This is not a new theme for me, so let me reiterate a core belief. Standing by your convictions is being committed enough not to patronize those who support a hostile view to your deeply held beliefs. For example, I don’t order my pizza from Domino’s or my chicken from Chick-fil-A.
This issue of what religion dictates to people of conscience continues to be part of our every-day news and part of our political dialogue, from presidential candidates to locally elected officials. It recently dominated the national news by way of the Kentucky clerk refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling and a judge’s order.
We are a secular nation, as intended by our founding fathers. They are documents of men’s laws and not God’s laws. I doubt God really cares if we have freedom of the press or drive while texting or pay taxes. There are overlapping rules as is only logical to keep us from anarchy, but if we were to derive our laws from a theological source from which would we choose? And who gets to interpret the text?
Were we to choose one over another, it would be in contravention of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. There is irony in that since many treat those documents as though they were supplements to the 10 Commandments rather than laws drafted by a bunch of guys spending a summer in Philadelphia without air conditioning.
It is our fundamental belief in our First Amendment freedom of religion, that man-made law, which keeps us from becoming a theocracy. We have plenty of divisive traits we combat every day without adding religion to the fare. Despite millennia to the contrary, killing one another over religious faith is counterintuitive to me. Power and money I get, but God supposedly wins in the end so why the battle over faith?
As Virginia’s Governor, Thomas Jefferson, drafted a bill that guaranteed legal equality for all religions–including those of no religion. It was Jefferson who famously wrote, “… it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Jefferson’s bill did not succeed until after Patrick Henry introduced a bill of state support for “teachers of the Christian religion.”
Future President James Madison also argued eloquently that the state had no business supporting Christian teachings. Among Madison’s points was a statement that “the Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every … man … This right is in its nature an inalienable right.”
Madison also made the point that the government sanction of a religion was a threat to religion. “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?”
There were times when being Jewish or Catholic or Mormon led to disenfranchisement. At one time only Christians could hold office in Massachusetts and Catholics were excluded unless they renounced the Papacy; Jews did not have full civil rights in Maryland and Mormons were banned from Missouri. Those eras were not our finest, and they do not bear repeating.
Freedom of religion does not support the premise that our nation subscribe to a particular God or theology. That is a treacherous path of intolerance and division that we haven’t traveled to the degree of such countries as Ireland or Syria or Iraq. We have plenty of divisive traits with which we struggle every day without adding religion to the fare.
What are the strengths of our convictions and how do we live them? If that Kentucky clerk truly wanted to put her faith over her man-made and man-paid-for job, she would resign her position and let man’s laws “render therefore unto Caesar” what is accountable to Caesar.
Her service to her God should remain between Her and her.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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