Tag Archives: religion

Privileging “Faith”

Sometime today, the House of Representatives will vote on an Act exempting anyone with “sincerely held religious beliefs” from the ACA’s mandate to buy health insurance. The measure didn’t go through the usual legislative procedures; it suddenly appeared—like magic!– a product of the increasingly hysterical opposition to healthcare reform.

And of course, it’s framed as “respect for religion.”

Religions began because humans attributed things they couldn’t explain to mysterious gods and their mysterious ways. Did lightning strike the village? Someone angered the deity. Was drought starving the tribe? Sacrifice a virgin. When smallpox vaccinations first became available, clergy warned that God–who sent the disease to those who “deserved” it–would disapprove of the vaccine’s use to evade His purposes.

We may laugh at these examples, but a significant percentage of the American population—never mind “natives” residing elsewhere—still harbor similar beliefs. Pat Robertson has famously attributed hurricanes to toleration of GLBT folks, and James Inhofe (who inexplicably serves on Congressional climate committees) believes climate change is blasphemy–denial of the Truth that God will protect the planet.

A not insignificant number of Americans are Freethinkers—agnostics or atheists–but very few of us are comfortable “coming out” as nontheistic in a society that pays so much homage to even the most farfetched “sincere” religious belief.

American culture privileges protestations of religion in innumerable ways.

Deference to dogma routinely distorts public policy. It explains institutionalized homophobia and sexism, the conflation of “sin” with “crime,” opposition to stem cell research…the list is extensive. Most recently, employers outraged at the prospect of providing basic birth control as part of comprehensive health coverage—even though they need not pay for the coverage and even though those workers have their own, very different religious commitments—have had their arguments received with (unmerited) respect. Because, you know, they’re “religious.”

And now, a bill that says “Hey—if you’re religious (or say you are), the law won’t apply to you.”

Thoughtful religious people understand that genuine faith requires humility.

Faith—religious or otherwise—means belief in something that by its nature cannot be scientifically or logically proven. There’s a reason it is called a “leap of faith.” There’s a reason that generations of religious thinkers have wrestled with the problem of doubt.

There’s also a reason that our legal system separates Church from State. The Constitution protects your right to believe in God, Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but it also protects me from the operation of your theocratic impulses.

I don’t think I’m the only person who is very tired of kowtowing to the demands of the Ostentatiously Pious and those who use them for political cover.

.

Comments

Religious Right to Discriminate–One More Time

Apparently, the right of religious folks to discriminate based upon their sincere beliefs is the issue du jour. 

Yesterday’s post centered upon a subset of that debate, but the broader question is the one posed by an Arizona law currently awaiting Governor Jan Brewer’s signature. That measure–which has most of the state’s business community demanding a veto–would allow shop owners and merchants to refuse service to people to whom they have some sort of religious objection.

Observers have assumed that the law is intended to target the GLBT community, but as written, it protects a merchant’s right to refuse service to anyone, so long as the proprietor can claim a “sincere” religious belief as motivation.

It boils down to a fairly simple question. Does government violate a fundamental liberty by forcing a devout person to do business with people he believes to be sinful?

As the saying goes, this debate is deja vu all over again.

This is the same argument that erupted when Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Opponents argued that being forced to hire or do business with women or people of color violated their liberty to choose their associates. And they were correct; it did limit their liberty. Of course, in a civilized society, our liberties are constrained in all sorts of ways; I don’t have the liberty to take your property, or play loud music next to your house at 2:00 a.m., or drive my car 100 miles per hour down a city street. Etc.

Here’s the deal: The guy who opens a bakery– or a shoe store or a bank or any other business– relies on an implied social contract. He expects police and fire departments to protect his store, and local government to maintain the streets that enable people to get there–and he expects government to provide those and numerous other services to all citizens, not just white citizens or male citizens or Christian citizens. In return for financing the government that provides those services, We the People expect those who are “open for business” to provide cakes or shoes or loans to anyone willing to pay for them.

Opening a business implies a “come one, come all” invitation to the general public. (For purely practical reasons, people who don’t want to issue that invitation probably shouldn’t open a business.)

Bottom line: If you don’t approve of gay people, or African-Americans or Jews, or whoever–don’t invite them over for dinner. I’ll fight for your right to entertain only the people you like. I’ll fight for your right to exclude “sinners” from your church, your private club and your living room.

Your hardware store, not so much.

Comments

Rise of the Nones

Surveys from Pew and Gallup and other respected pollsters have identified sharp declines in Americans’ religiosity, especially among the young.  Some twenty percent of Americans currently report no religious affiliation;  among younger cohorts, the percentage is much higher.

