Against Theocracy

It's hard for me to get a handle on where to go with something like this. As those of you who visit here regularly know, I am a vocal proponent of the First Amendment, particularly the Establishment Clause. I am also a noisy advocate for equal rights for gays and lesbians (for everyone, actually), and reject completely the idea that Christian morality should have a place on the law books. I am a firm believer in teaching science in science classes and leaving religious instruction to parents and churches. We live in a secular state, and I'd just as soon keep it that way.

Perhaps the most significant thing that strikes me is the blindness of the Christian right to that. Take Sally Kern: it never seems to have occurred to her that the state must stand aside from religious considerations in debates of public policy and that her personal religious beliefs are not appropriate as the basis for those policies. (We could generate a list with no trouble -- Kern, Peter Pace, Mike Huckabee (not so much -- he does, at least, recognize that a boundary exists), Jesse Helms, just about any Republican senator or congressperson (those who actually have beliefs).) I suspect that Kern is more honest that most Christianist propagandists, if no more well-informed. (And see more on that below.) That is the penalty for exalting faith over reason, belief over evidence.

Just to refresh my memory, I searched through this blog for prior comments on theocrats. Follow the link to see what I've said on that topic in the past, including my contribution to last year's Blog Against Theocracy.

In the area of personal morality, or morality in general, the list is even more exhaustive.

I can't let go of the idea that the worst enemy we have right now is the Christianist theocrats. What strikes me most about the likes of James Dobson, Tim and Donald Wildmon, Lou Sheldon, Peter LaBarbera, Tony Perkins, Matt Barber and their ilk is their fundmental dishonesty. They are, at their most virtuous, mendacious. I can't, at this point, believe that they are truly ignorant: their misstatements and misrepresentations have been pointed out to them too often and too publicly, and those corrections too blatantly ignored, for that to be the case. The only reasonable conclusion, as far as I can see, is that their purpose is not religious but political: they are after power, and are using the religious beliefs of others to reach that goal.

I'm told in some quarters that we must understand their worldview if we wish to be able to engage in meaningful dialogue. Dialogue with people who refuse to hear what you're saying? Whose only response is to shout louder? People who know the facts and make up lies in their place? People who refuse to grant that your position has any validity because it does not fall in line with their beliefs? What kind of dialogue is possible with people who quite openly do not believe in compromise?

The irony here is that, while they are decrying the Islamism of the radical elements in the Middle East, they simply can't see -- or refuse to acknowledge -- the parallels there with their own mode of thought. Those who the Christianists see as our worse (foreign) enemy are those whose mindset most closely resembles their own.

The core issue, it seems to me, and the reason that I am adamant that American Christianists, our own would-be theocrats, are fundamentally anti-American, is simply that the basis of their philosophy (if I can call it that) is reliance on unquestioned authority: "God did it" is pretty much unanswerable, and serves as the only necessary reason for anything. The basis of American society, in our founding documents and the whole cast of our culture, is that authority not only can be questioned, it must be questioned. The United States is a child of the Enlightenment, in spite of the revisionist history you hear coming from such as John Hagee and Roy Moore: this country was not founded on Christian principles, and quite explicitly rejected Jesus Christ as our tutelary spirit:

When the Virginia bill for establishing religious freedom was finally passed, a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal.

Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion."

"The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."

-- Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, 1821.

I am appalled at the extent to which the Christianist framing of debate has filtered into our public discourse. The best example I can think of is the idea that civil unions and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples are OK, and we should just leave the word "marriage" to the churches because of its religious connotations. As I have pointed out before, "marriage" has never been a religious term; the religious term for marriage is "matrimony." Let them have that one, and let's keep marriage in the sphere of civil law, where it belongs and has always resided. On that issue, must I point out again that it took the Christian church roughly a thousand years to decide that marriage was indeed worthy of recognition? I jiust did a little checking, including a look at Catholic Pages, about the history of the sacrament of marriage, which does not mention the establishment of marriage as a sacrament. I did, however, find this, in a letter from Stephen Strosser, Professor of History at Boston College, to Massachusetts state senator Marian Walsh:

In the twelfth century, the idea of marriage as a "sacrament" - i.e., as something fundamentally regulated by the Church - was established along with priestly celibacy and primogeniture. The simultaneous appearance of these practices shows the way in which the preservation of property suddenly became an issue of great anxiety: celibacy prevented church property from passing on to priests' wives and children; primogeniture insured that property remain intact as it passed on to only the eldest son; and Church surveillance of marriages made sure that an authority larger than, say, the most powerful warrior / aristocratic families on the block, was overseeing the passing on of dowries - e.g., Eleanor's region of the Aquitaine. Women became the means of medieval corporate mergers: families consolidated power and property, both by means of dowries as well as by being the producers of male heirs.

However, let's not get sidetracked on the marriage question, although it is one of the major areas in which entrenched religious attitudes have a stranglehold on civil law. What is noteworthy in that context, however, is how the discourse on that issue throws into relief all the faults of the Christianists I have mentioned above: their dishonesty, lust for power, intolerance, and reliance on authority.

Oh, and I can't remember who came up with this as a rejoinder to Sally Kern's baseless assertion that societies that have embraced homosexuality have rapidly disintegrated, but let's look at one of those societies: the Roman Empire, which was moderately tolerant of homosexuality throughout its history, collapsed shortly after it adopted Christianity as the state religion (CE 305; the official "fall of Rome" is usually dated around CE 409-410, when the Visigoths set up their own kingdom in Italy, although the collapse actually started with the civil war between Constantine's sons beginning in 337. The Byzantine Empire staggered on in truncated form until 1453. The Christianists, of course, following their usual form of argument, would maintain that the Roman Empire lasted for another 1200 years.).

'Nuff said?

My contribution to The Blogswarm Against Theocracy.