Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics,Religion | Tags: Democracy, Religious politics, Fundamentalism, Religious history, Islam, Theocracy, Religious freedom
Riding the crest of a new tide of Islamophobia, NRO’s The Corner and Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor, Ron Ramsey, have settled on the theory that Islam isn’t a religion — it’s a cult, or a way of life, or some other construct of lesser dignity, therefore not entitled to First Amendment protection. This is a cutesy way of translating subjective disapproval and hatred into an objective-sounding argument.
I need hardly add, too, that it doesn’t hold together, legally: the First Amendment definition of “religion” is almost intolerably broad (Scientology qualifies. Ugh.). The Supreme Court’s first succinct statement of religious freedom in America defined the concept’s reach quite broadly, as reaching all matters “of opinion”:
[T]o suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty.
Reynolds v. U.S., 98 U.S. 145, 163 (1878) (quoting early, pre-independence Virginia lawmakers); see also id. at 164 (summarizing) (“Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”).
By trying to erode the definition of religious freedom to exclude disfavored sects on that basis alone, the new right is attempting something truly unprecedented: the rolling-back of a concept that is definitional to the American experience, and our shared history. We might term this as something broader: the law should vest no individual with an advantage, or privilege, merely due to the fortune of his birth. There is no greater distinction between republicanism and pre-Enlightenment theocracy than the application of this principle to religious liberty. How strange to see that line blurred.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics | Tags: Free exercise, Free speech, Freedom of religion, Fundamentalism, Religious history, Religious politics, Theocracy
OpinioJuris parrots a concern on the far right that Obama’s recent public reference to religious freedom as the “freedom to worship” somehow reduces the right. Emphasis and red numbering are mine:
Recently, both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been caught using the phrase “freedom of worship” in prominent speeches, rather than the “freedom of religion” the President called for in Cairo. [. . . .]
To anyone who closely follows prominent discussion of religious freedom in the diplomatic and political arena, this linguistic shift is troubling.
The reason is simple. Any person of faith knows that religious exercise is about a lot more than freedom of worship. It’s about (1) the right to dress according to one’s religious dictates, (2) to preach openly, (3) to evangelize, (4) to engage in the public square. Everyone knows that (5) religious Jews keep kosher, (6) religious Quakers don’t go to war, and (7) religious Muslim women wear headscarves—yet “freedom of worship” would protect none of these acts of faith.
Those who would limit religious practice to the cathedral and the home are the very same people who would strip the public square of any religious presence. They are working to (8) tear down roadside memorial crosses built to commemorate fallen state troopers in Utah, (9) to strip “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and they recently (10) stopped a protester from entering an art gallery because she wore a pro-life pin.
Both of the central contentions of the article about the limited reach of “freedom of worship” — bolded above — are critically wrong, as are their supporting examples. First, as to the reach of “freedom of worship,” numbers 2, 3, and 4 are covered by the First Amendment right to freedom of religion only secondarily. Those rights are best asserted, and emphatically protected, under the free speech clause of the Amendment. Any one of a million Supreme Court cases would be on point for this proposition, but let’s start with Hague v. CIO, 307 U.S. 496 (1939):
Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemoriably been held in trust for the public use and, time of out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thought between citizens, and discussing public questions.
Evangelists can rest easy: no-one is going to take away their right to bother the rest of us anytime soon. Further, as to numbers #1, 5, 6, and 7, the phrase “freedom of worship” is legally equivalent to the “freedom of religious expression”: Black’s Law Dictionary defines worship as “any form of religious devotion or service showing reverence for a divine being,” and the cases support that analysis. See Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992).
Our favorite new conspiracy theorists also go astray when reading the freedom of religious exercise too broadly. Questions about whether it’s right to “strip the public square of any religious presence” aren’t about “free exercise,” which refers to the individual’s right to practice his faith — they’re about the establishment of religion, which deal with the individual’s right to push his faith on the rest of us, through state-sponsored symbols, political acts, etcetera. I can’t help but think that this confusion is deliberate: for the far-far right, the right to free exercise should include the right to bring the rest of the world under their faith. But that’s not how a pluralistic society works. The First Amendment’s religion clauses delicately balance the individual’s right of worship against the rights of others to be unaffected by personal exercise. You can’t take one part of that compromise, and abandon the other. No matter where you come down on the questions presented by numbers #8 and 9, they’re not questions of freedom to worship — and, as to #10, federal authorities can freely enforce content-neutral rules of expression within federal buildings. Deal with it.
