SCOTUS Attacks Religious Freedom

Joe Kennedy, a coach at Bremerton High School, began praying on the field during school events. The Washington State public school district warned him several times to stop the public prayers because it feared that Kennedy’s actions violated the Constitution’s ban on government Establishment of Religion. 

Eventually, Kennedy lost his job, and sued the district. The case, Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, ultimately went to the Supreme Court. In a clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the SCOTUS ruled in favor of Kennedy.

The rationale for the SCOTUS ruling is that Kennedy’s actions are protected by freedom of speech. As Scott Shackford reports for Reason,

In a 6–3 decision, the Court determined that Joseph Kennedy, a former assistant coach at Bremerton High School in Washington state, was within his First Amendment rights and not acting in his capacity as a school official when he prayed on the 50-yard line at football games and permitted others (including students) to join him. As such, Kennedy was not causing the school to violate the Establishment Clause and endorse a particular religion.

The majority decision for Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, leans heavily on evidence and statements that no student was coerced or ever said they felt coerced to participate in these postgame prayers. Gorsuch observes that it doesn't appear that the method that Kennedy engaged in prayer caused anybody to feel as though he were pushing his religion on students as a coach

But Justice Sonya Sotomayor easily demolishes this argument. As The MORNING DISPATCH reported on 7/6/22: 

In her dissent, Sotomayor argued that context—much of which was absent from Gorsuch’s majority opinion—was necessary to reach the correct conclusion in the case. “Properly understood, this case is not about the limits on an individual’s ability to engage in private prayer at work,” she wrote. “This case is about whether a school district is required to allow one of its employees to incorporate a public, communicative display of the employee’s personal religious beliefs into a school event, where that display is recognizable as part of a longstanding practice of the employee ministering religion to students as the public watched.”

Sotomayor’s dissent also focused on the power dynamics at play in the situation at hand. “Students face immense social pressure,” she wrote, even if they aren’t pushed to join prayers or punished for skipping them. “Students look up to their teachers and coaches as role models and seek their approval. Students also depend on this approval for tangible benefits … from extra playing time to a stronger letter of recommendation to additional support in college athletic recruiting.”

[My emphasis]

I would add that, among those tangible benefits is grades. It’s easy to see that a student may fear lower grades if she doesn’t go along with her teacher’s religious exercise. Regardless of whether there is any overt evidence in this particular case of a student being punished for not participating, the power that teachers have over students’ educational outcomes can easily foster covert forms of punishment, or fear thereof.

Here are my FB comments that accompanied my share of Supreme Court rules for coach whose prayers on field raised church-state questions.  Quoting from the article, I wrote:

"The 6-3 decision is a victory for those who seek a larger role for prayer and religion in public schools."

And it is a terrible defeat for freedom of conscience and religious liberty.

For the 2nd time in a week, the SCOTUS shredded the Constitution*, demonstrating once again the Conservatives' willingness to ignore the clear language of the Constitution when it suits their purposes.

Unlike the recent decision which affirmed the right of a Maine parent acting as a private citizen to choose a private religious school with her child's allotted education tax dollars, this incident involved a government employee acting in his official capacity at a government school function of a government school.

This is not a freedom of religion or freedom of speech issue, as the Conservative majority imagines. It is neither. The Conservative majority flippantly brushed aside the very first line of the First Amendment, which explicitly protects us FROM religion—"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". This coach didn't privately pray. He made it a public demonstration, at a public school event, as a public school employee, thus implying the imprimatur of the state and carrying the power of a law sanctioning an establishment of religion.

There is no conflict among the first 3 phrases of the First Amendment—"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech . . ."—when you draw a bright line between government and private function. Of course, the root of the problem is government schooling. These conflicts would vanish if we amended the First Amendment to add "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" and privatized all public schools—the complete Separation of Education and State.

* [The first time being the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Here is my Facebook post on the ruling.]

Related Reading: 

Separation of Church (or Education) and State

Why We Need the Separation of Education and State

Freedom Of Religion Demands Freedom From Religion

On Religion, The First Amendment Works Both Ways

Freedom Of Religion Demands Freedom From Religion

My Commentary on Church-State Separation

‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ is Not a Bigoted Term

In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, Trump's unwelcoming message to Muslim Americans like me, Fakhruddin Ahmed wrote:

Muslims immigrate to America not to change the American way of life but to embrace it. Muslims are attracted to America because of the way it is; they have no intention of changing or harming America. Muslims know that if they had settled here first, modern America would probably look like the Middle East, and would not be a welcoming beacon of freedom and innovation. Few Muslims dream of emigrating to China or Russia!

