From the Publisher / Arnold G. York
As the year comes to an end and we look back for a moment, it’s apparent that many of the political battles that have raged over the past year are the same battles that have been fought in this country for several hundred years.
We’re debating and arguing about some of the basics. Maybe it’s time to pause for a moment and look at one of the basics, and at the founders and see what their world was like and why they put in some of the guarantees into our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
The founders clearly wanted no official religion. They had seen religious wars tear Europe apart. Most every king had an official church, and in almost every country Catholics and Protestants had been fighting over the “true” faith. They carried that same battle with them to the New World. So our country’s founders decided there was no “right” religion, no officially sanctioned correct way to worship or not to worship. Government would stay neutral, and an official religion would not be part of public life.
At the same time, while people practice the free exercise of religion, groups of people, doing what they have a right to do, can trample over the first part of the amendment and, in effect, try and establish a religion by majority rule.
Those two parts of the First amendment sometimes collide.
The referees in this ongoing battle are the courts. It’s their job to balance the two parts against each other and set the rules.
Is it OK to give financial assistance to a religious school? Suppose it’s just for books. If the book is the Bible, the Koran or the Torah, is that different? Suppose the book is a biology book and it discusses evolution or creationism? Some of the questions are tough, but above all, government has to stay neutral.
Over the centuries there have been numerous assaults on that neutrality. Governments have money and power, and many groups want to get a piece of it. Politicians are always looking for votes and if the majority wanted to unofficially declare an official religion, most politicians would willingly jump on that bandwagon.
This is not a theoretical discussion. Even today people will live or die over it. Look at Iraq. Iraq is Europe in the late Middle Ages- religious groups, with their own militias, killing each other over the true faith.
The two major competing groups, the Shiites and the Sunni, are Muslim, just like the Catholics and Protestants in Europe were all Christians. They defined the free exercise of their religion as meaning that the government should assist them in protecting the true faith against the heretics. And often, the government did just that and took sides.
But there is a very high price once government starts taking sides. The bloody battle becomes inevitable. That’s what’s happening in this country today. School boards, who are the government, want to block the teaching of evolution, or to teach creationism. Governments want to subsidize religious schools. People want the government to block stem cell research, or abortion, or contraception. People want government to define when life begins and when death occurs, according their own particular set of religious principals. They then want those principals written into the law so that any other people with different religious principals are now doing something illegal.
The founders were not Olympians. They were pragmatists and had seen this coming. They had watched it all turn sour and explode into confrontation and warfare, and wanted to avoid it. They knew that people have great difficulty being reasonable when it comes to matters of faith because it’s so fundamental to whom we are. So the founders decided that the government had to be reasonable for them, and that matters of religious faith were personal. Government had to stay out it, and they put a great priority in staying out of it. The establishment clause is the very first line of the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In the next few years there are going to be enormous First Amendment battles that relate to science, because science is moving rapidly into repairing our biology. To some, it’s science prolonging and improving our lives. To others, it’s man tinkering in God’s realm and changing our biology. Some are going to try and push government to pass all sorts of laws to make certain scientific practices illegal. The lines are going to get very blurry and the battles are going to get brutal. To my mind, the best that government can do is to follow the example of the founders and try and stay out of it. It’s not going to be easy.