Mack makes a lot of convincing arguments in this piece. While I don’t usually agree with Mack on everything, I think he does a fair job of protecting the role that religion has played in shaping American politics against the angry secularists who denounce its legitimacy in their field. While I myself am not a very religious person at all, I still agree that religion played perhaps the central role in forming this nation, and the Constitution is based on many of the good things that religion is supposed to provide. Mack does a nice job of explaining this in the following passage:
In many ways, American political history is the history of activist theologians from the right and the left. These men and women have been intellectuals of a special kind—people whose religious training and experience shaped their vision of a just society and required them to work for it. They have been key players in some of our most important reform movements, from abolitionism, the labor movement, and civil rights to the peace movements of various generations
This hostility towards any religion in the public intellectual field reminds me of point I made in my previous post about the pessimism towards the role of intellectualism as a whole in America. I find many of these public figures to be angry people who seem to feel they are above the rest of the country in their intelligence and importance. While I wholeheartedly agree with strict separation between church and state, I find it undemocratic to try and ban the discussion of religious values in formulating public policy. Many of the tenants of religion (specifically the Judeo-Christian values found in the majority of American figures, but found in the vast majority of all major religion) are aimed at promoting harmony and peace. There is nothing wrong with promoting just laws and policies aimed at these goals, and our country has been formed to try and guarantee at least “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as promised in the Declaration of Independence.
Now when it comes to education, I agree that religion should not be prevalent. When it comes to that realm of intellectualism (academia), the two seem to be incompatible. However, public intellectualism covers a lot more ground than just academia, and thus there is a room for religion in the realm. So I agree that evolution should be taught instead of creationism, and no public funds should go to promoting any religion in the classroom. Fortunately, these things are already protected by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Our government is designed to neither promote nor prohibit any particular religion, and so far I think it is doing a pretty decent job at it.
Recently, the role of religion in the public sphere has been magnified during the last seven years of the Bush Administration. The outspoken liberals on the left have been blaming plenty of things on the Bush Administration’s using religion as a crutch to round up support from the conservative religious population, and the conservatives claim that the liberals are attacking religion itself with their extreme secularism. There is no doubt that the Administration made a strategic decision to target the religious right in the small states and Middle America, with very successful results. However, how much has religion actually played on any important legislation? Abortion is still legal, and creationism is still not being taught in school. The only real issue with strong religious points of contention has been the debate over same-sex marriage. However, this has not been a conservative vs. liberal issue, as many democrats oppose legislation legalizing it as well. Why? Well, because virtually ALL political figures are religious themselves (and if they are not, they have to play like they are for the voters)! It is not the religious right vs. secularist left battle that it is often portrayed as. Once again, religion plays a large role in public intellectualism.
So where do we go from here? Over the course of our development as a country, we have been working to arrive to the point we are at today. There is a clear divide between religion and the state (and education), yet religion is still extremely prominent and represented by our elected officials. Public intellectuals will have to ease their anti-religion stance and recognize its importance in their field of expertise. It permeates all of society and is something that should not be feared or persecuted against.
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