Muslims are traversing the same path of hope trodden by millions of immigrants before them. If President Donald Trump understood these simple truths, perhaps his misgivings about Muslims would subside.

As more Americans decouple from organized religion and embrace tribal and racial identities, some fear that Muslims will fill the religious void. They need not worry.  Muslim Americans are following the same trend that has delivered other religious groups to the doorsteps of secularism.

Ahmed goes on to back up his contention, which I believe is largely true. I think it’s also largely true that “The overwhelming majority of Muslims are on America's side as it fights these terrorists.” But does that invalidate Trump’s (and others’) “rationale for repeatedly brandishing the phrase ‘radical Islamic terrorism’,” which he say “conflate[s] Islam itself with terrorism and offend[s] the world's 1.6 billion Muslims who do not see a link between the two?”

I left these comments:

I sympathize with the sentiments expressed here. Muslim Americans should not be automatically lumped in with and treated like terrorists.

But there is one glaring problem—Ahmed’s rejection of the term "radical Islamic terrorism.” It is a serious mistake, especially for Muslim-Americans, to evade the actual nature of the terrorist movement, which is precisely motivated by a totalitarian ideology rooted in the Islamic religion. If this barbaric movement is to be wiped off the face of the Earth, all people—Muslim and non-Muslim, religionists and atheists—must properly identify this enemy of civilization.

The Star-Ledger recently ran a guest column by John Farmer Jr., doing just that. Farmer informed of a new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center, chaired by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton of the original 9/11 Commission, which attempted to answer the question of why the Bush strategy failed. Key quotes from the column:

"For all of its battlefield and intelligence successes," the BPC Report notes, "the United States has demonstrated little ability to degrade support for the ideology underlying jihadist terrorism."

That ideology rejects the idea of a nation state as a western creation foisted upon Islam by colonial powers. It advocates a world as a unified caliphate under a single Islamist banner, and rejects utterly the notion of the separation of church and state, believing that "the Koran is our constitution" and that religious law should inform all aspects of daily life.

Just as only Muslims can be effective in countering the Islamist version of Islam, only America and the west can be effective in countering the Islamist totalitarian rejection of our freedoms and way of life.

Ayn Rand Institute scholar Elan Journo makes the same point:

[T]he jihadists have never made their cause secret. Our enemy is defined, not primarily by their use of terrorist means, but by their ideological ends. They fight to create a society wherein Islamic religious law, or sharia, dominates every last detail of every individual’s life, a cause inspired and funded by patrons such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and above all, Iran. In our book, we call this political-ideological movement Islamic totalitarianism.

These are not Anti-Muslim bigots. These are not “Islamophobes.” These are sober, objective intellectuals. “Radical Islamic terrorism” does not mean all Muslims. It does properly conceptualize the faction of Islam we are fighting. Proper identification is the vital prelude to winning. It’s great to know that “Muslim Americans are following the same trend that has delivered other religious groups to the doorsteps of secularism.” They must be explicit. Just as American Christians rejected their totalitarian Inquisitional past by embracing the separation of church and state, so American Muslims must reject the totalitarian branch of their religion and explicitly embrace separation of mosque and state. That will definitively distinguish peaceful Muslims from the jihadists. Freedom of religion and conscience is a core unifying principle of all Americans.

The War Between Enlightenment and Fundamentalist Political Islam—and the Choice All Muslims Must Make

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Clarion Call for Islamic Reformation—Craig Biddle

The Evil of Whitewashing Islam—Craig Biddle

Why We Need the Separation of Education and State

Killeen, Texas School Bans Charlie Brown Christmas Poster by Tyler O’Neil, posted at PJ Media in December 2016, is a good example of why government schools should not exist in a free society:

Dedra Shannon, a staffer at Patterson Middle School in Killeen, was ordered [by the principal] to remove a door-length poster featuring the iconic scene of Linus in front of a kid-sized tree uttering the true meaning of Christmas: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord. That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

The principal argued that the poster was "an issue of separation of church and state" and that it "had to come down because it might offend kids from other religions or those who do not have a religion." The principal said Shannon could keep the picture of Linus up but had to remove the offending dialogue.

