Arrogant majorities threaten all

Wednesday, December 3, 1997

RELIGION:

Government must protect every view equally, favoring none

Recently in Alabama, Judge Roy Moore caused a legal ruckus that
snowballed out of control, attracted nationwide attention and will
most likely wind up going to the Supreme Court. The controversy
started when Judge Moore posted a wooden plaque of the Ten
Commandments behind his bench and held prayers before court
sessions. His actions have since attracted the vocal support of
Alabama’s legislature and governor, demonstrating that the
separation of church and state remains an issue capable of stirring
up the most unbending convictions on both sides.

While the American Civil Liberties Union says this is an illegal
governmental recognition of religion, Judge Moore’s supporters say
the Ten Commandments formed the moral basis behind all our laws, so
it is proper to display them behind a judge’s desk.

As for me, well, I agree that it’s a historical fact that the
Judao-Christian religion significantly influenced our Western legal
concepts. However, it’s also a historical fact that the roots of
the Western legal system are in ancient Babylon ­ in the Code
of Hammurabi. Somehow I doubt Judge Moore will be posting a carved
image of the Babylonian god Marduk anytime soon. A true quest for
historical accuracy does not stir up the kind of passion that
partisans evince here.

Let me shift the discussion away from Judge Moore to another
church-state controversy with a longer history; namely, prayer in
public schools. Since the ’80s, activists, senators and presidents
Reagan and Bush have passionately argued for the re-introduction of
group prayers into public school classrooms.

I could recite their arguments and counter them one by one, but
doing so is pointless, as passionate people will never be persuaded
by rational arguments. Instead, I hope to ask a different question:
Why are people so passionate about this? Why does it stir such
animosity and unreasonable fury?

Once I discussed this issue with a group of people with whom I
had grown up. A judge had ordered a local public school to stop
holding prayers at the graduation ceremony, which infuriated the
people with whom I was talking. My support of that judge’s decision
had no effect on them except to make them angrier. These people
were not fundamentalists, just typical Americans. Their reaction
was a mystery to me, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to
understand it.

The proponents of public school prayer are sometimes
fundamentalists, but, just as often, they are spiritually lazy
people who never go to church (Reagan didn’t). In fact, this broad
and disparate group is not really bound together by a common dogma
or fanaticism. What unites them is an insistence that they, as a
majority, have certain god-given rights that must not be taken away
(they never perceive themselves as part of a minority, even if they
happen to be, for example, Guatemalan).

One of their rights as a majority is the right to governmental
recognition of their religious heritage. Even if they themselves
never do anything to spread Christian values, and even if the
Constitution says otherwise, still, they will never allow some tiny
minority to take their rights away. They ask, "If 99 percent of the
students are Christian, why can’t they have a Christian prayer in a
public school?"

I do agree that minorities sometimes have to accommodate the
majority’s preferences. The majority of people drive on the right
side of the road; a minority who want to drive on the left will
have to conform. So what’s so terrible about a Hindu kid or a
Muslim kid forced to listen to a "non-denominational"
Judao-Christian prayer?

Why should the majority have to make a huge sacrifice for the
sake of a minority, instead of the minority making a sacrifice? But
to ask the question this way is totally backward. The separation of
church and state does not just exist to protect the 1 percent of
non-Christians; more importantly, it exists to protect the 99
percent of Christians.

Why? It is a fact that power corrupts ­ especially the
power to determine which values and beliefs will be spread among
the people, and which eliminated. Christianity and other religions
in America have been denied one power that they are much better off
without.

Before speaking of the rights of the majority, we should first
remember that our entire political system is based on the
insistence that no group of people may be trusted with unlimited
power. Going back to the writing of the Constitution, we recall
that, to the Founding Fathers, "democracy" had negative
connotations, and meant something different to them than it does to
us: It meant unrestrained mob rule, specifically the rule of the
English tyrant Oliver Cromwell and his thugs. So the founders
drafted the Bill of Rights, with its guarantees of individual
freedom, which were specifically intended as checks upon the
majority’s will. Without such checks, democracy was dangerous and
untenable. Thus, the founders made democracy safe for the world.
Our country is a republic with democratic representation and with
strict, inviolable limitations on the power of the majority.

If any kind of power does not possess a check upon it, that
power will corrupt any group to whom it is granted (read the
Federalist Papers). Any group. That includes the president,
Congress and even the majority of the people of the United
States.

Power corrupts, but not all powers corrupt equally. Throughout
history, the most seductive and corrupting kind of power has been
the singular right to determine which values and beliefs will be
spread among the people, and which will be squashed. In the Middle
Ages the Catholic Church had this power. Later, the Soviet
government had this power. The Chinese government and the mullahs
in Iran still have this power. These institutions were or are
fantastically corrupted by it.

Consider the Iranian mullahs. Their right to exercise an
effective veto over every law and election is based on the belief
that religious leaders can be trusted with final power, because
they cannot be corrupted. This belief is obviously incorrect. There
is nothing fundamentally wrong about the religion of Islam. What is
wrong is the concentration of power in a single group, with no
checks upon it.

The greatest threat to human freedom is the belief: "The other
man’s group can be corrupted, but my group cannot be." In our
country, there are people who think like the mullahs ­ except
it’s Christians who are believed to be incorruptible. The Christian
faith arises from the belief that Jesus is the son of God and our
Savior. But the assumption that Christian leaders are incorruptible
is not a sincere part of the faith.

I once heard a Muslim say that only in America can you find the
true Islam, because here Islam is uncontaminated by connections to
political power. The separation of the spiritual power of religion
from the physical power of government is a gift to American
Christianity.

But some Christians don’t see it. Instead, they insist that if
they, the majority, want to pray in courtrooms and classrooms, a
tiny minority should not be able to take away their right to do it.
The force we are dealing with here is not genuine spirituality, nor
even religious bigotry. It is rather majoritarian arrogance.

The First Commandment on Judge Moore’s plaque says, "Thou shalt
have no other gods before me." But Hindus believe in a multiplicity
of gods. A Hindu who faces Judge Moore’s court is not being taught
to obey the law, nor to do the right thing. He is instead being
taught that other people are more powerful than he is ­ which
was the Judge’s real purpose in putting up the plaque.

And a Buddhist kid in school will be forced to remain silent,
hands folded, trying to be invisible, while the Christian kids
around him join together and look down on him (come on! You know
what children are like!). Their parents are not interested in
praying with their own children at their own breakfast tables; they
insist that teachers paid by the government and judges backed up by
the police and leaders of the armed forces must pray before captive
audiences who have no choice except to listen. They will never
settle for anything less than a direct connection between their
religion and government’s physical power.

This is the mentality of the bully. It is a mentality that says,
"There must be something wrong with you; why else would there be so
many of us and just one of you?" It is an arrogant smile through
clenched teeth, a haughty attitude that says, "Remember, we can do
to you whatever we want."

It has nothing to do with a sincere Christian faith. All
Christians everywhere desire to celebrate God’s grace. But this is
not genuine prayer nor a celebration of grace. It is a celebration
of the fact that we are more powerful than you.

A sincere faith teaches humility and self-restraint. I see
neither of these in people who seek to humiliate their minority
neighbors.

The bully has grown up now, his baseball bat replaced by an army
and a police force, but he is no wiser. Is it so important to you
to force others to conform? Then I say, that is why it must be
denied to you: because it is important to you. The irrational fury
brought to this argument is proof of the seductive power of the
arrogance of the majority and of society’s perennial need for
vigilance against that arrogance.

The notion that the many must sometimes make sacrifices for the
sake of the few is something upon which both Christians and
democrats ought to agree.