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change of fundamental importance has occurred in this country, and
we have yet to come to grips with it. Religion
itself — at
least organized traditional religion — has become controversial
in a way that it has never been throughout the whole of American
history. With all their concern that no single religion be established
by the state, the Founders never imagined a situation in which organized
religion as such would be feared or repudiated by large numbers
of citizens as a source of oppression. Yet today that is what we
face. The divide between the secular and the religious is now far
more culturally and politically significant than the differences
between any particular religions. And the division between church-going
Americans and those who intentionally avoid or abjure organized
religion has everything to do with our politics. Certainly that
division was one of the crucial fault-lines in the last presidential
election.
So it is not
surprising to see that President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft
are now being criticized
for engaging in Bible study at work and invoking faith in their
speeches. While most of the critics concede that Bush and Ashcroft
are within their constitutional rights to pray at work or to invoke
religion in public address, they fear the symbolism. They fear that
the non-religious will feel left out of a country in which the leaders
take their Christianity both seriously — and for granted. Yet the
trouble is, the divide between the traditionally religious and the
assertively secular in this country has sharpened to the point where
each side has reason to fear the other.
Certainly during
his confirmation battle, defenders of John Ashcroft were right to
fear that the very fact of his faith was being held against him.
The specter of religious conservatism has long been one of the Left's
favorite tools for scaring voters away from Republicans. Now that
traditional religious morality has become an almost reflexive object
of hatred among much of the secular elite, the religious have every
bit as much cause to fear being "left out" as anyone else
— probably more.
Right-thinking
liberals once used to shake their heads at Ronald Reagan's daring
to call the Soviets an "evil empire." How old-fashioned
and fanatical in a relativist world to think of anything as "evil."
But the fact is, even for seculars, the notion of evil hasn't really
gone away. Conservatives — religious conservatives, above all —
are the new evil, at least to the many for whom Leftist political
ideologies fulfill the role once taken by religion. And this is
precisely what the founders could not have imagined — the rise of
mass secular ideologies that function as de facto religions.
In an
earlier piece on President Bush's faith-based initiative, I
pointed to an unforeseen consequence of this cultural change. As
the federal government expanded in modern times, it began to fund
"secular" organizations governed by the quasi-religious
ideology of the Left. Religious conservatives have rightly come
to feel left out by this turn of events. The simultaneous rise of
big-government and quasi-religious but technically "secular"
leftist advocacy groups eligible for government subsidy has actually
served to circumvent the establishment clause. In a sense, the American
state is already perilously close to having established certain
secular ideologies, simply because the government can systematically
aid them, to the exclusion of other more obviously religious organizations.
This is not
simply a question of political advantage. The problem is that a
profound cultural change has frustrated the principled intentions
of the Founders that no cultural ideology be supported by the state
to the exclusion of others. The concerns of liberals and conservatives
alike about the dangers posed by some aspects of the president's
faith-based initiative to the separation of church and state are
by no means entirely misplaced. But opposing the president's faith-based
initiative will nonetheless leave intact the underlying inequality
that brought the initiative about to begin with — the government's
implicit endorsement, through its largesse, of the new secular ideologies
at the expense of the traditionally religious.
But if the
faith-based conundrum will be difficult to solve to the satisfaction
of all, that is all the more reason to take care that the traditionally
religious not be pushed further out of the public square. Few if
any of the critics of President Bush or Attorney General Ashcroft
call their prayers or public invocations unconstitutional. But if
symbolism is what this debate is about, then the time has come to
make a symbolic statement about the respected place that traditionally
religious citizens must have in this country. In ways that we still
have not understood or acknowledged, the new secular ideologies
have been given an unfair advantage by our inability to see their
hidden religious character. It's high time that these seculars learned
to practice the fairness and tolerance they have long demanded of
others.
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