Skip to main content

We the People

Religion and politics do mix; not always well, but they are about the same thing.

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".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more