I was walking through Robert Bell last week when I heard someone in the hallway lecturing a friend on interpretation of the Constitution with respect to religion. As I walked past, he was saying that, if one reads the writings of the founding fathers, one discovers they never intended for the First Amendment to prevent religion from interfering with the state. Instead, they wanted to keep the state out of religion. This got me thinking about Christianity, the founding fathers and religion's place in government.
Why should I care? More importantly, why should you care about one person's opinion about the founding fathers? Quite simply this: there exists a radical wing of Christianity which has as one of its goals the political domination of America. While it has not won the battle, its mark is on public discourse: naming but a few issues, initiatives to exclude homosexuals from the institution of marriage, force false claims about biology into science classrooms and make private behavior between consenting adults illegal. Its goal is nothing less than to remake America in its own image, and that goal threatens the freedom of every single American to do, believe and speak as we choose.
So that's why you should care when someone is repeating claims about why it's OK to legislate based on religious beliefs. There are three problems with the argument that since the founding fathers (supposedly) intended only for the state to not regulate religion, it is OK for religion to regulate through the state. The first is simple: if the government becomes an instrument of religious proselytization, how should it choose which set of beliefs to enforce? A government that may pass religious laws is a government that must choose which religion to exalt above others, in effect creating a state church.
The second flaw is the rather unflattering worship of the Constitution and founding fathers it entails. The argument not only ignores the two centuries of legal precedent since the writing of the Constitution, it treats the Constitution's text as a religious document, instead of a set of laws that can be interpreted as best serves the public good. Why should we play semantics with every word the founding fathers wrote? Is the Constitution sacred? I think not.
As an aside, in my experience the sort of people who think that the Constitution permits Biblical laws are the same sort of people who think that Christianity has always been like non-denominational Protestantism. It hasn't. The form of Biblicist Christianity that currently dominates political discourse and the social right wing has only existed since the mid-nineteenth century; the deistic Protestantism of the Enlightenment would be as unfamiliar to modern Protestants as the Catholic beliefs of the early church.
The third problem is, I think, the most compelling. There is precisely one social organization that can legally strip you of your possessions, break apart your family, hold you against your will and even kill you. That organization is the government. The use of force is the sole province of the government, and all government edicts carry the threat of force behind them. Therefore, any law based solely on a religious basis requires those who adhere to it to agree to its justification with the threat of force. Christian laws are Christianity behind the barrel of a gun.
So remember this the next time you hear someone advocating the removal of the wall between church and state, and be wary of the social movement that person represents. After all, while conservative evangelical Christians are generally decent people and fun to be around, the political movement they represent threatens the very foundation of pluralistic American society.
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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