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The War on Religion

by Andrew W. Jones

With "Freedom of Religion" as its slogan, the American state suppresses freedom and religion.

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On Feb. 27, the California Supreme Court ruled 6Ð1 that Catholic Charities, the social action wing of the Catholic Church, must include contraception in the prescription drug benefits it extends to its employees, even though the Church maintains that the use of contraception is a sin.

One might think that the American Civil Liberties Union would be the first to defend the Church. After all, it is dedicated to freedom of religion, and when the state forces religious organizations to act in direct opposition to their own beliefs, religious freedom suffers.

But don't expect to see the ACLU rallying to the defense of Catholic Charities anytime soon. While civil libertarians are quick to fight against any intrusion of religion into government, as of yet they have not made a peep about this blatant intrusion of government into religion.

This actuality betrays a reality that most American Christians have accepted for quite some time: with regard to religion, the aim of ACLU-type organizations is not the protection of religious freedom, but the elimination of all its public manifestations. Their ideology much more closely resembles the rabidly anti-clerical, socio-economic egalitarianism of Robespierre, than the measured libertarianism of Jefferson. These modern Jacobins have worked tirelessly to eliminate every sign of religion in ever increasing circles of secularization. Take, for example, the blitz the ACLU has unleashed on the Boy Scouts. According to the ACLU's definition of "civil liberties," people whose beliefs and behaviors are considered to be immoral by religious groups still have a right to join them, or to be employed by them.

To ACLU-type organizations and their supporters, the primary purpose of the establishment clause seems to be the protection of government and society at large from any interaction with religion, especially Christianity. With such an interpretation and in an era where the government increasingly meddles in every aspect of social and private life, the separation of church and state becomes a weapon in the suppression of the very thing it was intended to protect.

The case brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the Salvation Army illustrates how this is done. The NYCLU argues that because the Salvation Army has received approximately $89 million in federal funding as a part of Bush's Faith-based Initiative, it has lost the right to promote its religion.

One might think the same logic would imply that the leftist organizations that previously got federal money to address social problems should have had to abandon their leftist beliefs. But during the decades when most of this federal money went to leftist organizations, no one even proposed this. The reason is that the Left's political beliefs are deemed to be non-religious, and therefore not relevant to the separation of church and state.

By drawing this distinction between religious and social beliefs, civil libertarians end up arguing that the government should subsidize one while punishing the other. Clearly, this is not what Jefferson had in mind when he proposed the First Amendment, or what the Founders had in mind when they enacted it.

The prohibition of establishment of religion enshrined in the First Amendment was intended only to prevent the federal government from interfering with the individual's ability to worship following the dictates of his conscience. Government establishment and protection of specific religions, such as Catholicism in France or Anglicanism in Britain, was contrary to this goal. Current civil rights activists are right that government sanctioned or funded religion is an affront to this principle, even if often a symbolic or indirect one. Take, for example, the recent hubbub concerning Alabama's Ten Commandments monument. Such a monument violates individuals' freedom of religion only indirectly, in that they have to pay for it. Yet from the reaction of many civil rights organizations, one would think Chief Justice Roy Moore was conducting the forced baptisms of kidnapped Jewish babies. Judge Moore was wrong; the monument was inappropriate. However, it obviously did less, just sitting there in the corner, to restrict individual religious freedom than the California ruling, where, in the words of the lone dissenter Justice Janice Rogers Brown, "we are dealing with an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission."

Part of the problem here is the growth of government power. When the scope of government is limited, relegation of religion to the private sphere does not limit the ability of people to peacefully practice their beliefs, but rather guards them against potential abuse and restrains them from forcing their beliefs on others. As government becomes omnipotent and omnipresent, however, that private sphere is systematically attacked. With every extension of government there exists a corresponding reduction in the scope of private society — including the realm of religion. The intentions of ACLU activists are betrayed when they advocate strict enforcement of the establishment clause as imperative, while simultaneously ignoring the rest of the Constitution. In a political reality in which the government is actively involved in social engineering and the redistribution of wealth, demanding the religious neutrality of recipients of government funding amounts to legal religious discrimination. Is it a violation of the separation of church and state for a person on welfare to put a dollar in the offertory plate, or more to the point, to hang a cross on the wall of his government-funded apartment? The government's financing of overtly secular organizations such as Planned Parenthood and simultaneous denial of funding to religious organizations amounts to an antireligious social-engineering project.

But plans such as Bush's Faith-based Initiative hardly seem an antidote. The initiative further blurs the line between state and church, and gives ACLU types reasonable ammunition with which to attack religious organizations. Eventually, those institutions which wish to retain their religious mission will have to refuse government funding, while all their competitors are subsidized. Some might make it, but as the disposable income of those who would support such truly private institutions is eaten up in rising taxes, they will be increasingly unable to operate. The end result of such a process is the elimination of private charity — a result that would not upset the ACLU spokesperson who stated in a Fox News interview that these charities are providing services that the government should be doing anyway. That's a remarkably revealing statement, isn't it? Voluntarily doing good, he was claiming, is inferior to forcing people to do good, via taxation and bureaucracy.

The reality is simply that religious freedom is incompatible with a ubiquitous state. This belief lies at the heart of conservative Christian resistance to policies such as state licensed and sanctioned homosexual marriages. While some elements of the Christian Right subscribe to the social engineering program of the ACLU, and, if given a chance, would use the coercive power of the state to force their moral convictions on all, many more Christians are motivated in their politics by the fear that the state's coercive power will be turned against them. And given what we know about government, why shouldn't they be afraid? Is the next logical step after legal gay marriages the illegality of churches that refuse to recognize them? Could the tradition of the Roman Catholic male-only priesthood (or the similar prohibition of woman preachers of many fundamentalist Protestant sects) be attacked as a violation of the Civil Rights Act? These concerns are not far-fetched. Millions of Christians are currently forced to finance thousands of abortions a year — an act they believe to be murder.

The practice of using the state for the purposes of social engineering and the redistribution of wealth is well established and shows no sign of waning. In this environment, cultural struggles over morality become struggles for political power. As the California Supreme Court has demonstrated, the government is going to be used to construct someone's vision of a perfect society. Is it any surprise the American people are lining up and taking sides?

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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