Submitted to a Candid World

Religion has always been an integral part of American culture, but to argue that it is an integral part of American democracy is to vastly overstate the point. I cannot stand to see politicians arguing that religion alone is responsible for American freedom, American morality, or American successes. The American polity, and the system that defends it, is unique and independent from religion.

That’s why I was less than thrilled to read this speech, by failed presidential candidate and panderer par excellence Mitt Romney. In Mittens’ mind, “freedom requires religion.”

Read why & how he fails, below the line.

Mitt contends that the only reason that we aren’t, essentially, killing ourselves and ruining democracy in the process, is that religion holds us back:

Our constitution and freedom would only endure if the passions and destructive tendencies of man’s nature were constrained by the bounds of religion.

No. Mitt misconstrues the entire purpose of a constitutional democracy. The Constitution presupposes an anarchic state of politics in which each faction will seek to one-up the other, where the coequal branches of government seek to attain uncontested dominion for each other. Much like Christians suppose that mankind needs God’s will and Jesus’ redemption to save themselves from sin, the Constitution supposes that democracy needs rules, because only firm rules, checks & balances, and a precommitment to certain foundational ideas (free speech, due process) can restrain man’s baser instincts from running roughshod over the citizens’ civil liberties. If religion can save the individual, it cannot save the state.

In short, if religion worked to “contrain” our “passions and destructive tendencies,” we wouldn’t need a Consitution, and we wouldn’t need a democracy. A perpetual benign dictatorship would serve the purpose just as well, without all the transaction costs entailed by democracy. But since religion does not work that way, we must have, as Sanford Levinson puts it, our “Constitutional Faith,” our civic religion, to restrain us.

The Constitution not only proves that religion is an ineffective restraint against greed and power, but actually identifies religion as a source of conflict. The Establishment Clause and its injunction against the creation of a favored class, in terms of religion, is right up there with other constitutional guarantees that prevent a “tyranny of the majority.” Although religion no doubt works good - and nowhere will I dispute that fact - the Constitution clearly defines faith as a potentially divisive element. Mitt nowhere admits this nuance, which I think is fatal to the honesty of his speech.

Mitt further takes it upon himself to defend religion as the only source of personal morality, a view which I think any rational mind should find very troubling.

I don’t mean to suggest that truth can only be found in religion or that morality exists only among believers. But I do believe, like Adams and Washington and Hamilton, that “national morality” as Hamilton put it, “require[s] the aid of . . . divinely authoritative religion.” I believe that religion is the most effective bulwark against moral relativism — which, as I have seen through my life, can be so malleable that it can label “evil good, and good evil;” as it says in Isaiah and “put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

If the only source of morality is a personal interpretation of scripture or religion, a pluralist society is quite literally adrift, with rules that the state can’t morally apply to people of different faiths unless one posits the objective truth of one religion… which obviously has its own problems. Now, moral relativism isn’t the answer, either. But it’s a hell of a lot farther along in the questioning process than Mitt is, here. The day we realize that democracy commands our own objective civic morality (does “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” ring a bell?), we’ll be a lot better off than we would be under a hypothetical Romney Regime.

I will give Mitt credit for one thing: in an earlier speech of his, he seemed to posit a theory of America that left atheists, secularists, and humanists out in the cold. This would, of course, put him in good company with President Bush (who said, “no, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”). But Mitt took it upon himself to defend the rights of atheists to exist, at least:

If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned…

We are all in this together. Religious liberty and liberality of thought flow from the common conviction that it is freedom, not coercion, that exalts the individual just as it raises up the nation.

This is a laudable principle which is only loosely at home in his speech, an affair which at every other turn conflates the religious salvation of the one, with the salvation from tyranny of the state. I recommend Romney take two constitutional law classes, and call me in the morning.