How much more evidence do we need before people get it through their thick skulls that it is never a good idea to interject religion into our political and civil affairs? Never! Perhaps the Bill of Rights is not explicit enough. Perhaps Jesus Christ failed to make his point about God and Caesar. Perhaps we are just too damn dense to understand that religion has no place in any of our public institutions or any political forum. Period. End of sentence. Repeat after me. Never. Are you listening, Senator Obama? Are you listening, Indian River School Board? Keeping church separate from state is not just a good idea. It is one of our most basic laws and an idea that has kept this country from dissolving into a putrid cesspool of religious rot.
Despite what Senator Obama said in his
Call to Renewal speech, we need less religious discourse in politics, not more. We certainly don't need the sort of in your face rhetoric we usually get from Pat Robertson and his ilk. This particular species of religious vermin is inspired by the atmosphere of religious intolerance that is engendered by the use of faith as a political weapon. The prevalence of religious zealotry has actually cheapened religion and embarrassed those who are trying to live according to a set of religious beliefs. It has also encouraged opportunists who see religion only as a means of gaining political power and wealth. Religion does nothing to clarify political issues and everything to cloud them. Religion does not invite discussion of issues. It demands acceptance of doctrine. That is completely antithetical to the nature of political discourse.
When a speaker cites his faith as the basis of an idea, he is doing so in order to give additional credence to his idea that it otherwise might not merit on its own. Let's not even consider the situations in which a devious person uses faith as a tool to advance a personal idea which actually has no basis in faith. The problem is that people tend to think that ideas that originate from one's faith are more credible than those that do not in much the same way that we believe that deathbed confessions are absolute truth. This is because we see faith as the bedrock that should guide our belief system and our personal destiny. Faith is not something that one is usually dishonest about.
Faith itself is always an absolute. There is no room for compromise in faith. And that is precisely why faith has no place in analyzing or determining public policy, which works best when it is born out of compromise. Arguments based on faith cannot be challenged because to challenge them is to challenge the speaker's faith. The purpose of political discussion should be to present ideas and to challenge ideas in order to come up with the solution that is best for everyone. We cannot discuss issues using faith based arguments without the discussion eventually becoming centered on the religious themes underlying the arguments. The original point of the discussion is lost. We see this happen every day in the political arena.
When someone brings faith into an argument, it signals that they have made up their mind based upon religious beliefs and they no longer wish to explore the issue. They have effectively refused to hear any further challenge to their argument since it is a matter of faith. Faith is by nature dogmatic and a society that allows faith to dominate its policies and political arguments will quickly cease to grow. New ideas will be stifled in the face of faith-based arguments. We are a society that has advanced because we have made the choice to govern not by faith, but by reason.
Faith has a place in our personal lives and in the not too distant past, faith was a personal and private matter. In recent times, however, there seems to be a growing tendency to profess one's faith in public. Some of this is sham, but there are probably many people who sincerely believe that public expression of faith is a good thing. However, this is not appropriate in the political arena. Politics is not a test of religious faith. It is a test of one's willingness to serve the public honestly and fairly. Faith is not a measure of how well one will be able to govern. Solomon had tremendous faith, but the one thing he asked God to grant him was the wisdom to govern his people well. We need people who will govern wisely. That is what we should desire in our politicians, not faith.