Why We Are Arguing About Religionby Bruce Frohnen
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/arguing-religion.htmlMost of us have been told from a young age that religious beliefs cause strife. The early modern “wars of religion” are portrayed as merely the most overt form of what happens when religion is allowed too much influence in public life. Of course, Protestant and Catholic forces fought on both sides of these conflicts. Nonetheless, we are taught that they were not primarily about the consolidation of national and royal power, but, rather, about religious intolerance. The solution, then, is supposed to be strict separation of church and state—leaving those who “have” religion to follow their beliefs in private, while preventing them from imposing those beliefs, or stirring up pain and trouble with those beliefs, in the public sphere.
There is, in fact, a certain logic to this position. If you are convinced that religion is an irrational set of beliefs that cause irrational people to fight over what they believe (falsely) is crucial to eternal salvation, you should try to keep those beliefs out of the public square. The solution, then, is a secular society that is “tolerant” enough to allow religious people to do their religious business, whatever it may be, behind closed doors.
The only real problem with this position is that it is based on a set of prejudices that utterly misconstrue the nature of religion. Religion is not merely a set of abstract beliefs. Thus, even if secularists were correct in their conviction that religion is all superstitious garbage, they still would be wrong in claiming that they can compartmentalize religion out of the public square with anything less than repressive action worthy of a police state. Sadly, proof of this fact, evident everywhere from America’s heartland to the streets of Bagdad, is consistently ignored by those whose “faith” lies in their prejudice against religion.
The very word religion means “to bind.” Not “to believe in angels or fairies” but “to bind.” In our hyper-individualistic culture, many people have many different beliefs about religion—most of them boiling down to the self-confident demand that whatever we do will result, ultimately, in God, Gaea, or “the universe” rewarding us for our self-esteem and “good intentions.” These are not religions. They bind us to nothing but our own vapid fantasies, demanding of our solipsistic sense of reality that we be affirmed. A religion, on the other hand, is a way of life. It is something that binds us, not merely to a set of beliefs, but to a set of habits, as well as institutions, through which we learn and follow a specific form of conduct, attempting to walk in the ways of our Lord.
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