Religious Freedom and State Values

By Rick Plasterer

The nation continues to witness the conflict between partisans of the Judeo-Christian belief and morality (most importantly at the present time, the Catholic bishops) and post-Christian secularists (spearheaded by the Obama Administration) escalating, and the question of the status of religious freedom is becoming ever more acute. Not without controversy in the past, it is a question exacerbated by the fact that the broad Christian consensus on faith and morals, still held by part of the population, is no longer shared by the academic and legal elites, who now advance an adversary morality of self-actualization. In support of this, they use loose-ends in the old understanding of religious freedom to minimize and undermine the general concept of religious freedom.

It is difficult to maintain freedom of belief and practice if the government is in the hands of people who are very convinced they have correct doctrine about religion. An ancient legal milestone in religious liberty, the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in A.D. 313, based itself essentially on agnosticism about true religion.

Religious controversy in the early modern period led to opinion which favored a kind of religious freedom which emphasized the need to accommodate rival religious claims. In John Locke’s concept of religious freedom, the state functions under a general belief in God, allowing individuals the right of belief and practice according to their own conviction. James Madison, also working under the assumption of belief in God, held that an individual’s duty to God is prior to his duty to the state, and cannot be abridged unless it poses a grave threat to society. Madison’s “free exercise of religion” concept, explicitly appearing in the U.S. Constitution, was in practice bounded only by an understanding of America as a “Christian nation,” formally stated by the Supreme Court in 1892 in Holy Trinity Church vs. the United States.

The state’s commitment to religious freedom only within a broad spectrum of Christianity was highlighted by the Mormon anti-polygamy decision (Reynolds vs. the United States) in which Mormon George Reynolds claimed religious freedom to practice polygamy. This went against all Christian morality until the advent of Mormon polygamy, and the court disallowed his argument, in the process, declaring that there was only a right to religious belief, not religious practice, and thereby emptying the “free exercise of religion” of most of its meaning.

But the loss of an absolute protection for religious practice did not matter much to American society, because there was a Christian morality commonly held in practice by both the state and the populace, and an understanding that there could be no state church.

And so it was, until the mid-twentieth century, when the legal and social understanding of religious liberty began to unravel. The Everson Decision (1947) prescribed a strict government neutrality toward religion, and more importantly for the future, between religion and irreligion.

If the government cannot “aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another” as the decision stated, any specifically Christian or even theistic framework for the government is prohibited, and any values the government endeavors to advance must be entirely secular. This issued in a series of court decisions over the next fifty years restricting religious belief and practice in public, most notably the Engel vs. Vitale case (1962) banning prayer in public schools, Stone vs. Graham (1980) which prohibited displays of the Ten Commandments in public schools, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992) which famously declared that freedom means the right of individuals to define their own universe and scolded the American public for its reluctance to accept the Supreme Court’s moral authority, Romer vs. Evans (1996) which scolded Colorado voters for their opposition to homosexuality, and Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), which voided all state sodomy laws, implicitly attacking Christian morality about homosexuality as immoral.

In all of these decisions, the claimed injury of religious doctrine to unbelievers was decisive, suggesting a move of the state from neutrality to practical hostility toward religious belief and practice. Along with this has been the changed understanding of the purpose of government, from a classical Lockean or Jeffersonian liberalism that focuses on maintaining public order, to a progressive vision of building a better society. The claimed injury inflicted by religious belief then is taken in conjunction with the state’s vision of the good life, in which everyone’s needs are met, personal and social fulfillment is achieved, and no one is offended.

And so it develops that the secular state is not neutral about religion, but is focused on addressing the issues religions address, particularly the meaning and value of life, from a non-religious viewpoint. It really advances a non-religious vision of human flourishing, from which dissent is not allowed. Since so much of Christianity runs counter to this vision (concern for obeying divine commands, for the wrath of God in another world, ordered and hierarchical relations between men and women, parents and children, the distinction between believers and unbelievers, etc.), Christianity is becoming practically illegal, under the guise of state neutrality and the common good. Unless we continually point out the need to root changing the world in a true understanding of the world, and the incompetence of the government to be the ultimate arbiter of values, religious freedom, the right of persons to hold religious beliefs of which they are convinced, and to freely act on them, will continue to disappear with surprising speed.