Today’s entry on religion and politics from Stanley’s blog Think Again at the NYT.
Perhaps Stanley needs to think again. The Constitution was so crafted precisely to avoid the conundrum that he refers when he says “there is no way for Lynn and Stanley really to speak to one another because each begins with a different conception of the proper scope of religion. No court or legislature could adjudicate that difference, for if there is one thing everyone agrees on, it is that the state cannot specify what religion is or is not, cannot tell its citizens what should be the content of their faith.” In computer science, we would term this a deadlock solved by breaking a link in a cycle of dependencies. Here the cycle of dependencies involve the negation of state dictating to religion and the negation of religion specifying what constitutes permissible boundaries for state jurisdiction.
So what did the writers of the Constitution do? They realized that there is a single state but many religions, that religions are often at loggerheads with each other, and that the people wanted to be governed via democracy and not religion (the very tenet of Calvinism that led to the pilgrims). So they broke that cycle of dependencies by establishing boundaries for religion with respect to governance. And this is where Stanley makes a mistake when he says that the state cannot specify what religion is or is not – the state does not define religion but instead the limits to which religion can be accomodated into our framework of governance.
The tax-exempt status debate is a side-issue. Religion exists in a society organized by government. It must follow those rules. The petitioners will not win that one in court. But the underlying debate is of supreme importance and must be never lost. We will relive the tyrannies of the past if we were to ever let religion govern us again.
0 Responses to “Why is Stanley Fish confused?”