Government and Religion Rightly Related is not a plea for a State Religion, something specifically prohibited by the Constitution. Nevertheless, religion is a vital component of democracy because democracy cannot endure without a moral citizenry, and religion is the fount of morality. Secular morality does not exist. That is not to say atheists, agnostics, and secularists are immoral. However, secularism is amoral per se. Whatever moral standards secularists embrace have been derived from religion. Removing the very residue of piety from democratic life, as seems to be the goal of some, will only hasten the unraveling of democracy in America.
Alexis de Tocqueville reflected more deeply on the inherent weaknesses of democracy, stripped of religion, than anyone at the ACLU today. “Tocqueville began with a shocker: That the first political institution of American democracy is religion. His thesis went something like this: The premises of secular materialism do not sustain democracy, but undermine it, while the premises of Judaism and Christianity include and by inductive experience lead to democracy, uplift it, carry it over its inherent weaknesses, and sustain it.
“By its own inherent tendencies, democracy tends to lower tastes and passions, to devolve into materialistic preoccupations, and to undercut its own principles by a morally indifferent relativism. Further, democracy left to itself tends to surrender liberty to the passion for security and equality, and thus to end in a new soft despotism, tied down with a thousand silken threads by a benign authority.
“Before the revolution of morals brought on by Judaism and Christianity, pagan philosophy held that most men are by nature slaves, and that ‘the strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.’
“It was Christianity (drawing on Judaism) that established three necessary premises for modern democracy: the inherent dignity of each person, rooted in the freedom that makes each person an Imago Dei; the principle of the universal equality of all humans in the sight of God, whatever their natural inequalities; and the centrality of human liberty to the purposes and principles for which God created the cosmos. In short, Christianity made the liberty of every individual before God the bright red thread of history, and its interpretive key. Underlying the chances of democracy, then, is its faith in the immortality of the human soul, which is the foundation of the concept of human rights and universal dignity. Lose this faith, and humans become harder and harder to distinguish from the other animals, and human rights become ever more difficult to define, defend, and uphold.”
The Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. No portion of the Constitution has been more violated. Religion must again be allowed to infuse American citizens, and their governments, with the morality necessary for democracy’s survival.
Posted by Jerry Pomeroy in Core Values