A few readers quibbled with my column today, pointing out that some the facts of the case I mentioned in Maine, if known, might have made readers feel differently. The court ruled that a mother could no longer take her child to Calvary Church, or socialize her daughter with its members, or expose her to a religious “philosophy” or material in the Bible.
Readers have pointed out that the pastor of the church has called out the father by name scores of times, denouncing him as a sinner, an enemy of God needful of salvation, etc., etc. Usually divorces have non-disparagement agreements. And of course, being told this, it might justify in readers’ minds the father’s claim (and the court’s) that the church has a psychologically distressing impact on the child. Sure, it might. Morally, on that score, I might even agree with the father.
In the end of my column, I tried to caveat that I wasn’t pronouncing on that aspect of the case. I have no doubt that some churches behave badly and distress their congregants needlessly. I’m a Catholic, and I like to say that “I’m religious, not spiritual,” precisely because I believe so strongly in organized religion: a religion that is in predictable ways stable and protected from the influence of today’s charismatic figures and movements. I like that my church generally encourages pastors of parishes to preach about the Gospel passage that is appropriate to the liturgy and to save named personal counsel for private meetings.
What I take issue with, and what I still hold, is that the court order’s actual instructions contain a pretense that is impossible to justify, that its demands are a kind of nonsense. Its aim is so broad and so invasive that it is literally impossible follow. And what I further take issue with is the idea that any court in America has a set of “neutral principles” by which it can adjudicate how a child should be made to feel about the religious views or status of one of her divorced parents — or that a child must (or even can) be insulated, shielded, or protected from the religious ideas held by her mother, which are (incidentally) represented all throughout our culture, our history, even our jurisprudence.