Although I have followed the TPM home page and Election Central for some time now, the TPM Café is a somewhat new experience for me.  It was with some real interest and anticipation that I followed the recent discussion of politics and religion, but while I found the major posts to be thought-provoking, I was rather dismayed by many of the replies.  My biggest objection is that there was not a stitch of respect in many of the responses, and I think without respect from all who post, blogs are worse than useless.

Both E.J. Dionne and the individuals who posted careful responses to his new book have certainly heard all of the objections leveled against them before, and are likely tired of them or too busy to reply to many of them.  Since my kids are busy playing video games, I thought I would try out presenting some responses to some of the more frequent claims made by those who expressed the strongest concern about the role of religion in politics.

Claim One: Religion is a personal matter that should not enter into public discussions of policy and politics.

No religious person should ever accept this claim because almost all religious traditions involve beliefs that are comprehensive in character.  Consider the conviction affirmed by Jews and Christians that they are to love God with ALL of their heart, soul, mind, and strength.  This means that their love of God cannot be compartmentalized within their lives, reserved for private expressions of heart, soul, mind, and strength, but not public ones.  If I take public action and I also believe that I should love God with all that I have, then my public actions must be understood by me as an expression of my love for God.  Add to this another claim shared by Jews and Christians that one should love neighbors and strangers as oneself, then it is obvious that one who believes this could not be indifferent to the treatment of neighbors and strangers in public life.

Similar claims can be made from other religious traditions.  For the Muslim, all life should be an expression of perfect submission to God, and this means public as well as private life.  For a Buddhist, life may be about following a path toward individual enlightenment, but this path cannot be walked without a commitment to reducing the suffering of others, and to showing compassion to all.

Claim Two: Religious belief is not rational.

While there are certainly situations where religious people have acted irrationally, it is just not true that all religious belief is irrational.  For starters, a belief that is not obviously rational is usually also not obviously irrational.  Take the Trinity, a position picked on by multiple respondents (and a tradition that I as a sorta kinda Christian do not myself affirm).  Affirming the Trinity does obviously require affirming something like a square circle, something that would be clearly incoherent.  Rather, it affirms something of which we have daily experience; namely, that a single individual can have a complex identity.  I have my father side, my husband side, my professor side, my neighbor side, etc.  My point is not to defend the Trinity, but rather to indicate that it is not clearly irrational.  If a major religious tradition, one affirmed by countless very intelligent people for centuries, teaches this belief, one is clearly not acting irrationally by affirming it.

Second, I think there are many grounds for affirming that belief in God (or even the gods and ancestors), is more rational than the denial of God’s existence.  This is not the place to go over the defense of this claim, but such a defense would include claims such as

1) God places goodness and purposefulness at the heart of reality, and so enables us to make sense of our own daily experiences of goodness and purposefulness in a way that the mere matter in motion of science does not.

2) God’s ordering of the world explains why we perceive order over time in a world where quantum indeterminacy should otherwise suggest a world that ultimately goes in countless different directions, dissolving into chaotic disorder.  God orders quantum reality by keeping it within the statistical parameters that physicists observe, not by determining exactly what will happen in the world (which would mean reality is actually completely deterministic, a position that atheists strangely seem to prefer).

3) God’s existence better explains many religious experiences than does biological reductionism.  There is not doubt that having a religious experience is different than understanding that experience correctly, so the experience itself proves nothing.  However, the experiences do need explaining, and the existence of dimensions to reality beyond what we daily perceive is a better explanation than one that essentially reduces religious experience to delusion and hallucination.

Claim Three: Atheists are picked on by religious people

No doubt this has been true and remains true in too many places, but it simply is not the case that it must be true.  In fact, I believe that religious people often have a better reason to value every human life and to respect its dignity than do non-religious people.  Too often, in our discussions about human life and politics, we buy into a hierarchical understanding of the value of human life.  Some human lives are viewed as more valuable than others, and our political actions reflect this hierarchy.  We care about kids in our school district, but not others, we ignore what happens to people in jails and prisons, because they are just not worth caring about, we bomb people who are far away and who exist for us more as abstractions than real human beings.

From within a nonreligious worldview, I think it is very easy to think in this hierarchical way about human life because it is the way we tend to think about everything else.  Why should human life be different?  However, many religious traditions affirm a radical alternative to the hierarchical valuing of human life; namely, that all human life, simply because it is human, is of immense value.  Perhaps this is because we are created in the “image” of God, or because we each have Buddha nature.  Whatever the reason, the value of the human life comes from its humanity, not from its beliefs or actions.  Thus, the life of an atheist is to be valued as highly as the life of any other person.

I think a democracy that affirms government of, by and for all of the people, not just some of them, is better served by this radical religious understanding of life than by beliefs that offer no reason why all people should be valued in the first place.