Religion and Politics Should Not Mix

Áine on November 11th, 2004 filed in Essays

Fanatics that carry out acts of aggression in the name of their “god” often tarnish the reputations of those who believe in peace and the well being of the human race.

“To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil we will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation.” - Attributed to George W. Bush in the book, “Bush at War” by Bob Woodward.

“When the thousand years have expired, Satan will be loose from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth — Gog and Magog — to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” - Book of the Apocalypse, Bible

Bush probably sees himself as a good man trying to do good things, but far more troubling is that it appears that he thinks that he is an agent of the Christian god who has been sent to restore all things and reconstruct god’s kingdom, even if it means trampling all over the Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, if you read the two quotes above, you will note that the one who sends armies to the “four corners of the world” is not doing the work of the divine, in fact, quite the opposite.

Many Americans are swift to point out that Islamic extremists are also in the business of eliminating those who do not follow Allah. Many Islamic scholars and average ordinary Muslims have pointed out that their Islam has nothing to do with plowing planes into buildings. By no means do I ignore the fact that there are more dark and disturbing aspects of Islam and it’s fundamentalists. I am not blind to the acts of Osama bin Laden and his loose-knit organization, and others like them, who use terrorism as a tool against humanity. The intermingling of religion and empire is not new.

“Three minority extremist groups - the militant fundamentalist Islamists exemplified at the far edge by Al Qaeda, certain activist elements among America’s reborn Christians and neoconservatives, and the most inflexible hard-line Zionists from Israel - have emerged as dangerously destabilizing actors in world politics. Working perversely to reinforce each other’s ideological excesses, they have managed to drown out mainstream voices from all sides. Each has the aim of changing the world according to its own individual vision.

If these extremists are not marginalized, they could succeed in creating a world order with devastating consequences for generations to come. Al Qaeda and its radical Islamist supporters, believing in Islam as an assertive ideology of political and social transformation, want a re-Islamization of the Muslim world according to their vision and their social and political preferences. The alternative that they offer is widely regarded as regressive and repressive even by most Muslims, let alone the West. Violence against innocent civilians can neither be justified in Islam nor find approval among a majority of Muslims. Yet many Muslims have come to identify with the anti-American and anti-Israeli stance of the radicals because they have grown intolerant of America’s globalist policies.” [Source: How Three Threats Interlock by Amin Saikal, first published in the International Herald Tribune, December 29, 2003]

The “coalition of the willing’s” relatively new emphasis on humanitarianism as a reason to attack Iraq is backed up by neither their past behaviour towards the Iraqi dictator nor with the fact that they have close relations with many other dictatorships. Indeed, the United States has often been quick to install brutal dictatorships in many countries, especially in Central and South America. None of the members of the “coalition of the willing” has had much to say about massive human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Darfur, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, or Libya. There are many peoples other than Iraqis who are also crying out for freedom against oppressive regimes, but they should not expect their cries to be answered unless they either have economic and geostrategic importance, like Iraq, or become a direct menace to the U.S. and its willing allies, as Afghanistan did under the Taliban. It should also be pointed out that many of the extremist groups that we are now fighting, we were once supporting. Both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were CIA-trained and U.S.-supported.

Terrorists have no nationality and terrorism knows no borders. Extremist actions are targeted mainly, but not entirely, against American policy behaviour in the middle east region (including the Arab - Israeli conflict), irrespective of which political party is in power in the United States, and the more extreme and oppressive our foreign policy becomes in all parts of the world, the less safe the American people and our troops overseas are. Brutal militarism and theocratic “cleansing” is not the answer to making Americans safer, in fact, it guarantees just the opposite! It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but those in charge of both domestic and foreign policy continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. The world cannot afford more costly mistakes resulting from policies which just do not work, whether they are couched in humanitarian, militant, or religious terms.

Preacher, priest and politician have combined on the grounds that John Kennedy disputed in his famous speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960. Kennedy’s every principle is flouted and contradicted by Bush: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president - should he be Catholic - how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. …where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials…” [Source: “The lowest ignorance takes charge” by Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian UK]

The Separation of Church and State is not the embodiment of anti-religion some people would define it as. It not only protects government from being unduly influenced by religion, but it also protects all religions from being unduly influenced by government. Above all, it protects human beings from persecution by either religion or government. Unlike many countries around the world, the United States mandates full religious freedom in its Constitution. No government official or politician can tell you which faith to follow. That very personal decision is made by each individual. All of us want the right to freely make our own choices about religion. Without this right to worship as we see fit, or the right to not practice a religion at all, Americans would not be a truly free people.

Religious Right groups and their allies insist that the United States was designed to be officially Christian and that our laws should enforce the doctrines of (their version of) Christianity. Is this viewpoint accurate? Is there anything in the Constitution that gives special treatment or preference to Christianity? Did the founders of our government believe this or intend to create a government that gave special recognition to Christianity?

The answer to all of these questions is no.

The U.S. Constitution is a wholly secular document. It contains no mention of Christianity or Jesus Christ. In fact, the Constitution refers to religion only twice in the First Amendment, which bars laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and in Article VI, which prohibits “religious tests” for public office. Both of these provisions are evidence that the country was not founded as officially Christian.

The Founding Fathers did not create a secular government because they disliked religion. Many were believers (deists) themselves. Yet they were well aware of the dangers of church-state union. They had studied and had even seen first-hand the difficulties that church-state partnerships spawned in Europe. During the American colonial period, alliances between religion and government produced oppression and tyranny on our own shores. Many colonies, for example, had provisions limiting public office to “Trinitarian Protestants” and other types of laws designed to prop up the religious sentiments of the politically powerful. Some colonies had officially established churches and taxed all citizens to support them, whether they were members or not. Dissenters faced imprisonment, torture and even death. [For more information, see: Establishment and Disestablishment at the Founding, Part I: Establishment Of Religion by Michael W. McConnell, Northwestern University (.pdf file)]

These arrangements led to bitterness and sectarian division. Many people began agitating for an end to “religious tests” for public office, tax subsidies for churches and other forms of state endorsement of religion. Those who led this charge were not anti-religion. Indeed, many were members of the clergy and people of deep piety. They argued that true faith did not need or want the support of government.

Respect for religious pluralism gradually became the norm. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, for example, he spoke of “unalienable rights endowed by our Creator.” He used generic religious language that all religious groups of the day would respond to, not narrowly Christian language traditionally employed by nations with state churches.

While some of our country’s founders believed that the government should espouse Christianity, that viewpoint soon became a losing proposition. In Virginia, Patrick Henry argued in favor of tax support for Christian churches. But Henry and his cohorts were in the minority and lost that battle. Jefferson, James Madison and their allies among the state’s religious groups ended Virginia’s established church and helped pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, a 1786 law guaranteeing religious freedom to all. Jefferson and Madison’s viewpoint also carried the day when the Constitution, and later, the Bill of Rights, were written. Had an officially Christian nation been the goal of the founders, that concept would appear in the Constitution. It does not. Instead, our nation’s governing document ensures religious freedom for everyone, an American value supported by the Democratic Party.

“When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.” — Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the Lee v. Weisman ruling, 1992. [Source: Separation of Church and State Issues | ReligiousTolerance.org]