Reflections on Religion and Politics

For the past so many weeks, I have been publishing on the Midwest Populist site essays written by atheists in defense of atheism and in opposition to religious interpretations of atheists in less than flattering modes of conceptualization.

Although, if one peruses through the various articles posted in support of atheology, he or she will surely notice responses that have reacted adversely to this theme, I can, nevertheless, in all candor, happily report that the positive feedback has outweighed the negative responses by several fold.

Due to this initial positive feedback, I am going to extend this experiment another step. All too typically, as Americans, we shutter from criticizing particular religious denominations, as though they are outside the realm of acceptable social and political debate and discursive confrontation. However, if we are to look though the other side of the lens, religious leaders and public figures who operate under pretenses of religiosity, are all too quick to interject their opinions and religious interpretations onto the sphere of American political and civil activity.

For example, Boston Church officials publicly condemned John Kerry’s support of female reproductive rights, and publicly threatened to Excommunicate him. Such a mandate is not something I would normally think twice about. However, conventionally, Excommunications are private affairs and rarely involve, even, any ceremonial components to their execution. Rather, these affairs most usually consist of a private agreement between the Church and the individual who is being ‘condemned to eternal hellfire,’ when the individual is convinced that he cannot ask for forgiveness for a particular action that the Church interprets as a grave sin, because he or she is in irreconcilable conflict with Church Doctrine, since he or she refuses accept that Church Doctrine is correct in respect to this matter. Finally, if the banished member of the Church comes to interpret his suspect actions in accord with Church Doctrine and, indeed, as an instance of sinful behavior, then he or she can actually return to the Church, ask for forgiveness, and once again receive the Sacraments.

Therefore, John Kerry was treated differently than most every other member of the Roman Catholic Church. Rather than having his dispute with Church Doctrine treated as a private matter between Kerry and the Church, he was publicly castigated as someone unworthy of the Sacraments. I think the motivation for this atypical action on the part of the Church is more than transparent. Church Officials were attempting to impact the political decision-making of their followers, and, in this instance, it was willing to sacrifice the integrity of its procedures and protocols by addressing its dispute with Kerry according to a profoundly different mode of action than it would when treating another member of the Church. Kerry was, to speak, a human sacrifice.

Although I do not want to address this issue as a matter of Church versus State, where a religious institution risks lost of its tax exempt status if it bullies from the pulpit upon matters that are directly political, I do want to explore an even murkier issue that is illuminated from these types of controversies. Specifically, I want to ask, if religious institutions can voice their opinions regarding civil and political matters, then, why cannot the same scrutiny and evaluative judgment-making be recast upon religious institutions regarding their interpretations of the cosmic and the subsequent practices that they come to adopt in reflection of the metaphysics they intellectually embrace. As church leaders often say, one cannot be political without using his or her faith when coming to decisions concerning the affairs of state. If we are to deem this assertion as permissible, then, conversely, those who use reality-based reasoning when determining the correct course of action when confronting matters of political contention should be given the same latitude, and we should have no inhibitions impeding us from criticizing the form of faith from which an adversarial political position is formed.

Allow me to demonstrate what I am getting at through a concrete exemplar: The Church maintains that anyone who facilitates - and facilitate is used quite loosely in this discourse - a woman’s liberties when it comes to reproductive practices should be Excommunicated and, in terms that are civic, condemned to prison. Therefore, accepting my doctrine, one on the other side of this debate might counter:

The Church offers Sacraments that involved human cannibalism as well as the weekly re-enactment of a human sacrifice. Given this, why should this institution along with its bizarre cannibalistic practices have any credibility when it comes to adjudicating matters concerning what constitutes human life as well as who should make decisions regarding female reproductive rights?

I realize that this statement is provocative, but, nonetheless, it cuts to the heart of the issue; especially when the public debate is draped in the veneer of morality that finds its source in a particular religious institution. Surely, in these cases, the practices of the religious institution are more than germane to the debate, and, therefore, we should not feel that it is taboo to address these types of concerns.

Russell Cole

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