"I just took the entire thing down," Shannon recalled. "I wasn't going to leave Linus and the Christmas tree without having the dialogue. That's the whole point of why it was put up."

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton would not let this stand, however. He accused the Killeen Independent School District of violating the state's Merry Christmas Law. That law, passed in 2013, ensures that no school official in Texas can silence a biblical reference to Christmas.

"We passed that law precisely because of this type of discrimination against people of faith," Paxton told Starnes. "This is an attack on religious liberty and a violation of the First Amendment and state law."

O’Neil goes on to report “Exactly how a poster showing Linus with a well-known Christmas quote constitutes ‘imposing’ personal beliefs on students the district did not explain. It seems to imply that the mere possibility of a non-Christian student seeing the poster is enough to cause psychological harm.”

But psychological harm is not the point. The "’imposing’ [of] personal beliefs on students” comes from the fact that government schools are imposed on students by government force—that is, force of taxation and compulsory attendance laws. A public school teacher is, by extension, an agent of the government and there bound by Constitution. The biblical reference is, by definition, a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on Establishment of Religion by government.

But, that’s not the whole story.

I left these comments:

The principal argued that the poster was "an issue of separation of church and state."

"We passed that law precisely because of this type of discrimination against people of faith," Paxton told Starnes. "This is an attack on religious liberty and a violation of the First Amendment . . . ."

Both are correct.

Government owned and administered schools must not allow its property to be used for any activity “respecting an establishment of religion,” thus violating dissenting taxpayers’ right to freedom of conscience. On the other hand, Christians are as much taxpaying supporters of government schools as non-Christians, so they have as much right to display religious Christmas greetings as anyone has to display secular Christmas greetings: To do otherwise amounts to “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” as well as “abridging the freedom of speech,” violating the rights of Christians in two ways.

Displaying the poster and forbidding its display both violate the First Amendment. This is a government-created contradiction. I believe the most fundamental issue here is not one of separation of church and state nor freedom of religion nor free speech. The fundamental issue is the proper role of government regarding education: specifically, the propriety of government being involved with financing, owning, or administering schools. These kinds of conflicts wouldn’t arise if we didn’t have government-run education. If all education were privately owned, run, and funded, the schools could make their own policies regarding expressions of conscience, and parents can consider such policies when choosing a school for their children. Whatever school parents then choose, they’d have to follow the school’s rules. (I’m leaving aside the issue of “discrimination against people of faith.” The government shouldn’t discriminate in the enforcement of its laws. But anti-discrimination laws targeted at the private sector violate the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of association. But that is off-topic and a subject for another day.)

To avoid these kinds of unnecessary conflicts, and for many other reasons, I propose the following addition to the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In short, we need the separation of education and state in the same way and for the same reasons as we have the separation of church and state—to protect intellectual freedom.

Short of that—and while acknowledging that Christians have a legitimate beef—I have to side with the school district. Religion itself is the larger threat to freedom because it is inherently authoritarian, which is why there must be an impenetrable firewall between religion and political power (the power of legalized force). As long as we have government schools, the Texas conflict and the like must be resolved on the side of separation of church and state as articulated in the First Amendment “establishment” and “free exercise” clauses. Once we crack the door open to government establishment of religion, no matter how small the crack, we start down a road that leads to theocratic tyranny. And that would be the end of freedom of religion, speech, press, and association—the entire First Amendment—and by extension freedom generally.

I would add one more important observation. Shannon said, "I wasn't going to leave Linus and the Christmas tree without having the [biblical] dialogue. That's the whole point of why it was put up."

No, it’s not the “whole point.” Christmas ceased being a strictly religious holiday the minute Congress made it a legal holiday. A legal religious holiday in a nation dedicated to freedom of religion and conscience is a contradiction. (The Founders used the terms “religion” and conscience” interchangeably. They understood religious freedom to encompass the freedom not to believe in or practice any religion—in effect, not just freedom of religion, but freedom from religion as well.) Being a national legal holiday, Christmas can have non-religious, non-Christian meaning just as validly as a Christian meaning. It’s a matter of individual preference. Otherwise, what’s the point of freedom of conscience?

