Let’s start with the video clip that prompted the question:
When I first heard this I was convinced, as Chris Hayes suggests, that this way lies ruin. First of all, from the American point of view, it seems that this would be applying a religious test to a candidate for office, and this the American Constitution simply rules out. [This misunderstanding is corrected by Another Matt in the first comment below.] However, from another point of view — and one that may not in fact be a violation of constitutional rights to freedom of religion — asking such a question does make some sense. The assumption lying behind the idea of a religious test for office is that a person’s religious beliefs are private and have no public application — in the sense that they should have no bearing on public affairs. American experts on the constitution can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems clear that the founders of the Republic realised that making religious profession a condition of office would in fact institutionalise religious differences that would prevent the establishment of a federation in the first place. The resolution of this problem was to expel religion from the public, and confine it to the private, sphere.
However, things have worked out differently than the founders of the Republic could have imagined. For they were enlightened men, and from their vantage point in history it seemed fairly clear that religion had no more public role to play. However intense people’s religious beliefs and feelings were, they had no public application. I suspect that they would be surprised at the robustness of religious belief in the United States today, and even more surprised at its insistent quality, its clamouring for public recognition in law and governance. And I think they would wonder where they had made the mistake that had enabled religion to capture such a huge public footprint, which they thought they had excluded. I daresay, had they known what was to come, they would have institutionalised some protection against the growth of such a forceful public expression of religious conviction, and the threat of its instantiation in law.
But surely belief in transubstantiation is not such a belief? No one is suggesting that such a belief be enshrined in law, are they? Well, I suspect that this is, in fact, the suggestion. No, not that belief in the wafer being turned, by the power vested in the priest, into the very substance, the very being, of Christ’s body (and blood — for it has generally been held that the communicant receives both body and blood when receiving communion under the single specie of the bread); no one would dream of enforcing this particular belief. But this belief conceals a metaphysical belief that some people would like very much to see enshrined in law. Transubstantiation is not just about a magic act, the hocus pocus of the mass. It’s about a metaphysical principle that has much wider application. If bread conceals the very being of Christ, so, within the conceptus is concealed the very being of a human person. And people do want to enforce that belief by means of law, so that, from the moment of conception a human person exists which has all the rights that are possessed by an adult human being. The same thing goes for Anthony Bland or Terry Shaivo. They have been thought to be persons in the full, metaphysical sense, no matter what the condition of their brains might have been, and killing them, from the standpoint of those who believe in the kind of substantial being that is exemplified by transubstantiation, is murder, plain and simple. Alex Schadenberg says that Terry Schaivo underwent “slow euthanasia,” and euthanasia, in Schadenberg’s terms, is murder, so she was, in that sense, murdered.
So, I think we do need to challenge people who believe in transubstantiation. When Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister of Canada, he set his religious beliefs aside when it came to the question of abortion, for those were private beliefs not shared by all Canadians. He was right to do so, but can we depend upon Roman Catholics to separate their public from their private lives in this fashion? It seems that we cannot, and, what is more, there are plenty of instances of bishops threatening with excommunication those who do. As I thought about it in this way it occurred to me that what religious people believe is of urgent importance to those whose votes they seek. Are their religious beliefs private beliefs, or are they not? And how can we tell if we do not ask them? I conclude that Dawkins’ position is much more defensible than Chris Hayes thinks. If it leads to civil war, then we are in trouble, for that is how tenaciously these beliefs hold onto people, who will not be content until the whole world is required to believe as they do, and act according to those beliefs. Isn’t Chris Hayes’ apparently hyperbolical concern about civil war an indication of how important it is that politicians be strictly vetted as to the role that their (private) religious beliefs will play in their public lives? I think so, and the question is of great and increasing importance as public life becomes the place where religious convictions contend and strive and intertwine with each other, often at the expence of the rights of real persons, who have lives to live and projects to carry out, ideals by which to live, and hopes for the future.
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This post was accidentally published by a combination of key strokes made by chance! I wanted to end by using myself as an example. I usually vote Liberal in both provincial and federal elections. One time, to my shame, I voted Conservative, but that was a long time ago when I was young and foolish, and the leader of the Conservative Party (called “Progressive Conservative” in those days) was a Nova Scotian. However, at the present time the provincial Liberal Party is led by a man who is a Roman Catholic, and has expressed himself in opposition to assisted dying. So I did not vote at all in the last provincial election. I was not prepared to elect someone who would, if elected, be a force opposed to a change in the criminal code that would leaglise assisted dying. Not that he would have a deciding vote, since the criminal code is within federal, not provincial, jurisdiction; however, I simply could not vote for a party led by a man who had expressed himself in favour of enforcing a religious principle about the supposed sanctity of life.
