c. 1996 Religion News Service
(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421,1551(at sign)compuserve.com.)
(RNS)-Many voters are somewhat familiar with the Republicans now seeking their party’s presidential nomination, though most would be hard pressed to name them all.
But few would have trouble identifying the other actor in this drama, a force allegedly as nefarious as it is virulent, a juggernaut that, if not checked, will allegedly replace representative democracy with a system not too far distant from the political arrangement currently existing in Iran.
I speak, of course, of the Religious Right.
Religious conservatism is being billed in some quarters as the greatest threat to liberty since Soviet communism. Yet this is a complete misreading of both history and contemporary American life. If ever there were a misunderstood political group-a group in which I hold membership, I should point out-this is it.
Far from being the aggressors in this nation’s culture wars, religious conservatives are fighting a rear-guard action, one that has arisen in response to the ferocious secularization of American life.
Far from being the lifelong enemy of the American left and, increasingly, the American mainstream, the religious conservative movement is a product of both.
I am not the only one to make this observation. Harvard Professor Nathan Glazer has written that the rise of the Religious Right was purely a”defensive reaction in the conservative heartland.” The roots of the movement are quite easy to discern.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Christian political movements were largely of the left, and often commendable. Civil rights marchers poured out of mainline churches and made America a better, more just country. Meanwhile, fundamentalists and evangelicals tended to their knitting and were largely left alone.
Then began a series of remarkable events, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that outlawed Bible reading and organized prayer in the public schools. These cases represented a dramatic reversal from a long line of cases that accommodated free religious expression.
For example, the 1952 Zorach v. Clauson decision upheld a New York law that allowed public school students to leave school for religious instruction. Justice William O. Douglas, one of America’s pre-eminent civil libertarians, explicitly supported what had been the law from the nation’s beginning, writing that”we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme BeingâÂ?¦.”When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities … it follows the best of our traditions. For then it respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their needs.” But the decisions against school prayer in the 1960s, from the point of view of religious conservatives, signaled the opening of a Pandora’s box. Case after case was decided against traditional religious practice, including Roe. v. Wade in 1973.
In Roe, to the horror of religious traditionalists, the court ruled that exterminating human life at its earliest stages was now a constitutionally protected practice. With this decision, America had changed nearly beyond recognition, and people of good conscience could sit still no longer.
The assault wasn’t limited to the law. School boards discovered values clarification and situational ethics, which, far from being neutral, were clear assaults on traditional values. From the traditionalist view, the world has been turned upside down.
And so it goes. Hardly a week passes without religious conservatives being reminded that they are being shoved out of the American mainstream. Just recently, the judge in the latest trial of suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian ruled that Kevorkian’s attorney could quiz potential jurors about their religious beliefs, including such questions as”Does your religion forbid suicide?”and”Do you tithe or contribute a portion of your income to your place of worship?”Message: Christians need not apply.
This decision was later reversed, and that reversal is now being appealed. If the appeal is successful, this would mean that someone who objected to, say, murder on religious grounds could be excluded from serving on a jury.
The success of the campaign against religious values can be measured in the increase in the rates of crime, illegitimacy, drug abuse, teen-age suicide, and in the coarsening of our culture as a whole. The fact that religious traditionalists are fighting back by attempting to stem these terrible problems through thoroughly traditional means should not be seen as a threat to our constitutional liberties.
LJB END COLSON
