There is no “Church of America.” That is due, largely, to the Founders’ explicit objection to the established Church of England, which was supported by the taxation of British subjects of the crown, including the colonists in North America at the time. The Founders wisely and emphatically opposed instituting any compulsory religion on the newly born nation.
Though it is true that social cohesion in a culturally homogenous population is strengthened by religious unity, the effect of having an official church in a religiously plural society is divisive. It engenders resentment from those who feel required to support something with which they sharply disagree.
However, in recent decades, the same effect has occurred — by excluding anything from official government policy that resembles religious teaching. The misunderstood “Wall of Separation” has had the effect of imposing a national pseudo-religion of secular philosophy, a counterfeit religion, which has had increasingly pernicious effects. It has engendered the very divisiveness and resentment which the flawed Separation Doctrine sought to prevent.
Consequently, the nation has struggled to find the correct balance between the valid libertarian constitutional principle of sectarian neutrality, and the insanity of libertine extremism.
The most noticeable effect, in the lives of ordinary Americans, has been the assault against parental rights, specifically in the moral upbringing of their children. Government schools were forbidden to impart religious values in the curriculum, but no such restrictions were being applied to extreme leftist ideology. Democrat nominee Terry McAuliffe, in his unsuccessful Virginia gubernatorial campaign, went so far as to say that parents have no right to decide, nor even to know, what their children are being taught in government schools. That he could so confidently expect that parents would hand their children over to him, speaks volumes of how deeply ingrained in the minds of leftists their anti-religious bigotry has become. He was ahead in the polls before he made that declaration, but then lost the election, thank God. (Irony noted.)
Fortunately, the voters prevailed in opposing that view, but more is needed. It is not sufficient to battle libertine extremism as a series of unconnected brush fires. They are all part and parcel of a unified movement in which one side, or the other, must be comprehensively defeated.
Defeating leftism cannot be done by a “Church of America,” but it can be done by an officially recognized set of moral truths, such as “There are only two sexes.”
It is absurd that vital moral questions are required to be treated by the courts, as if they were counting how many angels fit on the head of a pin, instead of getting to the actual problem. It is a moral problem.
For example, there is a wide and vast movement to enshrine the fiction of “transgender rights.” Courts of law are properly restricted to making decisions that have focused only on very narrow details of the litigation. What is needed is for the Congress and the state legislatures to pass laws that address the overall issue: the moral one.
Such laws must unequivocally state that there is no such thing as a transgender right to impose, upon other people, the obligation to acquiesce to their demands — the demands of those who claim to be another gender. Indeed, such laws should penalize anyone trying to enforce that imposition, including teachers who propagandize to their young students such absurdities as “transgender women are real women” and “transgender rights are human rights.”
Government must officially make crystal clear that these are indeed absurdities. The right to disagree remains, but not the right to proselytize the absurd to a captive audience of children.
While the protection of free speech is essential, even for libertine extremists, their speech is not more sacrosanct that that of a Jew or Christian who teaches in a public school that there is a God. If teaching of the religious view is deemed an unconstitutional infringement on liberty, then so must be the teaching of the opposing view. Indeed, the religious view of American governance has the validity of historical precedence.
Reform will not come about by endless litigation over details, but only by a comprehensive and aggressive policy from the legislatures. When government neutrality on moral issues is not possible, morality must prevail.
Divisiveness in our society has come about not because of people expressing religious views, but from people trying to silence them.
Image via Pxfuel.