Not at all – as far as I know, a “religious test” would have to be be part of a law that would make someone legally ineligible for office by professing some beliefs and not others. Asking candidates about their religious beliefs, or how their religious beliefs would inform their governance, letting them evade those questions if they want, and then letting the voters decide is quite in the spirit of American democracy.
Thank you, Another Matt. On reflection that seemed to me to be likely, but I was not at all sure. My knowledge of things American is, I am afraid, deficient.
Now, of course there are de facto religious tests — it’s nearly impossible for an open atheist to achieve national office in the US, for religious reasons — but as far as I know, it’s the de jure situation that counts constitutionally.
There’s a big difference between barring people from office because of a religious belief (or lack there of), and people not voting for people because of a difference in religious opinion. Interestingly, a few states, including my home state of North Carolina, have provisions in their state constitutions barring atheists from public office, which fortunately don’t even get applied since they’re obviously against the First Amendment (which NC was oddly enough instrumental in producing).
But I really don’t like politicians acting like their freedom to practice their religion exempts them from the obligation to explain how their decision making processes work, and whether their loyalties to their religions would blind them to alternative arguments. Particularly since ‘religion’ can mean literally endless amounts of craziness, from the agnostic that goes to a UU, to the FLDS cultists marrying their neighbors 14 year olds. I’d be happy to vote for a good Sikh candidate, but I’d like to know that he’d have the sense not to cause a big stink over not carrying a knife around other world leaders.
I wish we would move these debates from beliefs to claims. Short of neural imaging determining my beliefs, they are private from a practical standpoint, but when someone asks me a question and I make a claim, that claim is public. All claims are public, even if they are made alone in a submarine at the bottom of sea. We ought to hold all claims and all claimants to the same standards of evidence. There is no reason why religious claims ought to be treated as privileged from the general standards of evidence. The example of whether Terry Schaivo illustrates the problem well. Maybe people could evade it by talking about claims made in different capacities. Someone could say that “as a Catholic”, she believes that Terry Schaivo has a soul, but “as a doctor” or “as a legislator” she is dead and no longer exists. My worry is that this divided self is extremely hard to maintain.
If an office-holder says something in public which is untrue, and can be shown to be untrue, then I think the media have not only a right but a duty to point out that it IS untrue. The only way we have to assess the quality of our public figures is through what they say in public: and if that includes statements that are clearly wrong and devastatingly silly, that’s important information for the people who are paying their salaries — or giving them tax breaks.
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Matt makes a good point. If it’s impossible for an atheist to get elected then any candidate who wishes to win must profess some religion, even if he doesn’t actually believe it. Mitt Romney is a Mormon?* Probably, but you can’t say for sure.
So it is everywhere in America. It costs nothing today to say that you believe in god where you can lose everything by admitting that you don’t. You couldn’t sell used cars at Big A motors and hope to make any money. So there’s no way today to say how many of us are still in the closet.
*Misspelled Mormon there in first draft and the spellcheck didn’t catch it. Left out an m.
The key is that it might be imprudent to be interpreted simply as a cultural Protestant with a particular historical grudge. I mean, hell, the resurrection is just as irrational, and more to the point insofar as Christianity (of all stripes) is concerned. When one is British and culturally-historically Protestant, it can look a little funny even to an atheist like myself who is culturally-historically Catholic and of Irish descent to apparently single out Catholic superstitions. If we add the evangelical Protestants who reject evolution and believe in the Divine Command Theory then it seems like a more even-handed smackdown ( I do realize Dawkins frequently goes after those idiots too).
I didn’t and still don’t accept the validity of the distinction that Chris Hayes tried to draw between “private belief” and “public belief,” where the content of both “kinds” is religious. I’d rather draw a distinction between –
(1) beliefs or claims that have no impact on my life, my property, or my liberty (in Jefferson’s words, they neither pick my pocket nor break my leg), and
(2) beliefs or claims that may have a serious impact on the lives, property or liberty of other citizens, including me, because those beliefs or claims either motivate or are cited as support for particular changes in law or public policy.
A belief or claim in transubstantiation, or in Mary’s immaculate conception, or in the bodily resurrection of some saint or demigod, or in salamanders, gold plates, and magic underwear, falls into the first category, it seems to me. Many of these beliefs are professed only in collective ritual settings at particular times of the week, as a sort of play-acting, and the rest of the time, in other settings, the claimant or believer’s words and actions don’t give a hint that he or she has the belief.
A belief or claim in special creation and in humans’ god-given dominion over the earth and all living things can pretty easily fall or slide into the second category. So can the claim that god owns our lives, or that a creator of the universe has plans for and gives commands to human beings, through direct revelation to believers or to human intermediaries.
