At the close of a multi-tradition holiday season, the outer visible signs of our cultural religiousity are at high tide, though not always accompanied by spiritual revelation or insight. Even in off-holiday seasons, one of the first things many foreign visitors to the U.S. notice is the high visibility of American religion. According the the Pew Center research, the U.S. is the most religious country in the Industrialized World. When we moved here from Paris, my European wife’s first impression was that American life consisted of a McDonald’s, a gas station and a Church being on every other corner. She was amazed to see the social role churches play in a mobile society where people need to make friends each time they move, and that asking someone about their religious beliefs- far from invasive- was a socially acceptable means of “screening” to judge one’s potential compatibility.
Sadly, however common, such screening is rarely reflective of any real understanding of our diverse traditions. As a first year theology student at Yale Divinity School- a seminary that, at that time, had students from around forty different faith traditions- I was amused and incredulous to hear people ask “What denomination are you?” and then, whatever the response, (“Methodist”, “Catholic”, “Baptist” or whatever) they would answer “Oooohhhh” with a significant nod of the head, as if that affiliation told them everything they needed or wanted to know about the student in question!
Unless the background of our apparent religiousity is understood, it is easy to misunderstand just what importance and impact religious belief and practice actually have on American life, and on our relations both with our own people and others. Our depth of understanding determines the good or ill that comes of our beliefs.
The founders of our country, fully cognizant of the damage that can be done by conflicts between Church and State, built into the Constitution a separation of those powers as a system of checks and balances to prevent such conflicts from arising. The Separation of Church and State is a political doctrine some other nations also have. France is quite insistent upon it- to the point that religious marriage ceremonies are not recognized as legal- they are considered merely a matter of private preference that may or may not follow a civil ceremony presided over by the State. But though we shared in each other’s revolutions against monarchical oppression, the reasons for this apparently similar policy are opposite.
France’s doctrine was meant to assure that the State could not be controlled (any longer) by the Catholic Church (or any other religion). Our doctrine, on the other hand, was developed to insure against the Government controlling Religion. The freedom to believe and worship as one chooses is one of the beacons of freedom for which the U.S. has long been admired.
What happens to our culture then when particular religious constituencies attempt to hijack that freedom in the name of the rightness or righteousness of their particular understanding of faith?
Consider the current presidential electoral politics being played out in the Republican primary process. A vocal minority seeks to impose its views of sex, marriage, procreation, sexual orientation and a host of other issues on the American majority by appealing both to what they surmise are our fundamental values and fears. Maddeningly, they claim to speak “for the American people”, not a narrow constituency. They profess certain knowledge of what the great collective of American people want (not coincidentally, insisting the people have mandated their own narrow agenda). This is basically an exercise in cultural and religious narcissism, whereby the religious right (and the candidates who seek to represent them) assumes that their views are the standards by which all others should be judged, and dissenting views are demonized.
Historically speaking, however, dogmatism, however manipulative, hasn’t got a very good track record. Absolutism, of whatever kind, tends not to allow for the variability of real life, and sooner or later is inevitably met with resistance. Since we tend to tailor data to fit our paradigms, dueling paradigms is a no win game. It demands loyalty to the paradigm over any possibly contradictory experience. Such ideological purity results in an inability to receive any information that might differ, no matter how valid or helpful it might be, condemning us thereby to a life of limitation rather than fulfillment, and to an inability to be effectively responsive to the needs of others, despite a civic and moral obligation to do so.
The roles of oppressor and oppressed easily become blurred in an ideology-driven dynamic, with each party committed to inflicting upon the other what it feels it has suffered. Revolution is, by its very etymology, cyclical in nature, so in time, the oppressor and the oppressed repeatedly trade places. The emotional struggle to be right, and the misguided tendency to think it is achieved by making others wrong, almost seems to be part of human nature- at least a lower, unenlightened part. Our cultures are described by the ebb and flow of that emotional sea and the structures we create to navigate those waters.
Paradoxically, whether in spite or because of our dueling ideologies, the ego reductions ensuing from continually rubbing elbows with those who differ from us have arguably increased our tolerance for difference and disagreement in the U.S. We continue to be an open society envied by many who have never tasted our freedoms directly and, therefore, do not take them for granted. Part of that envy continues to include the freedom of belief and worship, without obligation or penalty. Such freedom should support a culture of peace, yet some still would use it to justify a culture of war.
In this climate of fear, it is encouraging that scholars like Steven Pinker have made a strong case that we are becoming measurably less violent as a species- despite the appearance of our media reporting, violence-packed movies, and video games to the contrary. If that is so, might it not also be the case that, at least subliminally, the importance of recognizing the existence of a power higher than humankind, and some form of faith that that power makes our betterment possible, if not innate to us all, has at least imprinted upon our psyches profoundly? Whether viewed as a confirmation of “intelligent design” of Creation by its Creator, or of the astonishing scientific perfection in Nature that keeps planets in their orbits, the seasons reliable, and life ever renewing itself, faith has provided the dynamic empowering both our self-discovery and our exploration of the universe. A nation that can support and protect our right to faith is not ill-founded, no matter what inner or outer conflicts it may have to face. A faction that seeks to control, limit, or repress such a right does so to the peril of all.
