Opinion | Your religious values are not American values
When a politician “Jewish-Christian values“I find that something disturbing usually follows.
There were two egregious cases last month. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws formalizing the Christian nationalist movement’s precepts — in the words of the National Association of Christian Legislators (2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”
On June 19, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a practice knocked down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1980. A rich show of support came from Donald Trump, who crowed“I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, ABOUT THAT. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”
A week later, Landry’s fellow Christian trooper Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, announced plans to require Bible teaching in public schools. Walters said learning the Bible is necessary to “understand the foundation of our legal system.”
Forgive me for wondering: is he referring to “an eye for an eye” or the stoning of disobedient children?
In any case, to both Trump and the true believers, it hardly matters that the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from the state, not to allow the state to impose religion. (So much for originalism.) Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit.
Not only have such steps been declared unconstitutional (“I can’t wait to get sued,” Landry said), but they are also exclusionary and insulting to many.
Despite what the Christian nationalist movement would have you believe, America was not founded as a Christian nation. And it is not today. In a pluralistic country, neither the Bible nor Judeo-Christian values are universal, not even in the two heavily Christian southern states where these laws were passed.
In LouisianaFor example, 2 percent of residents are followers of other faiths — including Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Thirteen percent are religious non-conformists, including 4 percent who are atheist or agnostic. In Oklahomaa similar percentage adhere to a non-Christian religion, and an even larger proportion—18 percent—adhere to no religion.
In a business suit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which challenged Louisiana’s law, noted that among the state’s approximately 680,000 students, many practice no religion at all. In response, Landry called on his followers to “stand up for Judeo-Christian values.”
While most of the Ten Commandments contain universal principles and moral precepts can be found in the Bible, not everyone gets ethical guidance from religion. And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true God. That is certainly not true for all Americans. Some atheists and secular humanists embrace the ideal that Felix Adler, the founder of the Association for Ethical Cultureby act before profession of faith —that how we act is far more important than what we claim to believe.
Politicians, many of whom regularly flout Adler’s ideal, rarely bother to include nonbelievers—those of us who are not what politicians call people of faith—in their supposedly inclusive rhetoric. This is where leaders of both parties, with their public prayers and displays of religiosity, tend to alienate people like me, whose principles do not spring from belief in a god. Barack Obama was an exception in including people “who have no faith at all,” though I would have preferred a more elegant formulation. Many of us rationalists do have faith, but it is in science or in humanity, however disappointing humanity may be.
When it comes to the Ten Commandments, four out of ten (three if you are Catholic) pertain to a specific form of worship with a specific god. For example, I am in favor of a rule against killing, but somehow this god has allowed a lot of killing in his name.
And if you believe it is a holy book, there is much more to explain in the Bible itself. For example, the acceptance of slavery.
For me, the primary interest in the Bible is its historical and literary influence, a work whose stories and metaphors have permeated literature. But it is also a work that has inspired and fueled many of the world’s most violent and deadly wars throughout history.
In their quest to impose their religious beliefs on others or to prove their conservative Christian bona fides, Republicans increasingly lean on exclusive territory. Prominent and mainstream Republicans increasingly support the positions of the Christian nationalist movementwhich often enshrines anti-Semitism and anti-Islamic views in its creed. And it is probably no coincidence that this happens when many christians fleeing their religion, many no doubt because of the hypocrisy and intolerance they have seen.
In normal times, all of this would be quickly swept away by the courts. Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has shown that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to religious freedom — and yes, that should include religious freedom — these justices are willing to put their own beliefs above all else.
On this 4th of July, let us remember that many Americans value the inclusivity and protection of everyone in this country, regardless of one’s faith.
