Excellent article on religion and political speech
May 1, 2008
My
friend, James Skillen, president of the Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) recently appeared on a panel produced by the Federalist Society to discuss religion and the public square. The article cited here is a summary of his presentation and interaction with the panel. Below are some critical excerpts that really help improve, I think, the ongoing discussion about religion in the public square.
…The standard argument presumes that convictions and language fit for the political community can be separated from convictions and language fit for each of the diverse religious communities. The distinction takes for granted independent religious and secular realms each largely defined as the opposite of the other. Secular is not religious; religious is not secular. But this is not reality.
…To distinguish a school from a bank, for example, is to recognize two different organizations, but we learn almost nothing about either of them if we define the bank as not a school and the school as not a bank. We need to know what each one is in its own right. Moreover, both are human institutions and have many interconnections.
…It is not true that the only thing people of diverse religions have in common is a public reason that can be separated from their uncommon faiths. Citizens may share the conviction that human dignity is a fundamental building block of political life precisely because it is fundamental to all of their diverse faiths. Yet at the same time they may differ on the public policy implications of that conviction.
…The First Amendment speaks of protection for the “free exercise” of religion without further qualification. The fact is that almost all exercise of religion is communal or associational in character. Moreover, the organizational exercise of religion is not simply a matter of worship in churches, synagogues, and mosques. Parents’ decisions about how to educate their children and a faith community’s decision about how to serve those in poverty are religious decisions for many people.
If the government of a political community in which these very same people are citizens also has a stake in the education of children and the alleviation of poverty, there is no reason why government should not give the same treatment to religious parents and religious social-service providers as it does to so-called “secular” parents and providers. Government’s obligation to protect the religious exercise of diverse communities of faith should mean equal treatment of all students regardless of the school (religious or otherwise) to which their parents send them and should mean equal treatment of diverse social-service organizations without regard to their religious or non-religious confessions.
…The First Amendment protects freedom of association as well as freedom of religious exercise. These two protections add up to much more than a requirement that government protect only individual conscience in private while remaining free to grant a public monopoly to an imaginary public reason in the political arena.
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This thinking is dangerous and Anti-American and not in keeping with Americans United. Such a line of thought might indicate the Blaine Amendment instituted by many Western states is unconstitutional. We can’t have that. Anyways, we all know liberal and progressive, common-sense people who know better than right wing yahoos, get to define what is and is not religion. It’s for our own good.