Reprinted from Redbook, June 1993

First, I want to make this clear: I respect people who have an abiding religious philosophy that guides their lives - whether they're Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Methodists, Hindus, Muslims, or Protestants. My gripe is with extremists in any religion who presume to tell me, and everyone else, what God wants. Here's just a sampling:

- Saudi Arabian fundamentalists "know" that God doesn't want women to drive.

- Jewish fundamentalists in Israel know that God disapproves of a Jewish state. Others… "know" that God [wants] Jews to expand the territory to include the West Bank.

- Traditional Catholics "know" that God doesn't want women to be priests. Austin B. Vaughan, auxiliary bishop of New York City, said, "A woman priest is as impossible as for me to have a baby…This is the way God made it."

- Protestant fundamentalists, such as Reverend Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, "know" that God wants Protestants to maintain control over Catholics.

- Iran's Muslim fundamentalists "know" that God was so angry at Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses that they…issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his death.

And no nation has ever gone into battle without claiming that it was only doing what God wanted. The motto of the Crusade of 1096 was Deus vult - God wills it. God seems to have willed every war on behalf of every cause ever since. "Who says I am not under the special protection of God?" said Adolf Hitler.

From India to Eastern Europe to the Middle East, we are witnessing renewed barbarities in the name of religious righteousness. In the United States, "stealth candidates" of the Christian right wing - so called because they hide their religious agenda from voters during campaigns - "know" that God wants them to get evolutionary theory and sex education out of schools and prayer in…

Of course, there are many Jews who would trade land for peace…Catholics who are pressing for women priests, Muslims who are appalled by the fatwa, and people of every faith who oppose…wars. All of them consider themselves religious, too. But…we need to be skeptical of those who claim to have a direct line to the Almighty. We need to notice that when religious extremists invoke with smug certainty positions they claim are the will of God, these positions conveniently support their own secular views and agendas.

As women, we should be especially concerned about the way religious extremism serves to keep us "in our place." The Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann, in her book, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, shows that it is what men want - not God - that has shaped church doctrine over the centuries.

Anyone who studies the history of any religion will find that not one has remained constant in its understanding of "God's will." For example, despite what many Catholics today think, Church teachings about abortion have changed over time. Until this century, the Church held that the abortions of an "unformed" embryo was not murder. (An embryo was said to be "formed" at 4 days if it was male and at 80 days if it was female.) Individuals may decide to support or oppose abortion, but they don't get to claim they know God's opinion on the matter.

The public should be especially wary of politicians who tell us they know God's opinion. The great principle on which this nation was founded is the separation of church and state, the celebration of religious diversity, and tolerance of all beliefs - not the imposition of one group's beliefs on everybody else. That principle is rare among the nations of the earth, and we must cherish it.

…As for me, I'll tell you what I think God wants: for human beings to show a little more humility about the mysteries of life, and a lot more tolerance for other human beings' way of thinking.