False choices By Ken Burrows: February 2016
Submitted by ftcsadmin2 on Mon, 02/29/2016 - 11:09.
- Conservative columnist Star Parker, who’s known for embracing creationism over evolution and who has called public schools godless “cesspools,” is fond of declaring that America faces mutually exclusive religious vs. secular existential alternatives, and only the religious option can save the country. Of same-sex marriage, she wrote in 2013 that it contradicts biblical tradition, which she insists our laws must be based on, and concluded: “We have only two options. Turn back to where we belong or watch the continuing collapse of our country.” Implying we “belong” in a biblically dominated state.
- Last month she reprised this theocratic-leaning dialectics by insisting that secularism in government is changing “what America is about” and then declared another of her stark choices by asking: “Are we going to be secular and socialist or a God-fearing free people?”
- This latter rhetorical query assumes that only the God-fearing can be free, and it intimates that secular government is not what America is about. Both are demonstrably untrue. When the Founders tackled the issue of religious freedom—arguably the single most distinguishing component their new experiment in liberty would embrace—they advocated relentlessly for a secular government. Not to diminish religion or religious freedom but to protect it. They knew that societies tend to descend into turmoil, even self-destruction, when the power of a religious institution is aligned with the government.
- Moreover, on a practical level, there is no intrinsic equation between religiosity and freedom. It can, quite often, be quite the contrary. Past popes labeled freedom of conscience anathema if it led one to question church doctrine. Religious leaders were among the defenders of slavery in the 1800s and among the critics of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Today we see increasing efforts to restrict rights and discriminate against others under claims of “religious freedom.” Because they don’t conform to her biblical worldview, Parker herself opposes same-sex marriage, abortion, birth control and divorce—even though all are matters of individual liberty.
- On the other hand, non-religious people and entities are often freedom’s major defenders. In generations past, freethinkers were among the leaders in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements. Today the American Humanist Association lists among its aspirations the upholding of “equal enjoyment of human rights and civil liberties.” Noted humanist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov defended liberties at great personal cost in Soviet Russia.
- The point here is not to say that either the religious or the secular have monopolies on protecting or constricting freedom, or on representing the best or worst in our nature. There are always good and bad players in any given cohort. But to suggest that only a God-fearing stance is compatible with freedom does not hold up to scrutiny. To suggest that the continuing viability of America requires turning back the clock to an imagined biblically dictated government does not square with history. Indeed, the Framers specifically sought to prevent that very thing.
- Parker sees our polarization and concludes deference to religion is the only way to affirm “what the nation is about.” She quoted Abraham Lincoln’s observation that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and so, she said, we have to make “hard choices.” But instead she presents us the “secular and socialist” vs. “God-fearing free” dichotomy. That’s not a hard choice. It’s a false one.
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“ Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.” .....Thomas Paine -