Religion is a way to specify what our lives, together, should be. "Don't kill, usually. Don't lie, usually. Keep our hands off your neighbor's wife, usually." That sort of thing. Holy men--usually men--talk to the community about what a good life is. Sometimes they write catechisms. Sometimes--usually the women--organize classes for the kids.
Every religious group is potentially the core of a community, or a society, with clearly articulated principles: Don't lie, don't steal, don't smoke dope, don't play with yourself. You can only have one wife, or maybe four, or maybe more: it depends.
Commonly, religious groups defend their ideas about what a society should be like by appealing to God. "God says, 'Thou shalt not commit bigamy, or drink coffee, or eat pork.'"
And that is what politics is about, too. Pay your taxes, serve in the army, go to school, mow your lawn, don't drive too fast. Politicians, when acting as politicians, do not usually appeal to God. Early on in human history, they appealed to the King. "The King said, 'Don't hunt in my forest!'" Later on, cranky ordinary people said the King was an ordinary crank, and threw him out. They drew up a Magna Carta, instead, or a Constitution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident! Nobody needs to tell you! It is self-evident: one man, one vote. One women. . . . Maybe later!"
Constitutions are usually secular. They are ideas that do not appeal to the Almighty, or to the King. Usually. Sometimes, as with our own founders, they argued that even God agreed with them. "God-given rights!", they said. They just meant it was obviously true that . . . whatever it was they thought was true.
So it is no surprise that Rick Santorum cannot figure out that we are not a holy community of the Catholic persuasion. A lot of politicians make religious-sounding noises because they know that a lot of people are religious, but Rick really believes that we are a religious society, and he appeals, not to what most American Catholics believe, but to what the Church says.
Our Constitution says that our government will not establish any religion as the official state religion, but that people have the right to practice just about any religion they choose. And there is the problem. If you are a committed Catholic, you are religiously committed to a certain set of ideas about what a society should be. If you are a Quaker, you will have quite another set of religious ideas about what a society should be, and so on. Fundamentalist Mormons think having four wives is a snug idea.
In spite of the rather faint traces of Deistic religion in the language of our Constitution, we have a secular constitution that guarantees the right of individuals to be religious if they want to, or do not want to. But the possibility, and the obvious probability of conflict between one's commitment as a citizen, and the commitment as a Catholic, or a Baptist, or Lutheran, is obvious. "No birth control!" the Pope says, except for abstinence. Screwing around is just for making babies. "Four wives!" the fundamentalist Mormons say, unless you are a woman, and then you should be grateful. "Gimme a gun!" fundamentalist wahoos say, "I'm gonna rid the world of liberals!"
The real problem might be that most religious people think religion is about God. It isn't. God is the ultimate father-figure one appeals to for a defense of what they believe is important. It is a way to trump what the King says, or what anybody else says. "God says thou shalt not, or shalt, or maybe shudda."
The secular person says, "We have thought about it for a long time, and we believe that free speech is important." "We the People, in order to establish a more perfect union. . . ."
We the People. History call it, "The Enlightenment".
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