Those who support the idea of the government becoming more entangled with religion tend to overlook a critical issue: what sorts of religion should the government endorse, support, or encourage? It's impossible to do this equally with all religions and those who do the most to push such things wouldn't want that anyway. How can the government pick and choose, though?

In Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age, Alan Dershowitz writes:

[O]nce [the state] says religion is to be preferred over nonreligion, [it has] to define what religion means. You then have to define what is true religion and what is real religion. I defended Jim Bakker for a principled reason relating to that. In imposing his forty-five year sentence, United States District Judge Robert D. Potter of North Carolina said: “We [pointing to himself] who have a true religion are offended by those who are charlatans and have a false religion.”

It’s not the role of a judge in America to distinguish between true and false religions. Judge Potter is a very religious Catholic and belongs to a church that has had conflicts with the evangelical movement. The very idea of judges in this country, whether it be a Jewish judge like Hyman Barshay dealing with my father back in the 1940s, or a Catholic judge, or a Protestant judge, imposing their own religious values on a sentencing process is un-American. And it’s intolerable to the continued separation of church and state.

The easiest way to determine what religions the government should support and what religions to ignore is to simply define the “wrong” religions out of the category “religion” entirely. Insist that they are “false” religions, run by charlatans, and thereby deny them all the same privileges, advantages, deference, and protections that normally go towards religion, religious belief, and religious organizations.

Such a tactic is ultimately dishonest, though, because it relies upon the definitions and assumptions of majority religious preferences. In effect, it's the same as saying that certain religions simply don’t deserve the same protections and advantages because they are too different from the majority religion — but it’s given a veneer of legal respectability.

An honest admission that those in charge want to keep religious privileges and advantages for themselves while denying them to strange minority faiths is too much for those in charge — yet, at the same time, these same people are the ones who insist that the reason why the government should endorse and support religion is because religion is needed for morality and good citizenship. Once such support is founded upon lies and discrimination, though, they ensure that whatever good religion might plausibly do simply won’t materialize in the end.

 

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