The "War on Religion"- Some Thoughts

There is a war on religion, or so some strident voices on the political right tell us.  This war is characterized by a bias against people of faith, by a government determined to push the symbols of religion out of the public square, to be replaced by the approved icons of secularist atheism. What is needed, they claim, is an embrace of the spirituality of the Founding Fathers, of the faith that informed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  A return to the fundamentals is all that stands athwart the breakup of American society into an orgy of immorality, lawlessness, and rampant socialism.

Pretty much no one, least of all most of the talking heads selling the idea of this "War," takes the idea seriously.  Only blinkered partisans who feel themselves constantly under siege really press the matter...loudly.  Most seem simply embarrassed by the idea.

But we should take them seriously, not because there is a war on religion, by which the claimants almost always mean a war on Christianity, but because there has always been a war on religion.  From the beginning.  Sort of.  To understand the paradigm, and the paradox, we need to step back in time.

In the early years of Christianity, until its legalization by Constantine in 313, Christian communities lived under the threat of persecution.  Never mind that most real persecutions were sporadic and localized affairs (if they even happened).  Those that were empire-wide, including the ten-year persecution that Galerius ended two years before Constantine's edict, were traumatic enough that persecution came to be perceived as part of the Christian experience, a process by which the true believers were separated from those whose faith was lacking, with martyrs representing the highest rank of the former and the traditores, who handed over their writings and religious paraphernalia, the lowest of the latter.

Once Christianity was made legal following the last major persecution, and later still when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the perception of persecution as an integral part of the Christian experience remained, though the actual threat of it practically nil.  Since there was no outside force truly capable of persecuting Christians, the focus turned on persecution from within the newly "Christian society."  The persecutors took two forms: wrong believers, heretics, or the members of other, minority, faiths such as Judaism.

A heretic is, literally, someone who has chosen a belief different from the official, orthodox version of a given faith.  In first Corinthians, Paul writes “there must be also heresies among you, that they also who are approved may be made manifest among you.”  The heretics, then, though a minority of the faithful at all times, took the place of the persecuting Roman authorities.  That those labeled heretics also saw themselves as persecuted followers of the true Christian faith adds only the slightest wrinkle to this perception.  Heterodox or orthodox, each saw their persecution as an act of definition, as proving their worthiness in their faith.

The early heresies tended to center around the nature of Christ.  Was Jesus was essentially the same as God the Father, or was he a later creation?  Was he fully human, fully divine, or both?  Never mind that an outsider would have a hard time differentiating between the "heretics" and the "orthodox."  Never mind that on the vast majority of doctrine and history both sides would tend to agree.  The minute differences seemed as vast to them as the differences between "pagan" and "Christian" and "Jew."

Later heresies tended to focus on matters of practice, cropping up occasionally as resistance to innovation, or the entanglement of religious and secular authorities.  Again, in most cases (with the exception, for instance, of the Cathars) an outsider would be challenged to spot the difference.  Each side in these matters, though, claimed to be the inheritor of the true version of Christianity, an embodiment of the primitive Church.

Jews also played a role in this through the absurd accusations of ritual murder and of tormenting the consecrated Eucharistic wafer that began circulating in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  It is no coincidence that the tortures, of both Christian bodies and the body of Christ itself, described in these stories echo those inflicted on Jesus in his passion.   These were merely lurid reflections, in the Christian mind, of the ongoing persecution of the righteous and probably reflect a newfound concern, and perhaps discomfort, with the embodied Jesus.

During the Reformation, as new denominations began spinning off from the Catholic church in the West, part of their patrimony was the sense of being true believers persecuted for adherence to the true faith.  Catholics and Protestants both saw each other as the persecuting heretic, whose condemnation was proof of one's worthiness.

Today, the story is the same, only the villains have changed.  Now that we live in a supposedly secular society, supporters of the secular arrangement, regardless of personal faith or lack of faith, are cast as the heretics, as the persecutors.  Secularism requires, at the very least, the equal treatment of all religious groups by agents of government, if not their complete sequestration.  It requires neutrality on religious questions, and this makes some people of faith very uncomfortable.  That some religious groups in the mix are non-Christian must be particularly grating.

This situation is further complicated in American society by the fact that, like the orthodox and heterodox of bygone generations, secularists and their opponents also make a historical claim.  In our times, they both claim to be re-capturing the pristine spirit of the Constitution, much as combatants in religious disputes claimed to be re-capturing the spirit of the primitive Church.  Secularists note the deist leanings of a great number of the Framers, and language supporting the segregation of religion from politics, while those favoring a greater place for religion in the public square point to the Framers' many overt expressions of religiosity and, of course, to the reference to "Nature and Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence. 

Let us not, however, succumb to a false equivalency. Secularists, for the most part, point to the tradition of separation that began in the early years of the Republic, and to the complete absence of religious language in the Constitution.  And, while there are some shrill voices in the secularist camp, the perception of a wholesale assault on religion is just that, a perception.  For the most part, the struggle centers on the issues that arise from the need for government neutrality in religious questions, especially as American society become more religiously pluralistic.  On the other side, those who were once in power and able to assert their religious identities over and against others' see the loss of cultural hegemony and the old instincts kick in.   

Thus the narrative of persecution, buried deep in the cultural genes of Christian denominations, finds its expression in claims of a so-called “War on Religion.”  We must take it seriously because it is a serious thing, but not so seriously that we allow the shrill cries of wounded faith to drown out rational discourse.  We must, instead, seek to engage people of faith, to show them how secularism protects the realm of faith from governmental interference, how establishment of religion threatens religion and how neutrality has created a vibrant and pluralistic religious life in America.  

We will not reach everyone, but there are potentially enough people whose worries about interference in and marginalization of their faiths are not characterized by simple paranoia and concocted grievance, that we can make inroads.  People of faith and non-faith can come together to make this possible.

Otherwise the "War on Religion," a war that never was yet always has been, cannot be drawn to a peaceful conclusion.