Sullivan On The Role of Religion In Political Decisions

Andrew Sullilvan watches with amusement as some Republicans panic over what has happened to their party. He writes, “It’s amazing to me to watch Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer begin to panic at the signs of Christianism taking over the Republican party. Where, one wonders, have they been for the past decade?”

Sullivan discusses how in recent years the Republicans have made religion an inappropriate part of the debate over public party and attempts to clarify the proper role of religion in a secular state. This is worth reading as it counters the straw man argument so frequently used by those who deny separation of church and state when they falsely equate a secular state with opposition to private expression of religion:

The theocon consensus that front-runners Romney and Huckabee both reflect is that religion is intrinsic to public life and public debate, that it is a necessary component of any political discussion – and that this does not merely mean rote invocations of Nature’s God or Providence or the kind of inclusive, vague language that the Founders believed in. It means a very thick, constant and inviolable recourse to religious argument in secular politics. If you haven’t noticed this development in the past decade, you have had blinders on.

Charles again refers to a straw man so as not to sound too much like, well, “shrill hysterics” like yours truly:

“Imposing religion means the mandating of religious practice. It does not mean the mandating of social policy that some people may have come to support for religious reasons.”

But there is a critical distinction here that Charles elides. It may well be that support for a piece of social policy emerges from religious reasons. But in a secular society, it is vital that when making the argument for your position in public, you do not deploy arguments that depend on or invoke religiously-revealed truths. The essential civic discipline in a pluralist democracy is to translate your religious convictions into moral arguments – arguments that can persuade and engage people of all faiths or none. Only a few secularist extremists are saying that people’s politics should not be informed in any way by religious faith (an impossibility in any case); most of us anti-Christianists are saying rather that political arguments should not be made on explicitly religious grounds, and political parties should not be allying themselves explicitly with one religion or another.

These guidelines are not always one hundred percent clear and sometimes there is a fine line between basing public policy decisions on one’s religion versus a more general moral argument. This does provide a framework for evaluating the positions of Republican candidates with regards to whether their policies are influenced by their specific religious beliefs.

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