To add the expected note of hypocrisy, general practice, from Norman Rockwell (above, right) to today, shows that “freedom of worship” has always been treated as a more artful description of, not a lesser version of, free expression of religion. It’s clear that today’s right-wing Christian community only sees in Obama what they want to see. They want to see a vast conspiracy to destroy their religion, and so, even when Obama attempts to speak their language, that’s what they see.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics,Religion,Science | Tags: Avatar, Christianity, Culture wars, Fundamentalism, Jonah Goldberg, Neo-Platonism, Philosophy, Platonism, Religious politics, Ross Douthat, Science fiction, War on Christmas
James Cameron’s Avatar is a good movie — but as a paean to a path we forsook long ago, it’s anything but subtle, and its approach to race may even be a little troubling, for the simplistic sort of apology it contains. Should we, as a race, feel personally guilty for the sins of our fathers, and if so, how if at all should we express it? And is allegory so blatant any allegory at all?
These issues, raised by the film, might be worth debate. What’s not worth debate is the question of whether the film somehow marginalizes Christianity. And yet no less than two “mainstream” conservative commentators have attempted to roll Avatar in to the “war on Christmas,” for its failure to further the clear superiority of monotheism. Apparently, Eywa is not the reason for the season.
In his contribution, Jonah Goldberg, the cutting mind who brought us “Liberal Fascism,” starts with — and slowly rejects — the premise that specific religiosity matters. It’s a dishonest and deeply flawed way to deepen, and then purport to abandon culture war tropes.
What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.
Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.
Awww, poor persecuted Christians. It’s tough to be an overwhelming majority and have to feign interest in other viewpoints. Now, watch the hands as Goldberg ditches this losing argument for another one. Apparently the absence of Christ in a science fiction film isn’t so surprising — what’s surprising is that religion is present at all.
What I find fascinating, and infuriating, is how the culture war debate is routinely described by antagonists on both sides as a conflict between the religious and the un-religious. The faith instinct manifests itself across the ideological spectrum, even if it masquerades as something else [as in Avatar].
Goldberg takes this as proof of God’s existence. The language is somewhat less elegant than Cicero’s (“nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of god”), but the notion is the same, and it suffers from the same flaws. That we think of God does not prove his existence. Indeed, the presence of the “faith instinct” could just as easily point to a shared human need to find (or, failing that, create) certainty in an uncertain world. God’s commonality could be his downfall, not proof of his existence.
Surprisingly, our second commentator is much, much worse. It’s seriously hard to be worse than Jonah Goldberg, but there but for the grace of God goes Ross Douthat, whose problem isn’t with Avatar‘s ignorance of Christianity, but with its apparent support for pantheism, a religion he judges as “empty” because it fails to offer a Christian form of salvation.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
This really isn’t worth commentary, except to note how narrow Douthat’s field of vision is (salvation means a lot of things to a lot of people), and how far religion has fallen. He all but concedes that religion only has value to him if it can offer an “escape upward” — a comfort in the form of an afterlife, or close proximity to a physical, knowable God. That’s just sad. Wasn’t knowledge once its own reward, and its pursuit an integral part of religion? Don’t we want Marx to be wrong? Isn’t the pursuit of wisdom its own escape upwards? Douthat could have benefited from reading — among other things — at least a single page of Platonist philosophy.
Besides, Douthat fails at the threshold. The theology of Avatar begins as a type of pantheism, but slowly becomes a verifiable scientific construct. When your planet is a huge neural net that preserves memories in accessible form, ancestor- and nature-worship aren’t forms of religious reverence — they’re forms of racial memory. Eywa is less a nature-god than a naturally occurring Library of Alexandria. This is not a minor plot point: it’s the film’s writers explicitly avoiding deeper questions of religion. Goldberg yearns to alter, and Douthat tilts against, an allegory that ultimately isn’t there.
Further, the movie is better for it. Explicit religious allegory is a painful thing, because it almost always degenerates into a missionary tract. Science fiction and fantasy work because they let us see ourselves from a distance, and through other eyes: explicit allegory, of the type that our two Christian pundits crave, kills that distance, and strangles the genre of all but escapist value. Goldberg and Douthat would depopulate creative fiction of all works but Narnia knock-offs. And who wants that?
