Religion in General a Step Towards Secularism
Jonathan Rowe on Nov 3rd 2007
Sandefur takes a jab at the notion that government can promote religion in general but not one particular religion:
This is known as the “nonpreferential” theory of the Establishment Clause. See, e.g., Patrick M. Garry, Religious Freedom Deserves More Than Neutrality: The Constitutional Argument for Nonpreferential Favoritism of Religion, 57 Fla. L. Rev. 1, 3 (2005) (“the Establishment Clause aims to keep the government from singling out certain religious sects for preferential treatment, but it does not prevent the government from showing favoritism to religion in general.”)
The problem is that there is no such thing as “religion in general.” Certainly there is no way of demarcating the things that separate “religion in general” from “non-religion” in a way that makes consistent sense to sectarians. Is belief in the trinity “religion in general” or is it just sectarian? What about belief in the divinity of Christ? It’s easy to say that the first thing is just sectarian because we’re used to seeing Protestant sects that don’t believe in the trinity. But what about the latter? If even atheists can be Quakers, surely someone who doesn’t believe in Christ’s divinity can still be a Christian…no? I don’t think so, but who am I to be making such distinctions about another person’s religious beliefs? And if we can’t draw that line, then the idea of government endorsing “generic religion” is an invitation to just the sort of religious controversies that the First Amendment was designed to keep out of government.
Similarly, Thomas West reaches the same conclusion but for the other side on the religion v. secularism debate:
Hamburger does a good job showing that any idea of government support of “religion in general” is an illusion. There is no such thing as “religion in general.” All meaningful government support of religion is always support of a particular religious view, as 19th-century Catholics bitterly experienced. Today, support of “religion in general” would include taxpayer funding of Wiccans, Satanists, Muslims (including those who teach hatred of America), and worshippers of that favorite goddess of some feminists, “Our Sweet Sophia.”
The problem for West is that, as a hagiographer of America’s Founders, he hasn’t resolved the dilemma that this is exactly what they believed in: “religion in general” not “Christianity,” or “Judeo-Christianity” exclusively. Indeed his article notes:
That is why in spite of their differences on the “establishment of religion” question, Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and George Washington could all agree on this provision of the Northwest Ordinance, passed in the same year as the First Amendment: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Likewise Washington’s Farewell Address invokes this amorphous concept of “religion in general”:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports….And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Now, many back then and today probably thought Washington meant “Christianity.” But the problem is that’s not what he said or what he meant. Washington meant “religion” in general. And “sound religion,” [what West refers to when he writes "all sides agreed that the right kind of religion was vital for the success of republican government,"] included not just Christianity, but Judaism, Deism, Unitarianism, Hinduism, Islam, pagan Greco-Romanism, and Native American Spirituality. The “right” kind of religion meant it was liberal in the classical (not modern) sense of the term: It was voluntary and didn’t believe in conversion by the sword.
In invoking “religion in general” the Founders drew a very low lowest-common-denominator that equated “religion” with any system that taught an overriding Providence and a future state of rewards and punishments which, they believed, virtually all world religions did. Hence, the Founders’ notion of “religion in general” converged with their amorphous, undefined God of the civil religion, which attempted to be all things to all believers.
As Benjamin Rush put it (and keep in mind, I don’t believe Rush was a theistic rationalist like the other key Founders but rather was a Trinitarian Universalist who denied eternal damnation):
Such is my veneration for every religion that reveals the attributes of the Deity, or a future state of rewards and punishments, that I had rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mahomed inculcated upon our youth, than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles. But the religion I mean to recommend in this place, is that of the New Testament.
I have no problem with government promoting the notion of “religion in general” as long as it’s understood to mean a diversity of Christian and pagan, orthodox and heterodox religions, all of them taking their rights equally under the law. This is I think what Madison had in mind when he proposed setting up factions against one another that would “cancel” each other out. [And I think atheism and secular interests also ought to have equal rights with the religious factions.]
As Gary North put it, discussing Madison’s desire for religious factions:
It is well known that Madison’s greatest fear was his fear of the triumph of any particular political faction. Federalist 10 is devoted to his theme. What Madison wanted was political neutrality: a world of politically impotent factions, only as strong as necessary to cancel out each other. In the 1787 “Vices” essay, he inserted this conclusion immediately following the paragraph on state religious oaths: “The great desideratum in Government is such a modification of the sovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the different interests and factions, to controul one part of the society from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the whole Society.”7
[...]
He said this explicitly in Federalist 51: “In a free government, this security for civil rights must be the same as for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government.”9
North, as a theocrat, rightly notes that setting religious factions against one another to cancel each other out, was a quasi form of secular humanism and gravely conflicts with the “Christian Nation” ideal. The Founders’ philosophic ideal of “religion in general” that granted equal rights to all [even non-"Judeo-Christian"] religions, which led to a multiplicity of diverse religious sects, offsetting one another is not quite what today’s secular humanists desire. Rather this reflects their unitarian ideal of Founding era classical humanism.
