[Religion]

A Heterodox View on Religion

The Times has an article describing one aspect of Sam Alito's judicial position--his view that the government should be more tolerant of religious display.

Judge Alito, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, has ruled in favor of allowing local governments to set up Nativity scenes alongside nonreligious symbols and ruled against a school district that wanted to prevent an evangelical group from sending home fliers to elementary school children. He has also ruled in favor of Muslim police officers in Newark who said the department's policy against wearing beards violated their religious rights.

There are a couple of ways to look at this, and I don't pretend to know Alito's interpretation (he has never ruled on a case involving state financial support of religion). They're quite different:

1. Government should allow more religious displays because this is a Protestant nation, and Protestant displays are consonant with the founders' beliefs;

2. Government should allow more religious displays because the accommodation of religion is not endorsement of it, and because to suppress that expression violates the spirit of the seperation clause.

The first is essentially a subversion of the establisment clause--in it, proponents are arguing, 'yeah, we think the establishment is all right--but hey, we got the numbers.' The second, and the one that I support, is more nuanced. It takes a liberal position and refuses to draw a black/white position. Why should religion be absolutely excluded from the public square? This is the third position, the anti-religious yang that balances the pro-religion yin of the first position. This view seems to violate the first amendment's other protection--against free expression.

But aside from the legal interpretations, I also think we'd end up with a more tolerant, less fundamentalist country if we allowed--even celebrated--religious expression. In European countries where they teach a comparative religions component in the schools, cultures are far more religiously tolerant and less susceptible to black/white religious fundamentalism. In America, where all religious language has been scrubbed from the schools, we're sliding ever more steadily into a culture dominated by a single religion.

There's nothing that says religion is anathema to democracy. Look at India. We have somehow solidified this notion, though, that absolute religious silence is the most democratic expression. Well, we've seen what that brings. Shall we try again?