It's common in America for people to try to base political policies on religious beliefs - something you don't often find in the more secular Europe. Unfortunately, too many Americans simply don't realize what's wrong with this - they don't realize that their religious beliefs cannot be imposed on others.

In Politics, Religion, and the Common Good, Martin E. Marty writes:

Religious citizens do not necessarily improve community life when they justify their actions on spiritual grounds. As noted, some features of religion can tempt people to claim a monopoly on God or on knowledge of God’s will — at the expense of the claims and knowledge of others. While religions claim to be resources for healing and reconciling people, they often serve as salt in old wounds or abrasions that cause new ones in the midst of community life.

Actually, it’s quite normal for religion to cause people to claim a monopoly on “ultimate” or “essential” knowledge. The claims of Christianity, for example, exclude many of the fundamental claims of Judaism and Islam. Therefore, any public laws or policies which are derived from those Christian claims necessarily exclude Jews and Muslims from full assent and participation. Non-Christians, and even Christians who may not accept the relevant claims, are thus transformed into second-class citizens.

Many of the nation’s founders, well aware of religion’s disruptive potential, worried that officially encouraging religion would only increase the chances for such trouble. Although some colonies had established churches, the new national compact avoided formal links between the state and religion. Such a linkage, constitutional father James Madison believed, would produce “knaves, hypocrites, and fools.”

“Knaves” would willfully exploit the power of religion to dominate the public masses, “hypocrites” would pretend that their personal faith matched the prejudices of larger publics, and “fools” might misunderstand the nature and power of religion and come across as inauthentic.

I don’t think that we need “formal links” between the state and religion in order to suffer from the problems Madison foresaw. There are many knaves, some walking the corridors of political power and some preaching from the pulpits, who seek greater power and dominance through the influence of religion in public life. There are too many hypocrites who feign personal piety in order to attract support from the masses — not to mention those who only seek to exacerbate the prejudices of the masses for the same reason. Finally, there are the fools try to emulate the knaves but do it so poorly that everyone sees through their game.

Perhaps it is a valid point of criticism of Madison that he was only able to conceive of these problems in the context of formal establishments of religion. We know better, now, and insofar as we recognize the above to be genuine problems, we should seek to avoid them regardless of how they are able to develop.

America has become more plural in its third century. Thus the introduction of religion into political matters runs an even greater risk of causing trouble. Think for a minute of the seemingly intractable, always contentious arguments over abortion. There religion often seems to do more to intensify passions than achieve resolution. Similarly, religion’s divisiveness in the public sphere can be seen clearly when considering an issue such as homosexuality.

Alan Wolfe has shown that even as Americans have grown more and more tolerant of each other, religious beliefs contribute to “a seemingly unbridgeable gulf ... between those who believe that the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality as an abomination must be taken as a moral injunction versus those who believe that Christianity requires the love and acceptance of everyone.” At times, religion seems to do more to maintain and fortify political divisions than to heal them.

American Christians who lived through the Civil War would have recognized this situation all too well. That was an era when, for the first time, many Christians realized that other Christians could, in all sincerity and piety, defend to the death propositions on the basis of biblical teachings which they themselves believed were actually condemned by the very same Bible. The Civil War was not a conflict between religions, but a conflict between radically different understandings of the same religion.

In Europe, this led to revolutionary understandings about the nature of the state and the development of a distinction between civil and religious authority. Such assumptions already existed in America, however little they were followed in practice, but the conflict caused may to revisit their assumptions about whether Christianity could serve as a common basis for culture and politics. Many concluded that it could not, realizing that conflict among sincere Christians could be devastating.

Sadly, too many Christians in America today no longer understand this lesson, believing that the truth of their brand of Christianity is so manifestly and obviously true that, once instituted, there would be no dissent or conflict over the political conclusions drawn from it. They couldn’t be more tragically wrong, but it’s difficult to see what would cause them to realize this short of another tragic war.

 

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