Related Reading:

A ‘War on Christmas?’ No: A War on non-Christians

Freedom Of Religion Demands Freedom From Religion

Christmas: In America, a Holiday for Everyone

The Khan Controversy: On Free Speech, Sacrifice, and Mosque/State Separation

The Tribune News Service Reports, GOP lawmakers, veterans groups disavow Trump over criticism of Muslim soldier's family.

In the article, I found two statements I want to reply to. First:

Arizona Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, led the charge, saying Trump did not have "unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us." The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the nation's oldest and largest veterans organization, called Trump out of bounds for tangling with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son was killed in 2004.

"Election year or not, the VFW will not tolerate anyone berating a Gold Star family member for exercising his or her right of speech or expression," VFW leader Brian Duffy said.

Criticize Trump for his Khan response all you want. But doesn’t the “right of speech or expression” also cover criticism and rebuttal? One thing Trump cannot and should not be criticized for is his “right of speech or expression,” repugnant as that speech may be. Isn’t that one of our freedoms our military is there to protect?

Second:

In an emotional appearance at last week's convention, Khizr Khan criticized Trump for proposing to temporarily freeze the entry of foreign Muslims into the U.S. and accused him of making no sacrifices for his country.

America is about recognizing people as citizens owning their own lives and possessing the unalienable individual rights to pursue their own happiness. The idea that we are subjects who must justify his existence by sacrificing for “the country”—i.e., the collective or the state or the King or the cleric—is an ancient evil that fits the character of a dictatorship, not the United States of America. What exactly was the purpose of rebelling against England? To throw off subservience to a King in exchange for subservience to an electoral majority? No. It was to free men from subservience to any “higher power.” Read the Declaration of Independence.

But what about the “sacrifices”of our servicemen? Isn’t that necessary? No . . . and yes—it depends on how you define “sacrifice.” I believe that sacrifice, properly understood, is the giving up of a value and receiving no value or something less valuable in return. Most people think of sacrifice as merely giving up something you want, without regard for what you get in return. But that makes no sense. A “sacrifice” that leaves you better off is no sacrifice at all. It is a gain.

I think of the people who volunteer to serve in the military not as sacrificing—giving up a value for no value, making one’s life worse—but as taking a positive step to defend the values they believe in—namely, the American principles they chose to actively defend. There is nothing sacrificial about taking time out from one’s life to defend the principles one’s life depends upon from those who threaten it, even if it involves risks and knowing the possibility of paying the ultimate price. American servicemen volunteer to defend the way of life without which their lives and the lives of their loved ones would be worse off. Temporarily giving up the value of one’s civilian time to preserve the greater value of living a life of freedom is not a sacrifice. That’s what American soldiers do.

But even if we insist on labeling American soldiers’ activities a “sacrifice,” isn’t the purpose of that sacrifice precisely so Americans as civilians can live a non-sacrificial life where each of us is free to live for our own sake?

As to Trump’s response to Khizr Khan’s attack on him at the Democratic National Convention, Khan’s published opinions on the constitution are noteworthy, and if still true alter the context of his Democratic Convention speech dramatically. Breitbart’s Paul Sperry reports:

Notwithstanding his war-hero son’s genuinely patriotic example, Khizr M. Khan has published papers supporting the supremacy of Islamic law over “man-made” Western law — including the very Constitution he championed in his Democratic National Convention speech attacking GOP presidential nod Donald Trump.  

Sperry observes that “Western society is built on individualism and secularism,” but that Khan speaks approvingly of the doctrine that the justification of human rights lies in the Quran, not “human law.” Keep in mind that Sharia Law is religious law, which is not law at all but a series of unchallengeable dictates written in a Holy Book by special elites who claim knowledge from a being beyond the reach of mere mortals and whose truth is infallible. Keep in mind that the human rights—the unalienable individual rights—laid out in the Declaration of Independence and formalized in the U.S. Constitution are derived scientifically from observational facts and requirements about human nature and survival—i.e., derived from man’s reasoning mind, and always open to scrutiny. Religious law is not open to scrutiny, but must be taken on faith and followed without question. Unlike the objective law (at least in theory) of secular nations, Sharia nations are ruled by non-objective “laws” that give arbitrary and unlimited and unchallengeable authority to clerics.

