George Carlin has a Point

A THOUGHTFUL RANT

“The use of faith-based is just one more way the Bush administration found to bypass the Constitution. They knew Americans would never approve of government-promoted religious initiatives, but faith-based? Hey, what’s the problem?”

The term faith-based is nothing more than an attempt to slip religion past you when you’re not thinking; which is the way religion is always slipped past you.”

George Carlin. When will Jesus bring the Pork Chops? 2004


COMMENT

Upon the death of Eudora Welty, George Carlin became the funniest living writer in America. Here we can admire a manifest ability to display unselfconsciously the courage of one’s convictions. The provocative Mr. Carlin’s antipathy toward organized religion reveals his clear awareness that society’s elites will use whatever institutions happen to be handy in order to manipulate the masses. And what handier institution than systematized, ritualized, and concretized theism?

CS

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Tocqueville, Despotism, Liberties

SOURCE TEXT

“A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this . . . compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

“I do not however deny that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one, which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all forms which democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835


OBSERVATION

The danger Tocqueville addresses here relates to the incremental erosion of individual and community responsibility in a maturing liberal democracy. While the system typically checks the most oppressive and violent manifestations of despotism, the mundane and on-going usurpation of minority rights becomes ever more apparent. Tax-supported faith-based initiates, prison programs rewarding adherents of favored sects, and, indeed, a tax code providing relief to religions bodies and their supporters all fulfill to one degree or another Tocqueville’s fears for America.

CS

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Jefferson, Danbury Baptist Association

SOURCE TEXT

‘Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State.’

—Thomas Jefferson. Letter to Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and others, a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, in the State of Connecticut. (1802)

COMMENT

The General Baptists and other denominations springing from the tradition begun by the radical reformers of middle Europe--a movement whose members held, on theological and practical grounds, a special aversion to political involvement—brought their axiomatic understanding of the elements of Christian life with them to the English Colonies in the New World. For these heirs of Manz, Hus, Simmons, et al, seeking favor from the state, whether represented by king, duke, Holy Roman Emperor, or even an elected body, would have violated fundamental tenets. That other denominations of Anglican, Calvinist, and Roman origins had no such historical aversion to formal establishment or political favor gave minority religionists cause for considerable concern in the early days of the republic. Indeed, the individual colonies themselves were not above granting special status to one denomination or another. Under Jefferson’s leadership, first Virginia and then the US, through the Establishment Clause found in the First Amendment to the Constitution, erected the “wall of separation” to which Jefferson refers in the above excerpt. Ironic that this wall has been under mounting attack from some members of the sectarian quarter whose paths were made safer by Jefferson’s Constitutional Wall.

CS


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Freedom of/from religion, theology

INTRODUCTION

The Christian Secularist (CS) edits this blog's postings. The blog features brief passages selected from the works of theologians and philosophers followed by succinct commentary, observations, critiques, propositions, or tangential thoughts. While source material necessarily springs from the minds of well-known contemporary and historical figures, commentary from the pseudonymous CS seeks to avoid the dual bias of appeal to authority and argumentum ad hominem. Neither the name, credentials, gender, nor institutional affiliation of CS will come to light in this blog. CS welcomes thoughtful and spirited reflections on the contents of these postings.

CS

STATEMENT

“While all authority in [the federal republic of the United States] will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as for religious rights.”

—James Madison. The Federalist, Essay 51 (1788)*

PROPOSITION

The Christian faith thrives in the United States like no where else on earth as a direct consequence of the Founders’ enlightened insistence upon a secular system designed to protect the rights of those standing apart from the majority. At its ultimate peril, the nation’s Christian majority undertakes assaults upon this secular structure, a structure that has provided the very milieu most accommodating to the growth of genuine faith. Thoughtful Christians, those who know and rightly interpret the lessons of history, understand that in the liberal and educated West, a faith freely chosen is a faith of depth and that a religion imposed through coercion ultimately withers, becoming a hollowed out vestige. Hence, a term that seems on the surface oxymoronic—that is, Christian Secularism—characterizes the tradition most obliging to the survival and growth of Christianity itself. Furthermore, this tradition tolerates non-Christian thought and practice to the extent that those practitioners uphold the principles of tolerance set forth in the nation’s founding documents.

CS

*The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. David Wootton, ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2003.