Chris Jepson: Pluralism is America's national creed

An expression I find amusing is the question that goes, “How’s that working out for you?”

Nowhere is such a query more applicable today than when applied to religion. A question the West (Europe & the U.S.) has been asking for the past 400 years is to what degree should we structure our public institutions and public policy around faith, dogma and superstition? Specifically, how much should we accommodate one’s personal religion in the public realm?

We have an illuminating contemporary example of religion running amuck and, of course, that would be in the Islamic Middle East. Mohammedanism, unlike Christianity, experienced neither a Reformation, per se, nor the subsequent 150 years of crippling religious wars as did the West from, oh, approximately 1530 to 1700 (see: The Peace of Westphalia of 1648).

Four-hundred years ago the West experienced such a horrific age of religious conflict that its leaders then eventually determined, “Time out. Enough mindless slaughter already.” Basically, it was agreed that the “prince” would determine his state’s religion but the individual could practice her faith privately as well as publicly during allotted hours. We (Western nations) eventually progressed from the idea of state sanctioned religion to who gives two whits what anyone believes, let’s all mind our own business, live peacefully in pluralism and all just make a buck or two. That’s the ideal anyway.

America’s Founding Fathers were acutely aware of Europe’s religious history and in an “enlightened” consensus created our Constitution, which makes no reference to god and in fact creates, “a wall of separation between church and state,” to use Thomas Jefferson’s now famous verbiage. Today this does not sit so well with Christian fundamentalists and conservatives who make specious claims about the “original” beliefs and intent of our Founding Fathers. Regardless, those enlightened men determined that the United States did not require or need a state-preferred religion. Hence, the “wall of separation between church and state.”

It would seem—to the most casual observer—that the example of the religious turmoil in the Middle East, with its accompanying warfare, conflict and sorrow would have a salubrious (validating) affect on American sensibilities regarding the efficacy and inherent value of its separation of church and state. Yet, since the 1980s with the rise of the Religious Right in America the wall of separation of church and state has been challenged with the erroneous notion that America is a Christian nation and that its government agencies and policies should reflect a particular religious bias.

America, through its Constitution, is a pluralistic nation comprised of many religions of which Christianity in its many permutations (evolutions) is but one of countless expressions of faith.

I am not so interested in anyone’s personal faith other than from a philosophical perspective. To publicly proclaim the “truth” of your faith is meaningless and irrelevant. I practice the adage of mind your own business.

To insist, however, that our pluralistic American government reflect your religious dogma is quite another matter.

A few decades back a North African Muslim nation (see: Algeria) used the democratic process of free elections to select individuals who, lo and behold, would put in place repressive, anti-democratic religious laws (dogma). The military intervened and cancelled subsequent elections. The country slid into a civil war. I find it ironic, that a “democracy” (such as it was) would end-up subverting itself by electing autocratic theocrats that would institute despotic public policy.

Religion and governance? How’s that worked out historically?