Trump personally disparaged Khan’s wife and their religion. While he had a right to say what he said, Trump’s remarks were incredibly stupid politically, and completely uncalled for from a humanitarian perspective and from a perspective of common decency.

But if this article is true, then criticism of this Gold Star families beliefs are fair game.

A key American/Western value holds that religion is a private matter that should be separated from political power and that people should be free to practice their religion privately so long as their actions don’t violate the same rights of others to their lives, liberties, property, and personal life-serving pursuits (e.g., by beating recalcitrant wives or killing infidels). Muslims who embrace the secular principle of separation of religion and state are Enlightened allies against Islamic terrorism and totalitarianism, and we should welcome them. Muslims who embrace Sharia Law are in sympathy with the goals of the Islamic totalitarians, even if they reject the tactic of terrorism, and must be considered enemies of Western Civilization. Such individuals cannot claim allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, to the First Amendment—which explicitly protects us from religion even as it protects our freedom of religion—or to any philosophical claim to be a true American.

When someone advocates imposing their religious beliefs on others by government force of law, then those beliefs must be exposed and examined. Those beliefs become fair game, and it becomes morally mandatory to defend our freedom of conscience by speaking out against any attempt to enforce those beliefs by law, whether or not one agrees with the ideas to be imposed.

To be fair, Khan’s writings are decades old. Does he still believe in the supremacy of Sharia Law over the U.S. Constitution? Sperry observes:

It’s not immediately clear if Khan has ever repudiated his earlier support for the anti-Constitutional principles of Sharia law. Searches turn up no subsequent writings or statements to that effect. Attempts to reach Khan by phone and email were unsuccessful.

For now, the most patriotic Muslim in America, according to media myth-making, remains Khizr Muazzam Khan, the father of a fallen American soldier who claims to hold the Constitution so dear he keeps a copy in his breast pocket.

But what does he really believe?

It’s a fair question.

Related Reading:

'American Values' Versus the Democrat National Convention

Why Did the NJ Star-Ledger Delete My Comment on Khizr Khan’s Dem Convention Speech?

Trump’s Ban-All-Muslims Policy Undermines the Fight Against Islamic Jihad

Is Donald Trump’s controversial new policy announcement to ban all Muslims from entering the United States until ironclad screening processes can be implemented by our government a good idea?

The New Jersey Star-Ledger doesn’t think so. And neither does just about anybody else. Trump's open bigotry is a challenge to mainstream Republicans, said the Star-Ledger in an editorial. The Star-Ledger brushed off Trump as a bigot, labeled his rhetoric “hate speech,” and basically viewed Trump’s popularity as evidence of something fundamentally wrong with the Republican Party.

There’s also something wrong with the Left, though. From President Obama on down, the Left seems more outraged by real or imagined prejudice against Muslims than the murderous Islamist Jihadists themselves. Perhaps it’s because of the Left’s blind spot blocking its realization that we are at war with an Islamic enemy.

The Star-Ledger does have a point, though:

The mistreatment of Muslims is, in fact, a national security threat. It plays right into the hands of the Islamic State, whose leaders openly admit their goal is to make Muslims in the West feel isolated and turn against their own communities.

I left these comments, edited for clarity:

The covert smearing of the entire Republican Party is just as bigoted as Trump’s call to ban Muslims—only less honest. That aside, Trump is dangerous. Bigotry has no place in the fight against Islamic Imperialism. It is not just evil. It is practically counterproductive.

We are not at war with Islam. But we cannot ignore the fact that we are at war with a malignant manifestation of Islam that combines faith-based belief with aggressive action; specifically, an ultra-conservative, fundamentalist merger of Islamic religion and political power. In my view, the best way to understand what we are up against is to look back at the Empire of Japan.

Japanese militarism was forged out of a merger of Shintoism and state. Shintoism, the official state religion, was the ideological driving force behind the Japanese government’s hold on the people and thus of Japanese imperialism, spawning such tactics as the Kamikaze—the Japanese equivalent of Jihad suicide bombers—and the banzai charge, the call to die for the Emperor rather than surrender, no matter how hopeless the chance of victory. State Shintoism enabled the Japanese government to orient an entire culture around war and regional hegemony. The Emperor under state Shintoism was held up as God’s representative on Earth.

