[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Steven Peterson]

Hi All,

I have a compromise to offer you. The government will guarantee your
right to have any religious beliefs and practices you want. No one
will be able to impose his or her religion upon you. You and only you
get to choose what church you belong to, or if you want, you can even
choose to belong to no church at all. You will retain the same rights
and voice in government no matter what you choose with regard to
religion. In fact, the government will not even tax churches so long
as churches don't endorse any particular political candidates.

Nice, huh? In exchange you are only asked one thing, that you agree
that laws must be made based on justifications available to all people
regardless of whatever other-worldy visions the various religions
might have. Our government will be secular, i.e., of this world. It
must be in order to enable religious freedom for all where no
religious group gets to dominate another religious group. A government
is a set of laws and institutions, and for our government to be
secular, the justification for the existence of all its specific laws
and specific institutions must all be arguable based on premises
referring only to this world.

It is necessary for a democratic community where we hope to promote
the ideal that political power should be shared equally among the
citizenry that every citizen ought to be able to ask for and receive
justifications for all of our laws that at least could be thought
plausible without relying on the other-worldly vision of any
particular religion. It's not that religious reasons aren't good
reasons. They can be but only for those who subscribe to the religion
of which the premises of such arguments are based. It is just that in
order to ensure freedom of religion, religious reasons ought to be
regarded as illegitimate for the purposes of promoting a government
for which everyone only forwards reasons that other people could, even
if they do not, use in their own reasoning. That is how we will
guarantee that one religious group cannot dominate others by imposing
its particular other-worldly view upon those who don't share the same
ideas about God or gods.

If you yourself happen to have an other-wordly notion that doing or
not doing certain behaviors endangers or profits your eternal soul,
you of course will be free do to them or not do them as you see fit so
long as your actions are within the law. You won't, however, be able
to impose beliefs about what is good for other people to do in care
for their immortal souls, but in exchange, you will be protected from
having other people's other-worldly notions imposed upon you. See how
this works out best for all involved?

Holding political views that are motivated by religious views is in no
way ruled out, but the arguments made for those rules must be done in
secular terms and must be arguable and convincing in such terms in
order to be made into law. Only laws that can be justified in worldly
terms will be enacted. No one is ever asked to leave his religion at
the door before entering the public square to debate legislation as is
sometimes claimed. For example, if you support a certain bit of
legislation and were first convinced that you should based on a quote
from Leviticus, but you can nevertheless argue for it in other secular
ways, that's great! But if you can only argue for it by claiming
other-worldy authority for a passage of the Bible, that simply won't
do, because a law isn't just a rule that we need to agree upon. It is
also the explication of the reasoning behind the rule since all laws
are subject to judicial review where the implicit justification of the
rule needs to be made explicit to determine Constitutionality. If the
court system reviews a law and the only justification for it they can
find is your Leviticus, well, none of us want to see a judge using
Leviticus in his official legal opinion, do we? We shouldn't anyway.
Even Christians and Jews who see the Bible as the word of God
shouldn't, because even if you are religious, you probably have a lot
of disagreements with other religious folks about just what authority
that particular quote has and how it ought to be interpreted. It is no
longer possible to presume a plain sense of Bible texts that everyone
agrees upon. I am sure that you don't want the Supreme Court deciding
such matters. That would be a threat to your freedom of religion since
the government would be putting its coercive power behind a particular
interpretation on a religious matter.

While the extremist theocrats like to blame atheists for imposing some
gag rule that prevents Biblical text swapping in the legislatures and
for their being unfairly hamstrung in the ability to argue, that just
isn't what happened. It can't be what happened. Atheists are but a
small, unorganized, and demonized minority. An un-closeted atheist
can't even get elected to public office to day and never could in the
past. What makes those theocrats think that militant atheists have
ever had the sort of political power to impose a gag rule on Biblical
text swapping or appeals to the will of God? The reason politicians
stopped doing so much of that Bible quoting as they used to is because
there is no longer any consensus even among the religious about what
exactly those texts are supposed to mean and what our obligations are
with respect to them.

In a religiously pluralistic society such as ours it is not only
imprudent to use religious arguments (since they tend to only be
convincing to those who happen to share the same religious premises)
but they also ought not be made because that would amount to an
attempt to impose one religious view upon those who don't share that
view. Religious arguments need to be restructured in secular terms
today, not because the militant atheists demanded it, but because
religious freedom demands it. Religious reason-giving in political
discourse isn't wrong because religion is wrong, but because religious
freedom means we get to have whatever religious background we want
without being politically marginalized for it. If a law cannot be
justified in secular terms but only with respect to a certain
religion, it violates the First Amendment establishment clause
forbidding such endorsement of any particular religion.

If you still don't see why this compromise is important, that is, why
exactly restricting legal justification to secular concerns is a small
price to pay for religious freedom, you may need to read some history.
This compromise I've outlined here is the moral that Jefferson,
Franklin, and a bunch of others drew upon reflecting on the centuries
of conflict preceding the creation of the US government. It may be
difficult to understand the need for it today without considering the
misery caused by religious wars and the sort of religious oppression
that drove people to the New World in search of religious freedom to
begin with. In fact, secularism probably never should be attempted to
be understood divorced from the European history that inspired it. At
any rate, in order to protect our religious freedom, we certainly do
still need it today. That is why we are fortunate to have this
compromise written into the Constitution as part of the Bill of
Rights.

What do you say? Deal?

Best,
Steve