Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Cultural crusade

There is a war brewing in the world—-but not a war like we have been familiar with of late. It is brewing over the future of society, and the place of any religion as a dominant manipulator of public opinion. This war is most visible in the United States, where Christianity is slipping as the most popular religion, and being replaced by Hindu, Budhism and Islam in growing percentages. The melting pot is finally becoming multi-flavored on the religious front.

When the United States was founded, the western world, from which the country sprung, was, by all measures, unfamiliar with religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. The overarching fight at the time was between Catholics and Protestants, Reformation and Puritanism—-or put more succinctly, a battle between differing interpretations of the same God. As people fled oppression for the New World, hoping to find tolerance and acceptance of their specific “nutty ideas,” a new country was built by those who followed paths that were different than what their home countries had built.

As the Nation began to coalesce, something began to take shape which would, in the future, differentiate the burgeoning Colonies from the rest of the known world. That something was the already growing diversity of Protestants, Catholics, Quakers, Shakers, Jews, and dozens of other sects which aligned themselves with substantially different interpretations of religious scriptures. Where the nations they had come from had State-sponsored and endorsed religions, sometimes to the exclusion of all others, the developing nation had a new experience—-freedom to worship.

When Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and others finally began to draft the foundations of this new United States of America, they carried with them two key worries that would come to shape what would be known as the Constitution. The first was a fear of Monarchy, most especially as it had been perpetrated in 17th and 18th century England. There was no desire to establish, as some had argued, an American monarchy—-a foil to the British, but something that was likely to be little different after any measure of time.

The second concern was the ability of the populace to worship freely, with no interference from the State. Religious freedom was still foremost in their minds, and the enshrinement of religious dogma into a document establishing this new experiment in democracy was feared as much as the ennoblement of a King. While the final version of the Bill of Rights contained a watered down constraint on Congress, it still outlined the fears of the Framers:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This has come to be known as the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. There is a reason that freedom of religion and speech are proscribed in the First Amendment and not later. Its positioning alone is significant, and it’s clarity should ring true in everyone’s ears.

In this day and age, as we listen to our leaders demagoguery, and their demonization of theocracies, we must look deeper into our own psyche and understand that we are drifting ever so slowly towards our own unique American blend of theocracy and plutocracy. This should be ringing alarms across society, but it merits no concern because it is a subtle creep of theology into the secular space of governance.

How then, you might wonder, shall we resolve the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The danger is in framing the concept of “Creator” in too formal a context. It must be remembered that an overwhelming majority of the Framers, including Madison and Jefferson whose hands most shaped the wording of the Constitution, were Deists and not what today we would call Christian. They believed in a Creator, but they did not believe that such a spiritual being was more involved in the life and destiny of an individual than the simple creation of Free Will. One might even argue that the belief in Deism is the foundation of the concept of “personal responsibility” that is so central to the sound-bite driven pontifications of Republicans and Democrats alike in this nation.

Fast forward a few hundred years and you find a nation polarized by dogmatic arguments, whether they be the new rage of gay “marriage,” or the old stand-by of abortion. These kind of arguments to me are easily resolved. The instant someone pulls out some sacred scripture to support their position, they have stepped from the secular to the sacred and undermined their own argument. It is akin to the insertion of an ad hominem attack in debate.

Because of the very nature of the sacred—-its unswerving, unquestionable and absolute correctness in the mind of its adherents—-it is a divisive tool in public discourse, meant to rend a nation apart, not bind it together. Only by stepping away from the sacred into the secular can we begin to draw a discussion forth that might resolve an issue on its merits as opposed to the writings of a single religion.

How then do we resolve this hyper-secular approach to democracy with the need for spirituality in our lives? For a Quaker, the Light permeates all life, and illuminates all crevices. It can not be contained to a specific room or closet for use on occasions of spiritual discussion. The key is to understand that we are not a nation of Quakers, nor a nation of Christians, Jews, Hindus or any other religion, and therefore the proscription of law based on a single theological scripture is likely to cleave one group from another.

What is necessary then is ultimately a spiritual quest for secular understanding; the use of our relationship with whatever we believe in—-whether it be a God, multiple Gods, society as a whole, or a blue frog sitting on a tree—-to guide us to the answer that will unite a nation. Only by beginning to understand that religion is a human creation, structured in its origin based on the society of its creation, to attempt to understand something which is, in the end, beyond comprehension.

Each religion, as well as each denomination/sect/arm/strand of a religion, contains within it the flavor and texture of the society from which it was created. It was once stated that “God does not make us in His image,” but instead “we make God in our image.” If such a thing as a God exists, then that entity is, by its very nature, incomprehensible. Religion is simply an abstract framework to begin to understand within, and a church/etc. its concrete instantiation.

To say this is to invite attack, and perhaps even a violent retribution from those who cling to the concrete human creation as infallible. No human creation can, by its very nature, achieve perfection. We are created, each of us, as flawed individuals and the amalgamation of our flaws does not instantly achieve perfection. The search for perfection in the sacred is admirable, but ultimately it will always be tinged with our own psyche, and therefore the enthronement of absolute understanding becomes a dangerous precedent.

So how do we know if a law is good? How do we know if a Constitutional amendment is necessary? The tests are both simple and difficult. We must try to remove the abstract and concentrate on the concrete. Does an activity we are attempting to regular pose some risk or negative effect to anyone outside the circle of consent? If not, does it pose a true risk to society’s fabric as a whole?

Often, the risk to society is not the action, but the caustic, demeaning and destructive method by which some, who trumpeting their piousness, demean others, and create a climate of intolerance, from which no good agreement can spring. Only by internal reflection of the impact of a decision on those unlike ourselves can we hope to understand whether something is truly good or bad. Men must understand their views on abortion and their impact on women, straight people on their fear of “gay marriage,” and whether its truly real, or just simply discomfort at the unknown.

We will never be free until we can park our individual beliefs to tackle the greater challenge of what is good for society and others, and supplant our own self-interest with understanding. Then, we will truly have become a nation of free people.