The other day, I had a conversation with someone who viewed this rejection of traditional religion with alarm, and wondered what might have caused it. (Video games? Bad parenting? The ACLU, with its insistence on obeying the First Amendment?)

I have a different perspective.

I talk to a lot of students, and what I hear from them is that they are repelled by ostentatious piety displayed by high-profile people who are being hateful or judgmental. They are contemptuous of the fundamentalists’ war on science. They are impatient with people who want to use government to impose their own religious beliefs on others–who want to deny women access to birth control, and who refuse to support equal treatment of their GLBT friends. They roll their eyes when people like Bill O’Reilly or Sarah Palin whine about a “War on Christmas.”

As impatient as they are with rampant hypocrisy, however, the rise of the nones is not simply a reaction to Christians (and Jews and Muslims) behaving badly. The young Americans I know take issues of social justice and ethical behavior very seriously, and a growing number of them have concluded that any morality worthy of the name must be a product of reason rather than blind obedience to dogma.

They are examining all beliefs–secular and religious–and they are testing outcomes. If a belief system promises to improve society, if it promotes equal human dignity and compassionate and loving behavior, it passes the test. If it generates power struggles, if it requires women to be “submissive” and consigns GLBT folks to second-class status–if it marginalizes or denigrates those who are different– it fails.

Works for me.

Comments

Revisiting…Everything

Random thoughts for a Sunday morning….

The Sunday morning interview shows are focused on the GOP’s “identity crisis.” The New York Times has an article by the Public Editor about a not-dissimilar debate occurring within journalism over the meaning and possibility of “objectivity.” An academic listserv I participate in has a recurring discussion about the advisability of holding a new Constitutional Convention, or at least seriously considering significant constitutional changes. Various religious denominations are grappling with challenges to settled theological positions, including their beliefs about the role of women, homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Educators are struggling to redefine both ends and means. Technology is changing everything from how we live to how we define friendship.

I could go on, but you get the picture. We live in an era when–as the poet put it– “the center will not hold.”

The existential question, of course, is: what will emerge from all this confusion and change? Will we take this opportunity to think about the “big” questions–what kind of society do we want to inhabit? What would a more just system look like? Aristotle was among the first to suggest that an ideal society would facilitate human flourishing; what would such a society look like?

Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence that these “big” questions are being asked. Instead, we seem to be surrounded by quarrelsome adolescents, desperately trying to game the system and retain–or obtain–relative advantage.

I wonder what it would take to change the conversation?

Comments

Voting on the Word of God

My husband and I attended a “Straight for Equality” event sponsored by PFLAG yesterday. PFLAG–for those who don’t know the acronym–stands for Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays; the organization has 350+ chapters in the US and abroad.  “Straight for Equality” is an advocacy campaign the national organization has just launched.

The President of the national board this year is one Rabbi Horowitz, who actually was the assistant Rabbi at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation back in the 1970s. He was an entertaining speaker, if a bit long-winded (a common “clerical error”). As he made his pitch for taking the “Straight for Equality” campaign into faith communities, he said something that struck me as both totally new and–upon reflection–self-evidently true.

He said the word of God is subject to vote.

Think about it: The way congregations read their holy books is inescapably influenced by the culture the congregants inhabit. It wasn’t so long ago that most Christian denominations read the bible to require racial segregation and the subordination of women. Some still do, but the vast majority no longer interpret the text in that way. The culture changed, and so did religious people’s understanding of God’s commandments.

When I was researching God and Country, my book about the unrecognized religious roots of contemporary policy preferences, I quickly recognized that even our most fundamentalist contemporary Christians, those who insist the bible is the literal word of God and thus unchanging (God presumably also handled the various translations), hold beliefs that would be shocking heresies to fundamentalists who lived 100 years ago.

We are all creatures of our times. We share the sensibilities of our cultures no matter how stubbornly we resist, and we bring those sensibilities to our interpretations of religious texts.

When enough members of a congregation recognize both the humanity of gay people and the justice of their claim to equality, those members’ attitudes–their “votes”– change doctrine. We’ve seen plenty of examples, as one denomination after another reinterprets rules that previously kept gays from being ordained or married. That process will inevitably continue, no matter how hysterically some try to fight it.

I had always thought of this as the process of social change. The Rabbi calls it “voting on God’s word.”

However we think about it, it reflects the reality that we humans create gods in our own image–which is a good reason to get serious about self-improvement.

Comments