Book Review: Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem

[Synnical]

For background - Noah Feldman co-wrote Iraq's supposed Constitution. Scott Ritter (former UN Weapons Inspector) comments here:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Noah_Feldman

"Now, the United States presented the interim government of Iyad Allawi with a draft Constitution that was put together by a New York Univ. scholar named Noah Feldman. Noah Feldman is an Islamist, he knows Islam, he is also an orthodox Jew. Now, I am not saying this from an anti-semitic standpoint, … But I know Iraq very well; to have an American Jew draft the Iraqi constitution in which is stated that Islam will not be the state religion is an insult to the sensibilities of all Iraqis.

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http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0532/050810_arts_god.php

Smite Makes Right
Far from Baghdad, we need a sectarian truce of our own. But are hard-believing Americans really ready for a grand compromise?

by Tim Appelo

Noah Feldman, the NYU law star who co-wrote Iraq's nascent constitution, now tackles a bigger nation teetering on the brink of religious civil war: the U.S.A. Unfortunately, both conflicts will proceed on schedule, despite Feldman's imaginative analysis, presented with a clarity rare among scholars.

In Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), Feldman explains it's not just the flash-point issues that divide us—gay marriage, abortion, stem cells, capital punishment, Terri Schiavo. More profoundly, we're split between "Values Evangelicals" and "Legal Secularists." The former aren't exclusively the Christian right, but all who think the way to unite the nation is to promote "a strong set of ideas about the best way to live one's life and the government to adopt those values." Legal Secularists include both atheists and religious people who argue that religion has no place in American government. "The conflict between the two groups now threatens to destroy a common national vision," Feldman accurately concludes.

He wants us, like Shiites and Sunnis, to cut a deal instead of each others' throats. But before he lays out the terms, he treats us to an exemplary history of the church-state problem in American history. Deftly, he shows how full of shit both sides are when they claim we either are or aren't a God-based nation.

At first, we were 95 percent Protestant, and there were no secular antireligionists. Even relative freethinkers felt that atheists couldn't be citizens, because they'd have no God-fearing reason to speak the truth under oath. (How nice to know that liars like Bush and Bolton will roast in hell!) Everybody agreed we didn't want to be like those wicked Catholics, enslaving their cash and conscience to a central authority. People feared what government would do to the individual's chosen religion, not vice versa.

And since each Protestant sect feared the rest, they hammered out a nonsectarian compromise. When public schools came along in the 1820s and the government had to codify an official American morality (unthinkable without a religious basis), the nonsectarian solution was to teach the Bible, without sectarian comment. When Ireland began exporting its Catholics to us, they complained about their kids being forced to read the Protestant King James version without a priest's guidance. From this came yet another compromise: private schools for Catholics and more Catholic-friendly public schools.

Then came Darwin and what Feldman calls "Strong Secularism," the first direct assault on Christianity. And in the opposite corner: retaliatory Christian fundamentalism. His discussion of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial makes a familiar tale fresh and strikingly applicable to the current cultural prizefight. But in fact, the Darwinites did not win (evolution teacher Scopes was convicted, even if evangelicals were ridiculed). Once-ubiquitous lecturers like Robert Ingersoll, the Billy Graham of atheists, were utterly forgotten, and traditional religionists got far smarter. Both sides regrouped for today's much bigger bout. "Strong Secularists" morphed into "Legal Secularists," who quit trying to shout down believers—a hard sell, especially after America's clash with godless Communism made atheism seem unpatriotic. Since the Holocaust and the civil-rights movement made the country's ruling elite newly sensitive to imperiled minorities, Legal Secularism was devised to protect religious minorities from the Christian majority, while insisting on the validity of all religions that know their place—outside the public square.

Legal Secularists' postwar success in driving prayer from schools and religion into the political closet also drove former religious enemies together. Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and others became the new Values Evangelicals that helped propel Reagan, Bush, and Bush to power.

Feldman's solution, in light of the history he so engagingly relates, is to pitch another historic compromise. Legal Secularists should give up on banning religious language and symbolism from the public square. In with crèches, Merry Christmas, and Ten Commandments statues. But to preserve the politically sacred church-state wall, ban all state funding of religious institutions and activities. The formula is simple: When it comes to religion, "No coercion and no money."

Feldman's plan would be perfect—except for the fact that the Bush Evangetaliban is all about coercion and money. Its goal, as Esther Kaplan documents in With God on Their Side, "is not to engage your opponents in the public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile." The imams of the right won't stop with symbolic victories. They want gays in re-education concentration camps, teenagers in madrasas preaching Values Evangelism and Intelligent Design, All Things Considered replaced by religious hate radio. They aren't kidding, and they are winning. Feldman's mistake is to think that Values Evangelicals value anything but brute power.

I have a different compromise to propose. Why try to be united? Americans, red and blue, have no common national vision and never will again. Feldman's own insightful quickie history proves our belief groups have fissioned steadily for centuries. Instead, on "values" issues, permit each municipality to declare itself red or blue, on the model of dry and booze-permitting towns. If all Florida rots into an ignorant, befouled backwater run by corrupt judges and Bush oil theocrats and overrun with pregnant teenagers who remain coke-addicted drunks until discovering Jesus at 40, like George, let them have their place for that. Red America, send us your gays, your morning-after-pill doctors, your science teachers yearning to breathe free! This country's big enough for both of us—as long as we stay divided. Meanwhile, one suspects only the blue half of America will read Feldman's book. The red half will probably burn it.

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[Book Lover]

1. On that same note

http://www.slate.com/id/2124297/

Evolution vs. Religion: Quit pretending they're compatible
By Jacob Weisberg

(final 4 paras)

That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was "utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God." (The passage is quoted in Daniel C. Dennett's superb book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.)

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, was saying nothing very different when he argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on July 7 that random evolution can't be harmonized with Catholic doctrine. To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who believe in God, and even Darwinists who call themselves Christians. But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence. Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria, doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose minimal role might have been to flick the first switch.

So, what should evolutionists and their supporters say to parents who don't want their children to become atheists and who may even hold firm to the virgin birth and the parting of the Red Sea? That it's time for them to finally let go of their quaint superstitions? That Darwinists aren't trying to push people away from religion but recognize that teaching their views does tend to have that effect? Dennett notes that Darwin himself avoided exploring the issue of the ultimate origins of life in part to avoid upsetting his wife Emma's religious beliefs.

One possible avenue is to focus more strongly on the practical consequences of resisting scientific reality. In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs, can the U.S. afford—ethically or economically—to raise our children on fraudulent biology? But whatever tack they take, evolutionists should quit pretending their views are no threat to believers. This insults our intelligence, and the president is doing that already.

[Kolesar]

2. This is enough to make me rush to the Mental Health Forum

Add this to the progress of global warming and I don't feel too good.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. "permit each municipality to declare itself red or blue"

An what happens when the Federal govt (all 3 branches) becomes permanently, overwhelmingly red (i.e. the entire country becomes an ignorant, befouled backwater run by corrupt judges and Bush oil theocrats and overrun with pregnant teenagers who remain coke-addicted drunks until discovering Jesus at 40)?