After the Japanese surrender that ended W.W. II, the allied occupying force of General MacArthur was given these instructions from the State Department:

Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. . . . [T]here will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. [Quoted from “Gifts from Heaven”: The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945 by John David Lewis for The Objective Standard.]

Our leaders recognized the ideological source of the Imperial Japanese government’s power—state Shintoism—and took steps to make a resurgence of that threat impossible by imposing a separation of Shintoism and state. The emperor was stripped of political authority, and reduced to a figurehead, like the Queen of England.

The lesson: Peaceful Muslims—those who want to observe Islam in private while respecting others’ right to their freedom of conscience—are our allies. Though his ban-all-Muslims policy is bigoted, I don’t believe Trump himself is a bigot. But he is a dangerous fool. The enemy is not private, peaceful Muslims. Since the fight is largely ideological, we need Islamic reformationists—a faction led by leaders such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muhammad Syed—who are fighting the ideological battle from within Islam. A ban-all-Muslims policy undermines Enlightenment principles and thus those Muslims and ex-Muslims fighting to drag Islam into enlightenment. Fundamentally, the enemy is political Islam. Private Jihadists can be deadly but are not an existential threat to society or civilization.  Ex political power, Jihadists are marginal criminal organizations like the Italian or Russian mafias, the drug cartels, etc. Political Islam—i.e., ISIS, Iran, the former Taliban, the Sharia regime in Egypt before it was ousted by the military—is an existential threat. Just think of Imperial Japan. As long as political Islam is tolerated in any form anywhere in the world, the recruiting of private Jihadists will continue and expand, and so will the long-term threat of Islamic Imperialism. Islamic statism is the inspiration for all Jihadists.

Any effort to justify or respect religious control of political institutions is to support Islamic Jihad. In this regard, we in the West must re-examine our worship of “democracy”—the absolutism of the vote. It doesn’t matter if a Sharian caliphate is elected by popular vote. Religious enslavement should never be a voting option. In this regard, Bush 43’s “Forward Strategy for Freedom” was a dismal failure. The right to vote is not freedom. The right to vote is a derivative of freedom. Bush’s strategy didn’t bring freedom. It brought the vote divorced from the principles of individual liberty—and a series of elected Sharia regimes. Many bemoaned the overthrow of the elected Sharia government of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt. But a Morsi regime is exactly what we should never tolerate, even at the price of a military dictatorship. Egypt’s military regime is not a threat to the West. The Morsi regime, regardless of it’s intentions, was.

We must recognize that political Islam is the enemy, no matter its manifestation. America would never tolerate the imposition of Christian law, no matter how large a voting majority Christians have. If we are to eradicate the Islamic imperialist threat, we must insist with the same moral vigor on the separation of mosque and state everywhere, no matter how large a majority Muslims may have in any given country.

The separation of religion and state is a must, lest we face some future Islamic equivalent of the Empire of Japan, this time armed with modern weaponry. The way we handled Japan should be the model for how we approach the Islamic threat today. We must insist on the strict separation of mosque and state, in the same way as America has the separation of church and state, while simultaneously protecting the right of individual Muslims’ freedom to the peaceful observance of Islam. Our guiding principle in the War against Islamic Jihad should be the First Amendment, which guarantees both freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

------------------------------------

I suspect that many, many Muslims are just as horrified as we are. And just as frightened. Or maybe more so. Westernized Muslims are as much ISIS’s enemy as we are. The Star-Ledger is right that “The mistreatment of Muslims [in the West] plays right into the hands of the Islamic State.

We need to encourage peaceful Muslims to speak up within their families and communities, despite their fear. Islamic reformationists need to know they have friends in the West who have their backs. Trump’s solution to the militant Islamist would constitute a major strategic blunder.

Related Reading:

The War Between Western Enlightenment and Fundamentalist Political Islam—and the Choice All Muslims Must Make

The Paris Attacks Highlight Our Original Mistake: 'We're Not at War with Islam'

Democracy in Action in Egypt

Related Viewing:

Muhammad Syed: Ex-Muslim

America Was Not Founded as a Christian Nation

I just came across this article by Bill Flax; Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? I think it’s fairly accurate, but only up to a point. Flax observes that:

The most vocal proponents of Christian America and their counterparts advocating a completely secular state necessarily cherry-pick data to prove exaggerations while discarding inconvenient details.

