Religious Freedom Versus Religious Dominion

Mixing politics and religion has always led to bloodshed and curtailment of democratic rights. This our learned Founding Fathers knew from history (and for them, even recent history), and that is why they instituted the separation of Church and State. Today we are more and more finding both law officials failing to enforce violations of this separation and lawmakers testing the waters to overthrow this separation. Is it a weak-willed surrender to local/regional pressure by special interest groups, or is it an imposed agenda? In light of this trend, any religious body, sect of clerical/denominational alliance that stumps for a candidate, a political party or lobbies state and federal legislatures should be found in violation of their fiscal immunity, and should be taxed to the fullest extent of the law.

Every religious sect believes it knows the path to salvation better than (or even exclusively over) the rest, and some claim to actually know the "will of God" on every evolving issue, like a private hotline to heaven -- that is the problem. This is old fashioned religious hubris. If one group inveigles itself to undermine the separation of Church and State, they will also have simultaneously destroyed religious freedom. Just to remind people (despite the distortions of political rhetoric) "religious freedom" does not mean that one religion has the right to govern our secular institutions, nor to exclude citizens of other religions. If a religious group were to manage to gain such control, it would not only be unethical, it would go against the mandate of the Constitution of the United States.

Yet we have fundamentalist sects seeking to gain religious dominion over our governing bodies, and the result would in no uncertain terms be a theocracy. If such were to occur (and there have been inroads in terms of the number of our appointed federal judges being graduates of conservative-minded bible colleges (which is perhaps a redundant phrase), the inevitable effect would be the disenfranchisement of the following portions of the nation's population: progressive Christians, all sects of Jews, all Muslims, all Sikhs, all Hindus, all Baha'is, all followers of nature-centered spiritualities, all Buddhists, all Hare Krishnas, not to mention all those honest enough (under the circumstances) to admit they are either atheists or agnostics.

What will happen to our renowned pluralistic nation, our time-honored multicultural democracy? Already we have businesses that are allowed to screen people in job applications and job interviews according to the religious biases of the employer by using questions to ascertain the religious beliefs and values of the job applicant. Using this method, they can deny that person employment not based on their skill or employment record or work ethic, but upon their religious propensities. So why is "private sector" a shield against the principles of democracy? If democratic rights cease to be once one crosses the threshold of a place of employment, that means only children, retirees, government workers and the unemployed remain as the ones theoretically able to retain their full democratic rights. This is patently absurd. That religion is being used to prop up an interpretation of the law that allows private employers to enact arbitrary forms of tyranny over their workers' lives is only comparable to the surrender of certain citizen's rights upon enlistment or drafting into a branch of the military.

Religion has its place: in the heart, not in government. Democracy and theocracy can no more coexist than water and oil. The agonies of the Middle East are largely due to the mixing of religion with public governance. Why should we want to create such agony here in America? Do fundamentalist Christians believe that if we use the Ten Commandments to trump or supersede the Constitution, that if we outlaw birth control and abortion, that if we abolish women's rights and domestic violence laws, the jobs will come back? that the factories will be rebuilt? that the family farms will be restored? and that everyone will willingly and happily suddenly convert not only to Christianity but their particular brand of Christianity? What will these theorists of theocracy do with those who do not convert? How will they judge and care for those who do not find gainful employment, if such a religious coup d'etat were to succeed?

The Christian Right obsess on the Ten Commandments, but the most important one is "thou shalt not kill", and this they zealously support only on the issue of abortion -- never mind those children who would slowly die from malnutrition if we did away with the federal welfare programs they so despise. A far finer edifice for Christians of any stripe to build their foundational response to the problems of this world would be Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. But where does "blessed are the poor" fit in the conservative libertarian scheme of hyper-capitalism, where the winner takes all? Where does Jesus say that thou shalt obey ME under penalty of law? and where did Jesus ever say or imply that women were lesser beings than men, or that birth control was a sin?

I will close with this quote from one of the earliest Christian thinkers, who was writing at a time when Christians were being mercilessly and horribly persecuted by the government of the Roman Empire because of Christianity's resistance to State Religion. Writing in 205 AD/CE to Scapula, a magistrate who was persecuting Christians, these are the words of the brave Christian, Tertullian:

"It is a fundamental right, a power bestowed by nature, that each person should worship according to his own convictions, free from compulsion." [Translation from the Latin into English by Elaine Pagels, PhD; found in her new book of religious history, Revelations, Viking Press, 2012.]