I am not troubled by beliefs or claims of the first type, and I don’t take the time to ridicule or criticize them openly, unless the claimant comes up on my front porch or rings my doorbell and attempts to evangelize or proselytize. When beliefs or claims of either type are trotted out as a justification for policies that could affect my life (the public school science curriculum, taxpayer funding of “faith-based” initiatives, energy and climate change policy, Catholic hospitals’ treatment of patients with advanced health care directives), then I take every opportunity to criticize them.
When the person who professes a belief or claim is a candidate for public office (either elected or appointed), then I set a lower bar or threshold or trigger point. Even a belief in transubstantiation, or in djinns, in some tenet of Scientology, may suggest that a political candidate has a faulty epistemology, that he or she has bad mental habits and isn’t capable of reaching reasoned conclusions supported by evidence. I’ve reached that conclusion about Mitt Romney and (to a greater degree) about Rick Santorum. When the claimant or believer is a candidate for public office, any alleged validity of the “private belief” / “public belief” distinction dissolves.
Jeff, well said.
Jeff, I think that is a good analysis of beliefs that are, and beliefs that are not, of public interest, as Kevin says, though by the end you seem to have changed your mind, when you claim that for any candidate for public office the public/private distinction disappears. There’s a good reason for that. Take the doctrine of transubstantiation, for example: as I try to indicate, that has follow on effects in the way that a person will regard the nature of physical things, especially in so far as those things are believed to have a hidden ontological dimension, as in the theology of the embryo. Anyone who can see a wafer as the actual body of Christ — that is, takes transubstantiation seriously — must see the embryo as sacred and inviolable, because possessing the very essential being of the fully human. In part that’s faulty epistemology, but it goes much deeper than that, because this is an entire world view which cannot avoid affecting the way a person acts and the decisions he will make. I think the public/private distinction rests, not only on the content of belief as such, but on the way those beliefs are held. If they are held in such a way as to affect a candidate’s public decisions in the absence of other bases of decision making, then it would be best for that to be well known, so that those affected can act accordingly, both in voting against that person, but also in protesting the application of such beliefs in the public realm.
Charles Sullivan. I’m not quite sure what your point is. I think it may be important to point out that many Protestants have no idea why they are opposed to abortion or assisted dying, and other things on the Christian political shopping list. But Catholics have a well developed theology of the human, and they have been carrying the can for Protestants as well as Catholics. Without the Catholic Church, Protestants wouldn’t be able to find very strong arguments for opposing the things that they do, so they grab onto Catholic coat-tails and away they go. Protestantism is pared-down Christianity, and has not had a developed or sophisticated theology for some time, except for Karl Barth, perhaps, and, of course, liberal Protestant theology, so the best that can be said for most of Protestantism is that its a kind of irrational pentecostalism of the “Praise Jesus,” “Thank you Lord” variety. There’s nothing to address except the irrationalism. The Catholic Church, however, provides a big target, because it still claims to have a sophisticated, fully worked out world view, which is on equal terms with anything that secular philosophy can provide. Of course, one could address oneself to liberal Protestant theology, or Anglican theology, which is a different thing, but none of that theology is really going to express itself in the public sphere, because what liberal theology does is to assimilate itself to the wider secular culture of which it is a part. So the traditions are not equal here with respect to criticism. In addition to that is the fact that the Catholic Church has enormous political power. The explanation for the growing power and presence of the Vatican is I suspect very complex, but the Vatican is, in fact, working actively to have its outlook reflected in the laws of the governments it influences. Thus, Catholicism is a very different thing from Protestantism, and Protestantism is often as happy to let Catholicism do the heavy lifting, so that Catholicism is, in fact, the weltanshauung to criticise, because it has the greatest power and the largest public footprint.
I think Dawkins is mostly interested in preventing politicians from having it both ways. Are you really a Catholic if you do not believe in transubstantiation? Can you still be Catholic and not think that contraception is immoral? Should they be allowed to appeal to both the fundamentalist and more reasonable at the same time? It seems to me he is trying to put all the marginalized beliefs front and center for the court of public opinion to consider, which no doubt will spark inspection of all the other edicts. It sounds like a great idea to me. Most believers I encounter do not give much thought all to the justifications for their religious beliefs; they just follow along as a matter of course.
This is clearly not a call for legal ineligibility based on candidate beliefs. A law that absolutely required a belief in evolution to be eligible for office would also be a bad idea, since laws in general rely on popularity and not scientific rigor. Such laws would be slow and clumsy to adapt to scientific progress.
I think Richard Dawkins’ and Sean Faircloth’s political strategy is a brilliant one. Once people start questioning the wisdom of their representatives when it comes to religion, hopefully it will no longer be a dangerous taboo.