: Co-opting the Fringe Narrative

For as long as I’ve been politically conscious, the line, “One Nation Under God,” a new adornment to our currency and a belated addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, has been pushed by the Christian right as proof that, in opposition to both the constitutional text and any fair reading of American history, we are a “Christian nation.”

President Obama today:

We are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.

This is successful messaging: a national symbol restored to national purpose.