	Bob Hostetler > Writing

Putting Religion in its Place

by Bob Hostetler

My oldest brother emailed me from Connecticut not long ago with the news that his schedule that week included plans to attend a "First Amendment Symposium" at the Hartford School of Law. The topic of the symposium? "Is there a place for religion in the public discourse?"

First, isn't it ironic that a "First Amendment Symposium" would ask such a question in the first place? I thought the first amendment was pretty clear on that subject ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"). The First Amendment never said religious speech should be excluded from the public discourse. Quite the opposite, in fact. That seems pretty clear, right?

Not so much, apparently. Not anymore.

For example, Time Magazine recently (June 21) ran a cover story on "Faith, God, and the Oval Office." The article included a Time poll that asked if a president should be guided by his faith when making policy. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats said yes, compared to seventy percent of Republicans. Just under half of all likely voters (48%) said yes.

The question itself is remarkable. Should a president be guided by his faith when making policy? Well, what is the alternative?

The alternative, it seems obvious, is for a president's faith and convictions to be detached from his (or her) decisions and actions. So, for example, a president may believe that God has endowed every man, woman, and child with certain "inalienable rights," but roughly half of the people Time polled believe that he should not be guided by any such religious conviction. A president may believe that capital punishment is immoral, but he should not let his beliefs influence his policies. A president's faith may urge him to abhor abortion, but that should have no impact whatsoever on how he governs or what policy he pursues.

There used to be a word for a person whose faith is knowingly and purposefully inconsistent with his actions: hypocrite. To ask men or women of faith not to consult that faith except in the most private matters is to damn them with exceedingly low expectations. Gandhi once said, "Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means." And men and women of principle through the ages would say that it is their faith that prompts them to seek truth, pursue justice, defend the oppressed, fight for freedom, and sacrifice their own selfish interests for a cause greater than themselves (which is why totalitarian regimes so often herd the religious into gulags or ghettoes).

And it's happening again. These days we live in what Stephen L. Carter called "the culture of disbelief," a culture that is hostile toward public expressions of faith. Richard W. Garnett, Assistant Professor of the Notre Dame Law School, detects a growing effort by the government to transform religious faith from a comprehensive influence over a person's life and actions to a therapeutic "cocoon wrapped around the solitary individual."

Garnett says, "It is a state-sponsored"-and, I would add, media-aided-"change in religious believers' own notions of what their faith means and what it requires. It is the process by which government domesticates….and convinces religion to see itself as a socially impotent force that does not belong in politics. The government tells faith communities that religion is a private matter, and, eventually, they come to believe it."

Jay Sekulow and Keith Fournier, in their book, And Nothing But the Truth, describe this wide-ranging and growing sentiment as a form of "religious cleansing," an echo of the ethnic cleansing practiced by the Bosnian Serbs in the horrific Bosnian conflict:

[T]he religious cleansers operate under the guise of civil liberty and the U.S. Constitution, contending in the political arena and the courts that the so-called separation of church and state means that religious beliefs, values, and practices should be barred from the public square.

Religious people can sit in their homes and places of worship and discuss political, moral, and social issues, and they can vote their consciences. But if they move beyond these borders and step into city hall, or the courts, or the public schools, or virtually any community arena, they become trespassers, violators to be hurled back into the private sphere where their ideas cannot affect, or even threaten to affect, anyone but themselves.

Of course, I may be overreacting. But consider this: it apparently never occurred to Time Magazine to ask the opposite question-"should an irreligious president be guided by his lack of faith when making policy?"-leaving readers to infer that Time believes religion to be more dangerous than its exclusion.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Words of Gandhi 76 (Richard Attenborough ed. 1982) (quoted in Daniel J. Morrissey, The Separation of Church and State: An American-Catholic Perspective, 47 Cath. U. L. Rev. 1, 1 (1997)).
Gerard V. Bradley, Dogmatomachy: A "Privatization" Theory of the Religion Clause Cases, 30 St. Louis U.L.J. 275, 277 (1986).
Garnett, Richard W., A Quiet Faith? (Taxes, Politics, and the Privatization of Religion), www.bc.edu/schools/law/lawreviews/ meta-elements/journals/bclawr/42_4/02_TXT.htm.
Sekulow, Jay, and Fournier, Keith, And Nothing But the Truth(Atlanta: Thomas Nelson Publishers), 1996, pp. 45-46.

This article appeared in the July 2, 2004 edition of the Hamilton Journal-News.

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