Many religious conservatives urge the increased implementation of religious based laws. These are laws which implement a direct religious tenet (e.g. a law requiring the teaching of creationism in the public schools, or laws banning certain types of stem cell research). In the public debate, religious leaders are heard to lament the removal of “religion” from public life over the last century.
However, I make the following claim:
1) That these individuals advocating religious laws (in particular, those advocating evangelical Christianity) aren’t bemoaning the lack of *religion* from public policy, they are bemoaning the lack of *their religion* from public policy. The difference between “religious laws” in general and “religious based upon my religion” are quite distinct.
This point may seem obvious. However, I suggest that it is not, given that conservative Christians who advocate this view speak about the desire to include “religion” in public policy, not “evangelical Christianity” into public policy. This is the rhetoric used in the public debate, and in discussions, it is commonplace to hear inclusive terminology such as the “Judeo/Christian” moral framework. This suggests that these advocates are interested in further injecting the abstract idea of “religion” back into public life, regardless of the particular religious views.
The purpose of #1 is merely to highlight that Christian evangelicals really want to impose Christian evangelical public laws, not generally “religious” public laws. Why is this important? Because I suspect that most evangelicals would be less supportive of public laws implementing the views of other religions.
To highlight this, I propose a thought experiment to help individuals advocating this view understand why religion in public policy is not a good idea.
1) Agree to allow “religion” in the law-making process
2) But let someone else select the religion to be used as a basis for the laws (say, Islam, in this case).
If these advocates are really for allowing “religion” in public policy, they should be perfectly happy with this arrangement. In the scenario suggested, religion dominates public policy — it just happens not to be the religion of evangelical conservatives.
The point of this thought experiment is to is for those on the part of he majority religion to understand how it would feel to be on the receiving-end of religious based laws based upon a different religion. It’s easy to support religious based laws if they represent your religious beliefs. But once one is forced to live by laws based upon someone else’s religion, it becomes clearer that religious based law making is not a good idea in general.
I suspect that evangelicals would not be happy living under an American legal system implementing Islamic laws. For this reason, it is not hard to understand that it is not a good idea to have a legal system implementing Christian evangelical laws. Religious views are personal beliefs, and implementing them not only makes for bad public policy, it is a form of subjugation to make people with other religious beliefs live under those rules. In essence, religious based laws forces people to practice a particular religion.
This thought experiment was inspired by the philosopher John Rawls, who (roughly speaking) proposed the idea that to design a “fair” social system, the system designers should create the system before they know how they will fare in the future system (whether they will be a person of power, or powerless). Without knowledge ahead of time of one’s place in the future system, one will try to design a system that is fairest to all, or risk hurting oneself once one finds out where one stands. In the case that one turns out to be powerless in the new system, one will try to design the system to be as fair to the powerless as possible. The point of such an approach is to remove the element of self-interest from system design. Otherwise, people will attempt to design the system to advantage themselves.
Similarly, in my thought experiment, if we allow someone else to choose the religion to be implemented as public policy, I believe that people would be less supportive of the idea of religious based laws, out of concern that the future religion adopted into law would not be their own. The only fair application is to remove all religion from public policy. This thought experiment is designed to engender empathy with of the inequality of imposing the religious-based views of the majority on the minority.
Posted by bemusedatheist 