The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has launched a new website dedicated to religious liberty, First American Freedom. Why? From the section “Threats to Religious Freedom“:
Today, religious freedom is under threat throughout the United States—at all levels of government, federal, state, and local—and abroad.
For example, at the federal level, the Department of Health and Human Services recently decided that Catholic schools, charities, and hospitals are not “religious employers” that deserve religious freedom protection. As a result, these ministries will be forced to provide and pay for things that violate their moral and religious beliefs, as a part of the health insurance coverage they offer their employees.
At the state level, Alabama has passed legislation that would prevent Catholics from serving undocumented immigrants, even with basics like food, shelter, and medical services. And in Connecticut, legislators proposed a bill that would have forced the Catholic Church to change how it is structured and governed—allowing the State to remake the Church in its own image.
For all these serious threats and ominous trends here in the United States, the attacks on religious liberty around the world are far more severe—and also growing. Assassinations, the bombing of houses of worship, and the torching of orphanages out of hostility to religion are unfortunately still common in many countries. One recent study describes a “rising tide” of threats to religious liberty, with three quarters of the world’s population living in countries with high or very high restrictions on religion.
Note the concerns here are broader than the HHS Mandate and broader than the Catholic Church in America. Whoever wins the election Tuesday, and whatever the courts might do with the Mandate, religious liberty will continue to be a major cultural and political issue going forward, and indeed a perennial issue, as the religious freedom generally enjoyed in America is a historical anomaly, and even within America it has been rough sledding at various points for many groups — Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Quakers, Muslims — depending on time and place.
November 4th, 2012 | 12:03 pm
“religious liberty will continue to be a major cultural and political issue going forward, and indeed a perennial issue”
So has abortion been a major cultural and political issue (four four decades now) but the slaughter continues and now we’ll be forced to pay for it. The problem isn’t that there’s an intrusion by the state, it’s that there is a modern superstate, and like all temporal rulers, it is has its ambitions-that are packaged as necessitous public purpose.
Unfortunately, those zealous ambitions have means. The state has an unlimited and unbounded financing mechanism, unlimited jurisdiction (just ask the Supreme Court, they’ll find some authority in the enumerated penumbrae) and a monocultural worldview and well oiled machinery that extends material benefits for political loyalty and servitude .
Until statism is seen as the form of idolatry that it is, incomparable with authentic religiosity and fraught with the danger of tyrannies ranging from capricious edict to mass slaughter, this problem will remain. A website isn’t going to do it. Worse, the message is diluted with the moral equivalence and linguistic engineering of “undocumented immigrants”.
What is ironic is that those relentlessly search for, and become “ballistic” from even the whiff of libertarian influence in politics are indistinguishable from the hard-core libertarians that see national borders as illegitimate restraints, because those borders impinge upon the idea of unlimited personal autonomy and the term “undocumented immigrant” is borrowed from the libertarian lexicon.
Worse, if you talk to the young, they are so steeped in statist ideology-the only way they frame the concepts of “rights” is the pursuit of state sponsored (often theatrical) economic vendettas or sexual libertinism. To the extent they think of religious rights, it’s to dismiss religion as irrational, personal and destructive.
November 4th, 2012 | 10:08 pm
The atheistic, radically secularized modern state does not acknowledge any authority above itself; it seeks to coerce undivided allegiance to itself through the ever increasing dependency of the people upon it for the necessities of life. It is hard to resist the will of those putting the “free” bread on your table – but the bread provided by the state is not really free. The secular state puts a hook in it and attempts to reel in submission to its will that violates the consciences of those who realize that Man does not live on bread alone, and that the atheistic conception of humanity and of government is fundamentally wrong in its rejection of our inalienable, God-given rights, in its rejection of the basic fact that the state exists for humanity, not humanity for the state, and in its rejection of the fact that rights of humanity do not come from the state, but are possessed by humanity before it brings the state into being to protect the very rights which the modern, atheistic, radically secularized state now tramples upon.
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