Religion cannot be pushed aside as Wednesday lecture suggested
Sara Ryan’s talk on Wednesday [March 22] was so filled with errors or nonsense (as were some of the quoted responses) that it requires a response. As someone who has engaged intelligent design for years, I found her comment pervasively uniformed.
I suggest that she study the matter closely from both sides before she talks about it again.
More pointedly, she seems to hold that we should not use religion as a basis for public policy in America, to which I respond:
Is she aware that absolute religious toleration was first argued for by radical protestants like Baptists, more expansively than and a century before philosophers ever took it up?
Does she really mean that we should not honor, revere and teach the Declaration of Independence because it plainly teaches that our rights come from God? The founders thought that July 4, 1776, was the founding date of our liberty, which was the day when the Declaration was approved in Philadelphia.
Does she really believe that the anti-slavery movement is suspect because it was led by Christian ministers who would not compromise, like politicians in 1820 and 1850, because their faith gave them a foundation of rock not sand?
Does she believe that the Civil Rights Movement is suspect because it was led by black ministers, foremost among whom was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King? Does she know that King became the leader after an intensely personal religious experience in which he believed that he heard a “still small voice saying stand up for justice, stand up for righteousness and I will be at your side forever?” Does she know that at the seminal “I Have a Dream” speech, King, on his own testimony, says that at the end he threw away the prepared text and “spoke the words [he] was given?” This is the part of the speech we remember.
She is much too young to know about the protest against the Vietnam war, which played a large role in my college years. But would she regard such a movement as suspect because of the pervasive involvement of religious figures like Father Daniel Berrigan.
Finally, would she regard opposition to capital punishment as wrong if it was motivated by the fact that both the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops oppose capital punishment in all cases? If a governor took a personal phone call from the Pope and then commuted a death sentence, would that be wrong?
What Ms. Ryan asks of religious people in the public square is hypocrisy, a public stance that cannot be good for an open, free society. Religious citizens can support any view on public issues they want. They just cannot announce that their reason for doing so is their faith.
But faith of any real sort cannot be taken off like a jacket whenever others demand it. So she seems to be asking of religious persons to either remain silent or adopt a two-faced attitude that their very faith forbids.
In my experience, persons like Ms. Ryan are willing to grant my examples, but they recoil when evangelical religion enters the public arena with an agenda that they find distasteful. But instead of contesting the message as they should do, they prefer to say that we should ignore the messenger. This view should be rejected on its face.
Richard Sherlock is a professor of philosphy at Utah State University. Questions or comments can be sent to ruffie@cc.usu.edu.