Filed in The Belfry, The Bench, The Bureau
First of all, I think this is again confusing different issues. A diversity of competing factions is also a governing principle to protect minority rights but it is still conceptually distinct from the Establishment Clause (EC) which is a more direct limitation on government authority principle. True, it applied to just the federal government originally, but so did all the rest of the single sentence first amendment and no one worth speaking with argues that freedom of religion, the press, association, to petition the government for redress, etc. was intended to allow competition between different state level denials of those federal level protections. They were understood by at least some people as principles that served as a good model for the states also and that is why the state establishments of Christian religions that existed at the end of the 18th century were all eliminated in the 19th century.
Secondly, quotes like George Washington’s are not calls to establish religion in general, they are statements of his 18th century view about religion and society. It is interesting to note that during his second inaugural he made no mention of religion at all and unlike his first inauguration, he wrote his second inauguration speech himself. Nevertheless, we cannot consider people from the 18th century to be authorities for the 21st century regarding how to maintain establishment in a world two centuries later for the obvious and excellent reason that no one from the 18th century could predict the world as it is and it is understood today. Also, the Founders left some parts of the constutution vague at least in part to make it a document sufficiently flexiblity to leave room for updates via re-interpretation and because they needed some vagueness at the time to reach a consensus among themselves concering details over which they otherwise didn’t all agree.
Thirdly, we don’t have an establishment of religion in general today in the United States. What we have is an establishment of Christian compatable monotheism and that is not the same as “religion in general”.
Fourthly, ultimately, the ONLY way to have government neutrality between religions is to have government silence and thus to be neutrality between religion and non-religion also.
In his previous commentary Jon has accurately noted how radical the Founders vision for the new government was in the late 18th century. We can follow their lead and be a little radical in the 21st century also, we don’t have to keep defending the status quo as if it is sacred because that is the way it was decided in the late 18th century. I honestly think those key late 18th century personalities would view a continuation of their spirit of radicalism as more respectful of the example they set than rigidly insisting that the decisions they made be the same decisions we must follow in every detail. The broader application of the EC that some of us advocate is in that same spirit, it is a difference only of detail, so much so that some people incorrectly dismiss it as too minor a detail to fuss about, but that “de minimus” objection is nothing more than the way people who oppose any change but claimto support the principle avoid confronting the self-contradictory nature of their position, while most people object because they incorrectly claim it goes too far.
Regarding your comment “offsetting one another is not quite what today’s secular humanists desire.” I don’t know what your point is. Madison did not advocate government assisting smaller factions to ensure that there were always maintained a large number of different factions of approximately equal size. He just advocated granting people the freedom to choose political factions that compete with each other without government favoritism. We are advocating government neutrality between religions, and therefore also between religion and non-religion, because we want all views to have equal footing in society. This EC view that some secular humanists are advocating is genuinely religion friendly. How in any practical terms is that different from Madison’s view?
On your last question, I would view Madison’s vision as allowing religious interests tax $$ when available on secular grounds, for instance school vouchers. Some sexual humanists want a “separation” that denies tax aid to religion even when available on generally neutral grounds.
Your point of view on this matter is actually close to my view. I agree that in principle government neutrality does not require no money going to religious institutions, it requires that it be disbursed in a religion neutral manner for a secular purpose. I also think there are major problems with the Faith Based Initiative (FBI) as it is implemented in practice, there is very little oversight to enforce the laws and I am convinced that religion is being incorporated in funded services in a way that is unfair to the recipients of those services. I don’t think the FBI was necessary at all, the existing laws permitted religious institutions to get government money. Also, I think it is unlikely that the FBI money is actually being distributed in a religion neutral manner and I think it is very unlikely that it ever will be distributed in a religion nuetral manner. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris upheld school vouchers. I also think there are real practical problems with private school voucher programs as they are implemented, including problems of bias that I think are potential constitutional violations. For example, the amounts of the voucher are less than the amount of the competing public schools which favors Catholic schools with their poverty wage nun teachers, the vouchers should be mandated to cover the full price of a public education to maintain neutrality. More generally, I think religious based segregation is bad for society over the long term, and I would oppose voucher programs for religious schools in general for that public policy reason. But I don’t translate everything that I disagree with, even strongly disagree with, as a constitutional violation.
[...] “Sustained by” also seems like it fits the quote that Romney cites, from John Adams: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people.” However, Jon Rowe at Positive Liberty noted a while ago that the Founder’s understanding of religion was different than ours. They were generally Unitarians, Deists, theistic rationalists, whatever you’d like to call them. Rather than focusing upon specific creeds as a means to knowing the revealed truth about God and morality, they viewed “religion” as anything from Presbyterianism to Islam to Hinduism. They thought that humans needed a system of rewards to encourage right living, but that the particular god encouraging ethical action wasn’t the concern of the state. [...]