Church and State

Damon Linker reviews a book by Martha Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance, in today's Sunday New York Times. Her main thesis seems to be America is more tolerant of minority religions than are other freedom loving nations, particularly the Europeans, where mosques have been forbidden to build minarets (Switzerland) and school girls have been forbidden to wear burkas or head scarves in school, or in some cases, in public (France and Belgium.)

Linker notes Americans, thus far, have avoided voting down the expressions of religion in their secular state schools and in most communities--although there was an attempt to forbid the building of a mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center.   On the other hand, Linker adds pregnantly, Americans have not been faced with a Muslin community as radical as that seen in France, England and Scandinavia. 

What do you do when the religious community which has arrived believes in religious intolerance?  What do you do when a group arrives in your midst which proclaims their message is the only right message and all others must not be allowed to speak? What do you do when intolerance challenges your value of tolerance?

Well, you can say we have a Constitution, which you cannot vote on. This is the law which must be obeyed: And the first Amendment, as it is generally understood insists the government cannot select one faith, cannot establish a religion or prevent the practice of any religion.

But where in the Constitution does it say we must tolerate all the teachings of any religion?

Maybe in the First Amendment, where it says Congress cannot abridge freedom of speech.  Of course, it does not say the President cannot abridge free speech, or the courts cannot abridge free speech. 

I suppose, if a group says women should not show their ankles or walk around with their hair uncovered, that would have to be tolerated, until that group takes actions to impose its will on unwilling members of the community.

Linker has written a book and several op eds insisting we have a right to ask candidates for public office how their religious views might bring them into conflict with their obligations as a public servant: For example, we ought to ask a Catholic candidate if he could enforce a law which grants citizens the right to abortion.  This seems reasonable enough.  Of course, we can ask these questions of candidates for the executive or legislative branch, but not of candidates for the judicial branch--and we now have a Roman Catholic Supreme court, in effect, as a result, and we can see the consequences in their decisions. 

It's not that we can see decisions against abortion in this conservative, Catholic court, not yet. But we can see something which is not a matter of doctrine--rather a doctrine of training. And that is not so much a matter of a single denomination, but it is a matter of the love of authority and doctrine:  Given any case which pits a powerless individual against the authority of reigning authority and we have justices talking about "original intent" as if they were talking about the handing down of stone tablets from the mountain, and whether it is the case of Bong Hits for Jesus, a school boy thumbing his nose at his Principal's attempt to make students cheer the commercial enterprise we call the modern Olympics, or strip searching of a Black man, who has had the misfortune to be riding as a passenger in an automobile stopped for a minor infraction, the justices who were raised by nuns, or who got taken to church every Sunday and told that an orderly world is a good world, these justices rule for authority and against the rebel and the dispossessed. 

Personally, I'd like to ask one question about organized religion:  How many people would "worship" God, if they knew there was nothing in it for them, personally?