Maybe we’re missing at least part of the point amidst the current flap over religion, women’s health, and politics. Thus far the media has been filled to over-flowing with the politics, the religious perspectives, and the relationship of the two in the election cycle. This may be a mile wide of the core issues.
Time Machine
Lo, the hand-wringing and pontification about the meaning of the 1st Amendment! The wording of the Amendment protects our own religious practice and also protects us from the establishment of an official government religion. It isn’t too hard to figure out why the Amendment eschews an official religious establishment. Drafting the Constitution required getting Church of England and Deist delegates from Virginia to cooperate with the Congregationalists of the New England states, and with the Presbyterians of western Pennsylvania. Now, toss in delegates representing Catholic interests from Maryland, some Huguenot interests from South Carolina, some representing the interests of Lutherans in the Mid-Atlantic regions, and add an assortment of Baptists, Quakers, Methodists.
Little wonder that establishment wasn’t a unifying factor in American colonial life, by the time we became a nation:
“Religious diversity had become a dominant part of colonial life. The colonies were a patchwork of religiously diverse communities and, as a result, the population of America increased quickly. […] Groups such as the Scotch-Irish were among the first to begin that emigration to America. As a result, religious persecution was beginning to diminish and religious freedom began to replace it.” [UNC-P]
It’s useful to remember at this point that England did have an established religion — and, that was the problem. They had a civil war over the subject lasting from 1642 to 1649. We could move the date of the conflict back further if we start on July 23, 1637 when Jenny Geddes threw her copy of the Book of Common Prayer at the dean of the Kirk of St. Giles in Edinburgh. The Scots were not pleased with the perceived level of ‘romanism’ incorporated in the practices of the Church of England and the uproar in the region led to the Scottish National Covenant.
We can also move the end of the conflicts beyond the 1649 traditional date and reasonably assert that the issues weren’t close to being resolved until the end of the Protectorate/Commonwealth with the Restoration of 1659. It is highly unlikely the Framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t notice the 21 years of religious strife in the mother country. Nor were they untutored in common documents like the Cambridge Platform, the Westminster Confession, the 1649 Act Concerning Religion, and the Adopting Act of 1729.
A reasonable argument can be made that had the Framers of the U.S. Constitution NOT put religious issues off the table, it would have been well nigh impossible to come to any agreement on the form of our governance, and the shape of our political system.
Fast Forward
Nothing so fascinates human beings as our capacity to reproduce ourselves and the process by which we do it. And, the current range of beliefs on the subject extend from almost Neo-Catharian tolerance of euthanasia, contraception, and suicide, to the categorization of all sexual experience beyond pure procreational purposes (with a dab of doctrinal “Close Your Eyes and Think of England,”) as intrinsically evil. Our system of governance is expected to accommodate this rather extensive spectrum of ideologies.
When the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services proposed that basic health care insurance policy coverage would include contraceptive prescriptions the issue was drawn into focus. The compromise position was adopted saying that no religious institution which did not tolerate views accepting of contraception would be required to offer such coverage — but, health insurance corporations would be required to offer the coverage to those wishing such provisions.
Unfortunately for the improvement of our national political dialogue, the level of mis-information soon out shouted the level of accurate commentary. Opponents of comprehensive health care reform (health insurance corporations) have treated us to a barrage of fact-free statements like, “This is taxpayer funded contraception…,” which, of course, it isn’t. Twisting the logic to say that a coverage requirement for basic policies is tantamount to a taxpayer subsidization of contraceptives necessitates mental gymnastics comparable to the contortions of Cirque du Soliel.
A Gordian Knot of similar proportions is also required to frame this issue in terms of religious freedom. The concept of religious freedom as contemplated in an American context requires the accommodation of varying religious precepts, NOT the acquiescence to the precepts of any single institution. If the views of the Catholic Bishops had prevailed, then what we would have experienced was the antithesis of religious freedom, i.e. one group imposing its views on all the rest. The American public seems to sense this.
A rational discussion of women’s health issues requires moving beyond the religious rhetoric while still being cognizant of the implications of public policy on religious tenets. Federal funds may not be used, for example, to pay for abortions. Those who would outlaw abortion under any circumstances may not be pleased that the medical procedure is still legal, but they may be mollified by the fact that they aren’t paying for it. Those who don’t believe in the use of oral contraceptives may take some comfort in the fact that the health insurance corporations are the ones who will be required to offer coverage, and not the federal government. Those who are not comforted by these compromises are, in essence, seeking to impose their narrowly drawn religious proscriptions on those who don’t share them. Again, this is not religious toleration and freedom, but its polar opposite.
There was a reason back in the 17th century religious reformers were called Puritans. Their emphasis was on the purification of the established Church of England, but as with most reformational activities their voices were not necessarily in unison. There were those who believed the Church of England beyond redemption, awash in ‘romanism,” and incapable of restoration — they were the Separatists or Brownists — we call them “Pilgrim Fathers.”
At the other end of the spectrum were those who believed that the accommodations of Archbishop Laud were all that was required, and still others who thought that neither Laud nor the Separatists had gotten it right — we call them “Puritans.”
It took 21 years of Parliamentary struggles, outright bloody war, the dissolution of the British government, and its eventual restoration in a different form of monarchy, to settle the three major factions into a reasonable state of cooperation. The Framers of the Constitution learned from this experience. We should as well.
Desert Beacon 