• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Wednesday, December 3, 1997

RELIGION:

Government must protect every view equally, favoring none

Recently in Alabama, Judge Roy Moore caused a legal ruckus that snowballed out of control, attracted nationwide attention and will most likely wind up going to the Supreme Court. The controversy started when Judge Moore posted a wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments behind his bench and held prayers before court sessions. His actions have since attracted the vocal support of Alabama's legislature and governor, demonstrating that the separation of church and state remains an issue capable of stirring up the most unbending convictions on both sides.

While the American Civil Liberties Union says this is an illegal governmental recognition of religion, Judge Moore's supporters say the Ten Commandments formed the moral basis behind all our laws, so it is proper to display them behind a judge's desk.

As for me, well, I agree that it's a historical fact that the Judao-Christian religion significantly influenced our Western legal concepts. However, it's also a historical fact that the roots of the Western legal system are in ancient Babylon ­ in the Code of Hammurabi. Somehow I doubt Judge Moore will be posting a carved image of the Babylonian god Marduk anytime soon. A true quest for historical accuracy does not stir up the kind of passion that partisans evince here.

Let me shift the discussion away from Judge Moore to another church-state controversy with a longer history; namely, prayer in public schools. Since the '80s, activists, senators and presidents Reagan and Bush have passionately argued for the re-introduction of group prayers into public school classrooms.

I could recite their arguments and counter them one by one, but doing so is pointless, as passionate people will never be persuaded by rational arguments. Instead, I hope to ask a different question: Why are people so passionate about this? Why does it stir such animosity and unreasonable fury?

Once I discussed this issue with a group of people with whom I had grown up. A judge had ordered a local public school to stop holding prayers at the graduation ceremony, which infuriated the people with whom I was talking. My support of that judge's decision had no effect on them except to make them angrier. These people were not fundamentalists, just typical Americans. Their reaction was a mystery to me, and I've spent a lot of time trying to understand it.

The proponents of public school prayer are sometimes fundamentalists, but, just as often, they are spiritually lazy people who never go to church (Reagan didn't). In fact, this broad and disparate group is not really bound together by a common dogma or fanaticism. What unites them is an insistence that they, as a majority, have certain god-given rights that must not be taken away (they never perceive themselves as part of a minority, even if they happen to be, for example, Guatemalan).

One of their rights as a majority is the right to governmental recognition of their religious heritage. Even if they themselves never do anything to spread Christian values, and even if the Constitution says otherwise, still, they will never allow some tiny minority to take their rights away. They ask, "If 99 percent of the students are Christian, why can't they have a Christian prayer in a public school?"

I do agree that minorities sometimes have to accommodate the majority's preferences. The majority of people drive on the right side of the road; a minority who want to drive on the left will have to conform. So what's so terrible about a Hindu kid or a Muslim kid forced to listen to a "non-denominational" Judao-Christian prayer?

Why should the majority have to make a huge sacrifice for the sake of a minority, instead of the minority making a sacrifice? But to ask the question this way is totally backward. The separation of church and state does not just exist to protect the 1 percent of non-Christians; more importantly, it exists to protect the 99 percent of Christians.

Why? It is a fact that power corrupts ­ especially the power to determine which values and beliefs will be spread among the people, and which eliminated. Christianity and other religions in America have been denied one power that they are much better off without.

Before speaking of the rights of the majority, we should first remember that our entire political system is based on the insistence that no group of people may be trusted with unlimited power. Going back to the writing of the Constitution, we recall that, to the Founding Fathers, "democracy" had negative connotations, and meant something different to them than it does to us: It meant unrestrained mob rule, specifically the rule of the English tyrant Oliver Cromwell and his thugs. So the founders drafted the Bill of Rights, with its guarantees of individual freedom, which were specifically intended as checks upon the majority's will. Without such checks, democracy was dangerous and untenable. Thus, the founders made democracy safe for the world. Our country is a republic with democratic representation and with strict, inviolable limitations on the power of the majority.

If any kind of power does not possess a check upon it, that power will corrupt any group to whom it is granted (read the Federalist Papers). Any group. That includes the president, Congress and even the majority of the people of the United States.

Power corrupts, but not all powers corrupt equally. Throughout history, the most seductive and corrupting kind of power has been the singular right to determine which values and beliefs will be spread among the people, and which will be squashed. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church had this power. Later, the Soviet government had this power. The Chinese government and the mullahs in Iran still have this power. These institutions were or are fantastically corrupted by it.

Consider the Iranian mullahs. Their right to exercise an effective veto over every law and election is based on the belief that religious leaders can be trusted with final power, because they cannot be corrupted. This belief is obviously incorrect. There is nothing fundamentally wrong about the religion of Islam. What is wrong is the concentration of power in a single group, with no checks upon it.

The greatest threat to human freedom is the belief: "The other man's group can be corrupted, but my group cannot be." In our country, there are people who think like the mullahs ­ except it's Christians who are believed to be incorruptible. The Christian faith arises from the belief that Jesus is the son of God and our Savior. But the assumption that Christian leaders are incorruptible is not a sincere part of the faith.

I once heard a Muslim say that only in America can you find the true Islam, because here Islam is uncontaminated by connections to political power. The separation of the spiritual power of religion from the physical power of government is a gift to American Christianity.

But some Christians don't see it. Instead, they insist that if they, the majority, want to pray in courtrooms and classrooms, a tiny minority should not be able to take away their right to do it. The force we are dealing with here is not genuine spirituality, nor even religious bigotry. It is rather majoritarian arrogance.

The First Commandment on Judge Moore's plaque says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." But Hindus believe in a multiplicity of gods. A Hindu who faces Judge Moore's court is not being taught to obey the law, nor to do the right thing. He is instead being taught that other people are more powerful than he is ­ which was the Judge's real purpose in putting up the plaque.

And a Buddhist kid in school will be forced to remain silent, hands folded, trying to be invisible, while the Christian kids around him join together and look down on him (come on! You know what children are like!). Their parents are not interested in praying with their own children at their own breakfast tables; they insist that teachers paid by the government and judges backed up by the police and leaders of the armed forces must pray before captive audiences who have no choice except to listen. They will never settle for anything less than a direct connection between their religion and government's physical power.

This is the mentality of the bully. It is a mentality that says, "There must be something wrong with you; why else would there be so many of us and just one of you?" It is an arrogant smile through clenched teeth, a haughty attitude that says, "Remember, we can do to you whatever we want."

It has nothing to do with a sincere Christian faith. All Christians everywhere desire to celebrate God's grace. But this is not genuine prayer nor a celebration of grace. It is a celebration of the fact that we are more powerful than you.

A sincere faith teaches humility and self-restraint. I see neither of these in people who seek to humiliate their minority neighbors.

The bully has grown up now, his baseball bat replaced by an army and a police force, but he is no wiser. Is it so important to you to force others to conform? Then I say, that is why it must be denied to you: because it is important to you. The irrational fury brought to this argument is proof of the seductive power of the arrogance of the majority and of society's perennial need for vigilance against that arrogance.

The notion that the many must sometimes make sacrifices for the sake of the few is something upon which both Christians and democrats ought to agree.

Comments

Post a comment