Flax criticizes the Religious Right for “transforming our Forefathers [ the Founding Fathers] into faithful servants of Christ.” On the other hand, observes Flax, “[T]hose most ardently challenging America ’s Christian origins wrongly portray the Founders as rank secularists.”

While there is no question that there were many Christians among the Founders, I think the second idea is closest to the truth.

American culture is predominantly Christian. But America is not, never has been, and never was a Christian nation. The fact that many Christians were instrumental in creating America does not change that fact. America is an Enlightenment nation. Many Enlightened Christians helped create it. But it is not a Christian nation. Pre-Enlightenment, Christianity had centuries to create an American nation, but did not and could not. No Enlightenment, no America.

The Founders believed in reason; that reason is a valid guide to human action and man’s primary means of supporting his life; that reason belongs to the individual; that therefore individuals must be free to live by reason; and thus government must be erected to protect man’s inalienable rights to liberty. These are Enlightenment ideals. This liberty includes the freedom to live by one’s beliefs, whether religious or not. Hence, the First Amendment, and church-state separation. This view is compatible with enlightened Christianity: God created man and nature, but then leaves us to shape our own existence with our human faculties without His interference. But this view is not dependent on Christianity. The Enlightenment transformed Christianity. The Enlightenment led, Christianity followed. Man’s nature and the social requirements for his survival and flourishing are what they are, regardless of whether one thinks man has supernatural origins or not.

The Founders did inherit Christian morals. But the Founders were political, not moral, revolutionaries. Enlightened Christianity served as a ready-made philosophy for the Founders, even though much of it—particularly the altruist ethics—contradicted the Declaration’s principles, which sanctioned man’s right to pursue his own happiness. Like most enlightened Christians—and as Flax notes—the Founders cherry-picked what they thought to be the rational elements.

While Flax decries Big Government operating in Christ’s name, he seems to approve of “big government” when it suits Christianity: He condemns those who believe the First Amendment justifies evicting crosses from parks, purging prayer from schools and ousting “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Founders wouldn’t have supported officially-sponsored prayer in government schools. If they did, they would be completely contradicting their own Founding principles. It’s clearly a violation of the Establishment Clause for a government institution to impose religious practices. It’s simply wrong to impose prayer sessions on a captive audience of kids compelled by truancy laws to be in schools that their parents are compelled to finance. I doubt the Founders would even approve of our government-run schools. It clearly contradicts the principle of inalienable individual rights, and makes inevitable conflicts like the controversy over school prayer.

The same goes for the Pledge of Allegiance. People should be privately free to insert “under God”—or not. The legislature should stay out of it, giving no official stamp of approval for or against “under God.”

As to “evicting crosses from parks,” the issue is public parks vs. private ones. As long as “public”—tax supported—parks exist, any display carries the implicit sanction of government. Of course, Christians, being taxpayers, can rightly claim that as partial owners of the parks, they have a right to display religious symbols. But then the same can be said of secular groups. These kinds of conflicts are inevitable with any kind of “public” ownership.

But Flax is wrong that “Modern denizens of political correctness [secularists] reckon the Founders so irreligious that they had sought to diminish spiritual influence.” Did they really? Or did they seek to separate government influence from private influence—a crucial difference. Look around. Churches are as numerous as gas stations and Dunkin Doughnuts. No one ever proposed eliminating religious displays in front of private homes; or banning private religious practice in public, so long as there is no implied government sanction. The Founders sought to protect private “spiritual”—religious—influence on the basis of “To each, his—not government’s—own.”

America as a Christian nation would be a nation ruled by biblical edicts rather than objective laws. Under such a regime, non-Christians—and even minority Christian sects outside the Christian mainstream—would be, at best, second-class citizens and, at worst, subject to persecution and even imprisonment or death. America would be, in essence, a Christian Iran.

It should be remembered that secular government does not mean atheistic government. It means a government that is neutral in the field of ideas, neither promoting nor forbidding any belief system, but protecting freedom of conscience so long as one’s actions don’t violate the rights of others. This distinction is important. A secular state is neither anti-Christian nor pro-Atheist. It is what America was intended to be; a government of laws and not of men.

Related Reading:

"The Message of Christ" and New Jersey's Education Wars

My Commentary on Church-State Separation