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Misusing Religion
I agree that religious opinion in the American political process (and generally everywhere) occasionally distorts the cause of justice. We have many arguable examples:
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Forcing minorities, religious or not, to comply with majority religious beliefs and practices.(Note that sometimes the reverse can be true.) Some people like Ms. Brown might include here forcing children in public schools to say the Pledge of Allegiance which includes the phrase "one nation under God." While children have a choice to participate or not, I acknowledge that such options do not deal with "peer pressure" issues like potential ostracism for non-compliance.
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Religiously motivated legislation may be inadequate if based solely on the authority of holy texts.
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Politicians (or religious leaders with political agendas) using religious beliefs and sentiment for cynical purposes, usually for some type of political gain. Note two recent high-profile examples: (1) Evangelical Christian lobbyist Ralph Reed lobbied hard against gambling in several US states, only to be exposed as a fraud when it was discovered that his activities were funded by gambling interests in another state seeking to kill the regional competition for gambling casinos. (Thankfully, his recent run for lieutenant governor of Virginia failed.) (2) Former head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Pastor Ted Haggard, stalwart Bush supporter and national spokesman against all gay marriage initiatives, confessed to a three-year-long homosexual liaison, allegedly including the use of the drug crystal methamphetamine.
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Religious citizen groups can do the same.As a type of interest group, religiously motivated citizens often seek to impose moral agendas on society using some holy text as the basis of their morality, or simply seek political access to special privileges. Race politics in America offers many examples of Christians who masked their interest in racial segregation behind biblical verses. In other arenas, much litigation surrounds religious groups who seek to benefit from constitutionally protected tax-free status by using questionable tactics of fund raising for their respective social, political, or religious agendas.
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Many "wedge issues" in American politics— abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage, race politics, welfare, etc. — are often expressed in religious moral categories, arguably creating false boundaries of good and evil better discussed on rational grounds, even if such discussion includes religious elements.
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Religious minorities usually suffer from lack of empathy and understanding. This is a fact of political life for most minorities globally. It also explains why Muslims are likely to continue to suffer in the American public eye for some time to come, since few Americans have the incentive to learn about Islam (or any other religion) any more than most of them learn extensively about their own faith tradition! This is true even if Americans are generally fair and generous toward many different peoples and cultures.
With these comments in mind, I am not generally concerned about religious excess in the American political process for the following reasons:
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In any human community operating according to law, there are winners and losers. The real question here is access to due process and constitutional checks and balances. While I agree with Ms. Brown that religiously motivated agendas may produce some degree of hardship on dissidents or the noncompliant, access to due process in the American legal system generally not only reduces the extent of hardship but also may redress it completely. Admittedly, this process has often been gradual and grinding but nonetheless effective. Over the decades, the courts have increasingly expanded the degree and scope of protected beliefs and behaviors incorporated by the due process clause of the US Constitution, including in the areas of race, sexuality, and political dissent.
Opinion polls bear out that Americans generally are wary of religiously motivated political agendas and support the "wall of separation" idea. (See Andrew Kohut's America Against the World for recent polling data on this question, as well as the Pew Center site that tracks religious opinion in the US. George Barna is another pollster serving the Evangelical Christian community.) As Ms. Brown rightly notes, Americans self-identify as religious, but they also identify strongly with the "separation" as well as the "equality" ethics of their civil religion. If they support religious agendas in politics, they do so as interested parties like other Americans.
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Likewise, most religious Americans are not revisionists seeking to reinvigorate the sacred history of America. Few Americans have a "love it or leave it" attitude toward compliance with religious (Christian) values. Admittedly, religious ideas do influence school boards debating how respective school textbooks handle controversial "wedge issues" in American history, but many of these concerns are legitimate. Religiously motivated or not, it seems reasonable to ask how to distribute moral praise and blame in the process of teaching history. Most Americans can distinguish between the dominant character of their Christian culture and the idea of a Christian nation, which most would not accept as valid even if they desired to see such a thing.
Religiously motivated moral positions are unavoidable and arguably no better or worse than secular or humanistic reasoning. This is perhaps the greatest divide between Ms. Brown and myself. Religiously motivated legislation on questions of gay marriage or abortion or school prayer, for example, may be inadequate if based solely on the authority of holy texts. Too often in history — with slavery, democracy, colonialism, national expansion, just war rationale, etc. — these texts have been used to abuse rather than protect. But as I suggested in my first piece, it seems that as many abuses may come from secular reasoning however understood.
Again, the real issue seems to be the question of checks and balances and constitutional protections. I do not know why a simple-minded religious person of any faith, reliant on holy texts commanding a sacred regard for human life, could not have better moral instincts on questions of abortion than a sophisticated humanist depending on a selective reading of the natural order.
It also seems reasonable for parents to be concerned about the myriad implications of legally acknowledging either gay marriage or abortion in the public square. While these issues are most often couched in individualistic terms, the legalized culture may extensively pervade the public sphere — public schools, the workplace, even the religious domain.
It is not self-evident that these issues can be strictly parsed according to the nature of a tort or harm to an individual. It seems like differences in the potential abuse of reason from sources religious or not is less important than the constitutional-legal framework in which such abuses occur.
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