The Enemy At Home (28 page)

So far it has been remarkably effective. American public schools may not have organized prayers, not even at graduation ceremonies or sporting events. Courts have ordered the removal of monuments with religious themes, such as the Ten Commandments, from public facilities. Some courts have even declared the Pledge of Allegiance, with its reference to “one nation under God,” unconstitutional. The secular ethic favored by the left has permeated the culture: “Merry Christmas” is now “Happy Holidays,” Christmas holidays are now winter break, and “friendship” trees have replaced Christmas trees. The left’s religious exclusion campaign is not complete. Working through its allies in the judiciary, every year the ACLU and its allies seek to eradicate the remaining vestiges of religious influence from America’s public institutions. Each Christmas we witness the surreal spectacle of liberal organizations filing lawsuits to dismantle Nativity displays, compel department stores to remove statues of Jesus from their stores, and stop public-school children from singing Christmas carols like “Silent Night.” Groups like People for the American Way are also seeking to deny religious organizations access to government funding on the grounds that their faith inspires them to discriminate against certain groups, such as homosexuals, or to refrain from providing certain services, such as contraception and abortion.

Despite an occasional setback, the left’s strategy of religious exclusion continues to win court victories. The reason it is so hard for public expressions of religion to survive judicial scrutiny can be seen from the recent Supreme Court case on two state monuments featuring the Ten Commandments. In order for religious displays to meet the court’s constitutional standard, they must have a secular purpose. Attorneys for the states of Texas and Kentucky sought to convince the Supreme Court that the Ten Commandments were basically secular. This argument is, on the face of it, absurd. The Ten Commandments are a product of the Jewish and Christian faith. Moses is said to have received them directly from God. The first three commandments concern duties owed directly to God. Moreover, Justice Scalia told the Texas attorney general, “I would consider it a Pyrrhic victory for you to win on the grounds you are arguing.”
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Even if the states prevailed—as it turned out, Texas did and Kentucky did not—they could only do so based on a proposition that all religious people would find disheartening: religious displays are permitted in the public square only if they can be proven to be not religious at all. This is the secularism that liberal groups and their judicial allies have imposed on America. Many liberals would like to see the same kind of secularism established in the rest of the world, including the Muslim world.

WHAT POSSIBLE JUSTIFICATION
can there be for the liberal campaign against public expressions of religion, both in America and abroad? In the view of the cultural left, the policy of excluding religion from all institutions of government is necessary for historical, constitutional, and sociological reasons. As many liberals see it, religion has been the source of most of the divisions and violence throughout history. Liberals invoke the Inquisition, the religious wars in Europe, and the Salem witch trials as proof of the horrors produced by religious fanaticism. This is the historical justification for secularism. Next, liberals, citing Jefferson, endorse his advocacy of a “wall of separation” between church and state. The objective is in part to protect religion from state interference, but also to protect the government from the dangers of religious fanaticism, denominational conflict, and theocracy. This is the constitutional justification. Finally, many liberals point to continuing religious diversity as a sociological reality. They insist that a strictly secular state is necessary in order to be fair to all citizens and not privilege some people’s religious beliefs over those of others.

How plausible are these concerns? Leading liberals are convinced that religion represents, as author Sam Harris puts it in
The End of Faith
, “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.” Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany: “The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.” Harris notes that most of the recent conflicts in the world—in Palestine, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, in Sri Lanka—show the continued vitality of the murderous impulse that seems inherent in religion.
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The problem with this exposé of the crimes of religion is that it is narrowly ethnocentric, since the allegations made against Christianity could scarcely be made against other great religions, such as Hinduism or Buddhism. Liberals and even some conservatives like to speak of the “wars of religion” in the Muslim world, but they cannot name them, because there haven’t been any. Historian Albert Hourani notes that in Islamic empires, mosques have generally served as a bulwark against tyranny. Even in the West, the crimes attributed to religion are exaggerated, while the greater crimes of secular fanaticism are ignored. The best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials. How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, nineteen. Yet the event continues to haunt the liberal imagination. In his play
The Crucible,
Arthur Miller attempted to show the magnitude of the crimes of McCarthyism by comparing them to the Salem witch trials. Little did the hapless Miller realize that, to the degree the two historical episodes were even comparable, his analogy actually suggested that McCarthyism harmed a relatively small number of individuals.

