No other gods

[mmcirvin]

William Raspberry quotes Kevin Hasson, advocate for public religious expression, who is upset about the court ruling prohibiting display of the Ten Commandments in a courtroom. Toward the end he expresses a noble sentiment:

"Writ large, that is the solution to the culture war: Respect for others' consciences, even when we're sure they're wrong, is contagious. Not because it's nice. Rather, it's contagious because it conveys an important idea:

"Whether it's a tradition as old and venerable as Buddhism or as new and flaky as parking-barrier worship doesn't matter. Because of how we're made, we are each free -- within broad limits -- to follow what we believe to be true in the manner our consciences say we must...."

That's just it, though. The First Commandment (by the prevailing Protestant count, at least) is "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." It says right there in stone that you don't have the right to be wrong. It's pretty unambiguous about that. And it's not a subsidiary proviso; it's the first one.

This is the whole problem, the question of how tolerant we have to be of intolerance. In the United States we allow individuals the right to express intolerance within fairly wide boundaries, and I wouldn't want to change that, as weird and dangerous as it may seem to people in some other Western democracies. But is it intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance in an official government context?



I should be fair to Mr. Hasson and mention that he seems to object not so much to the specific case as to the "predominantly religious purpose" language in the majority opinion. He goes on for a while about the difference between the words "temporal" and "secular"; I always thought they were synonyms derived from roots meaning almost the same thing, but apparently the word "secular" is secretly anti-religious because somebody or other decided to translate it into Arabic as "godless". It's a bit of a head-scratcher.

Anyway, he seems not to get the civil libertarians' case at all. Nobody (well, almost nobody) is trying to expunge religion from public life. The whole reason the Founders wanted government secular was to keep government from messing with their public religious expression. It's resulted in a highly religious population with many sects and denominations that nevertheless has essentially no tendency toward sectarian bloodshed.

In most countries where the government does officially mess with religion, religion in public life is either (a) in decline, or (b) bad for you if you express the wrong kind—and in case (b) the tendency is not toward highly ecumenical definitions of what is the right kind. I don't see why the most publicly religious people in America sometimes fail to see the connection. If I really wanted to destroy American Christianity I'd start by demanding that the government officially endorse it.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, I'm aware that in Jewish tradition, those particular commandments are part of God's specific deal with the Jews and aren't supposed to apply to other people. But somehow I doubt that the people who want them displayed in courtrooms and declare them the Foundation of Western Law are taking them that way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, this inability to see the distinction between public expression and government endorsement is so much more common than it ought to be that I often think it's got to be a deliberate strategy of obfuscation.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

I guess it should be obvious, but what would be the boundaries between 'government' and 'public' in that case? Where would schools fall, for example?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, the government-run schools are mostly where the law has had to make lots of fine distinctions. In the extreme cases, it's perfectly all right for individual kids to pray out loud or make religious statements in situations where they'd be allowed to make other kinds of statements; it's not all right for the curriculum to include daily prayers or for the teacher to start proselytizing in class. In between are a lot of cases that are trickier (schools trying to get around bans on endorsing religion by instituting student-led prayers, etc.)

I recall dimly that, after a number of these cases ended up in the papers (sometimes because school officials had weird ideas about what the law was and started telling students it was illegal to say "Merry Christmas" and crap like that), the Clinton administration was actually moved to put out a memo explaining in great detail what was allowed and what wasn't, and that it was amazingly sensible and got Clinton praise from prominent non-crazy religious leaders.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

We have a kind of weird situation here (at least in Ontario) wherein the Catholic schools are also funded by the tax base (you select which of the public or catholic school boards you would like your tax money to go towards at the municipal elections), and the catholic schools are pretty free to proselytize, have school prayers, force attendace to school masses, etc. They make up almost half of the schools in any city. For some reason, I went through this system, and it had an (unsurprisingly) placating effect on the religious fervour of its students. Everyone would say they believed in god, but it wasn't a big deal. It seemed more confusing than offensive to them if you didn't (and actually bothered to admit that).

I knew a jewish kid who went through this system too, and he always got exemptions from the masses and religion classes. I just had to read during them and not recite the prayer in the morning.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Most modern Catholic schools are pretty much like that in the US, but they don't get any government money. There's been an endless debate over whether tax money should be used to give vouchers to parents to use at religious schools; this is not currently done.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...on the other hand, churches are themselves tax-exempt.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the common pattern here is that in any more or less Western pluralistic society that isn't an outright theocracy, the more a religious organization has to make accommodations beyond its core followers, the less hardcore it can be. And getting public funding often has that kind of string attached (though soliciting private tuition effectively can too). In the European countries with established state churches, the state churches turn into these big-tent organizations that aren't much into the hellfire and brimstone. Or, a lot of people are counted as nominal church members when it's actually not much more than a check box on their birth certificates.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

Well, of course there is that. I did gain some comfort from knowing that when they cited the millions of catholics (or whatever the number was) mourning the pope's death, there were probably a lot of people like me artifically being used to inflate the number.

I learned recently too that Germans must pay a tax to their church of choice, or forfeit participation in it. German religious membership is pretty low, though perhaps no moreso than the average european country.