Religion & Politics - The Great Debate

It is often said that if a social occasion is to remain civil, two topics must be avoided; politics and religion. Recently there have been a couple of notable instances where it appears that in the minds of two prospective presidential candidates the line between the two is blurred.

Mike Huckabee, ex-governor of Arkansas and current Fox News host, was asked by reporters about the likelihood of him making a presidential bid in 2012. In reply, Huckabee said 'God hasn't told me yet'.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, after his speech at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, said much the same thing when asked a similar question.

To some, these might be just throwaway comments, light-hearted in nature and almost touching in their simplicity. However, to secularists they are words that start alarm bells ringing and fingers drumming.

The first question that comes to mind is if either man is elected are policy decisions going to be driven by religious sensibilities? For example, would funding for certain programs be decreased (or increased) depending on whether they align with his/her personal belief system?

A real-life instance, albeit on a smaller scale, of religion coloring public life was several years ago when controversy raged over pharmacists in a number of states refusing to dispense birth-control or the morning-after pill. The pharmacists claimed that providing those medications ran counter to their own religious beliefs, so they felt compelled to turn away customers looking to procure them. Some of the pharmacists also said they thought giving out birth-control violated the hippocratic oath, although it's hard to not suspect that their religious convictions were the driving force, and it was merely convenient that an applied reading of the oath was available for use as a compounding argument.

Bringing us back to the religion-in-politics question, to the secular mind the concern is around the implications if the issues in question are broader than personal health choices, and the decision-maker is the President of the United States.

There will always be debate about religion's place in political discourse; to many believers, religious beliefs are an important contributing factor to the affinity they might feel towards a particular candidate, whereas secularists seek to exclude religion from any discussion of policy-making due to its intensely personal nature and tendency to undermine objectivity. Secularists bolster the legitimacy of this goal by citing the US Constitution and its mandated exclusion of religious influence from political debate.

When presenting any argument it is very important to acknowledge head-on the counter-arguments, research why and how they exist and apply, and then demonstrate why your point still stands in spite of them. In that spirit, a secularist must acknowledge that nowhere in the Constitution do the words 'separation of church and state' appear (just as any serious and thoughtful atheist must admit they cannot actually prove there is no God), there is only a warrant against religious conviction being a deciding factor in a candidate's suitability for public office, which can be found article VI. Even in the first amendment the exact phrase cannot be found, the wording is simply as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;".

Whilst both of these pieces of text do not explicitly state that religion and politics are not to be mixed, the implications of their respective wordings are obvious. Religion is deemed to be something that exists within an individual's conscience and when making laws should not be a part of the input process. In the case of the first amendment, a crystal-clear statement just sixteen words long, two rules essential to the functioning of a free society are put in place; first, that the government has no say in what you believe (or don't believe), and second, that the government cannot enforce a particular religion or any of its practices.

The end result is the separation of church and state, since if the government is barred from influencing belief in any way, shape or form, freedom of AND from religion is established.

Secularism does not equate to atheism (although it is hard to imagine an atheist who is not also a secularist); there are plenty of believers who support secular ideals as they recognize 1), the diversity of the United States in its citizenry means that acknowledgement of one "official" religion is an impossibility, and 2) religion as an informer of policy puts us uncomfortably close to the beginnings of a theocratic system of government. Both of which could eventually result in persecution of those who hold different beliefs or, of course, none at all. It hardly needs mentioning that this was the main reason the founders of the United States left Europe.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom in 1779 and in it the ideals of article VI of the Constitution and of the first amendment are reflected:

"...that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy of the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right."

The founders of this country knew that religion, whilst important to many, was entirely too divisive to drive public policy and took action in a variety of ways to ensure it did not. We need to remind our leaders of the lessons of our forefathers and always remember them ourselves.