It is strange to witness the passion with which some liberals rail against the Crusaders’ and Inquisitors’ misdeeds of more than five hundred years ago. Ironically these religious zealots did not come close to killing the number of people murdered by secular tyrants of our own era. How many people were killed in the Spanish Inquisition? The actual number sentenced to death appears to be around ten thousand. Some historians contend that an additional hundred thousand died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.
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These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even taking that difference into account, the death tolls of the Inquisition are minuscule compared to those produced by the secular despotisms of the twentieth century. In the name of creating their version of a secular utopia, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that liberals count as “religious wars” were not fought over religion. They were fought mainly over rival claims to territory and power. Can the wars between England and France be counted as religious wars because the English were Protestants and the French were Catholics? Religious differences had very little to do with why the two countries were fighting. The same is true today. The clashes between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq have nothing to do with religion: one group is the majority and now enjoys power, the other group has ruled the country for decades and is trying to restore its lost authority. Similarly, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme Orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims—“God gave us this land” and so forth—but even without these religious motives the conflict would remain essentially the same. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

“While the motivations of the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious,” Harris informs us, “they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death.” In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as fighting for land and the right to rule themselves—as combatants in a secular political struggle—Harris detects a religious motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be some underlying religious craziness that explains their fanaticism. It’s obvious that Harris can go on forever in this vein. Seeking to exonerate secularism and atheism from the horrors perpetrated in their name, he argues that Stalinism and Maoism were in reality “little more than a political religion.” As for Nazism, “while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.” Indeed, “The holocaust marked the culmination of…two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews.”
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Is anyone fooled by this rhetorical legerdemain? For Harris to call twentieth-century atheist ideologies “religion” is to render the term meaningless. Should religion now be responsible not only for the sins of believers, but also those of atheists? Moreover, Harris does not explain why, if Nazism was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler. How can a self-proclaimed atheist ideology, advanced by Hitler as a repudiation of Christianity, be a “culmination” of two thousand years of Christianity? Harris is employing a transparent sleight-of-hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name.

What about the idea that separation of church and state was mandated by the American founders as the basis of a “new order for the ages”? In her book
Freethinkers,
Susan Jacoby argues that it was precisely to establish such a framework that the founders declined to make America a Christian nation and instead gave us “a nation founded on the separation of church and state.” Jacoby credits the founders with “creating the first secular government in the world.”
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But consider this anomaly. The idea of separating religion and government was not an American idea, it was a Christian idea. It was Christ, not Jefferson, who said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The American founders institutionalized this Christian idea—admittedly an idea ignored for much of medieval history—in the Constitution.

The framers’ understanding of separation, however, was very different from that of today’s ACLU. From the founding through the middle of the twentieth century, America had religious displays on public property, congressionally designated religious services and holidays, government-funded chaplains, and prayer in public schools. So entrenched was religion in American private and public life that, writing in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville called it the first of America’s political institutions. In a unanimous ruling in 1892, the Supreme Court declared that if one takes “a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs, and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth…that this is a Christian nation.”
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Virtually all of the actions that secular liberals claim are forbidden by the nonestablishment clause of the First Amendment were permitted for most of American history. Thus liberals like Jacoby are in the peculiar position of claiming that the religion provisions of the Constitution were misunderstood by the founders and by everyone else for 150 years, until finally they were accurately comprehended by liberals. The arrogance of this claim is exceeded only by its implausibility.

Finally, some liberals defend secularism by pointing to the religious diversity in America. Historian Diana Eck has a recent book titled
A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation
.
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Since America no longer has the religious homogeneity it had in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Eck insists, there is a pressing social need to adopt constitutional rules that do not violate the right of minorities to practice their own religion. We frequently hear that Nativity displays, monuments with the Ten Commandments, and prayers at public-school graduation all make the multitudes of American non-Christians feel extremely uncomfortable.

But where is the evidence for this? It is not the Hindu and Buddhist immigrants who press for secularism, it is the liberal activist groups. Muslims, Tariq Ramadan argues, would prefer more public recognition of religion in America so that they can be respected not just as individuals but as Muslims. The ACLU, of course, will have none of this. So the mantra of “diversity” seems to be a secular ruse to undermine all public religious expression. Moreover, the factual premise is unsound. Contrary to Eck, America is
not
the world’s most religiously diverse nation. Surprising though it may seem, the total number of non-Christians in America adds up to less than 10 million people, which is around 3 percent of the population. Many Asian and African countries have religious minorities that make up 15–20 percent of the population. They are vastly more diverse than America. In terms of religious background, America is no more diverse today than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How is this possible? Because America currently draws its immigrants mostly from Mexico and Latin America, and virtually all of them are Christians. So not only does America remain a Christian country, but as historian Philip Jenkins points out, its Christian population relative to non-Christians is growing. Jenkins notes that the real story of America should be entitled “How This Christian Country Has Become an Even More Christian Country.”
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Of course, religious minorities, however small their number, have the right to practice their religion free from government interference. Nonbelievers should have the freedom to live secular lives. Several justices on the U.S. Supreme Court seem to believe that these rights are threatened every time a public school conducts a prayer service. In the 1992
Lee v. Weisman
case, Justice Anthony Kennedy fretted that students who are exposed to prayers at public-school graduations are “psychologically coerced” to participate in religious exercises. Even if students are not required to participate, Kennedy worried that their respectful silence may be construed, against their will, as tacit endorsement of the religious message. No matter if the prayer was nondenominational, no matter if (as in this case) it was recited by a rabbi, Kennedy found that it violated the “no establishment” clause.
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Secular liberals cheered Kennedy’s conclusion. The validity of his argument, however, is based on the questionable premise that any government support constitutes “establishment” of religion and thus a violation of the rights of others.