note #8 above.
10. It can be put either way, either that religious divisiveness exacerbates other existing social forms of antagonism, or that other social forms of discrimination or alienation become accentuated when religion is employed by them.
11. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. I, ed. Paul Rabinow, tr. Robert Hurley and Others (New York: The New Press, 1994), pp. 303–19. He thinks the meaning of the Enlightenment or “modernism” is itself a limit-attitude seeking to explore freedom in light of counter-modernistic trends and in tension with but not synonymous with “humanism,” and certainly not transcendental.
12. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes us Human (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 359.
Religion’s Divisive Burden as Absolutism in a Scientific and Pluralistic Age
Manifestations of Religion’s Divisive Absolutism
The twenty-first century has the ingredients of possibly being the most dangerously polarizing century in human history. Few people around the world will ever forget the TV images of noncombatants or other civilians being beheaded by a member of ISIS, even if the entire episode was not shown. This was done in the name of a religion, though combined with other motives as well. Now, it is not that killing in the name of a certain god or religion has never occurred before this. We are all fully aware of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty-Years War, and the Holocaust, and many other forms of mass slaughter with religion as a primary motivation. Throughout history, various nations have supplicated their particular “god” to make them victorious in war. Many volumes could be written on the alienation, either caused by religious faith or at least accelerated by it, and some of these conflicts have gone on for decades or attempted to facilitate a universal genocide. This is the case even if one limits one’s study simply to “Western” cultures without including all the rest of history and the religious conflicts other cultures’ religions waged.
Of course, the religions themselves promised certain benefits to those who belonged, and these must be acknowledged. One cannot fairly overlook the many people and religious groups that appear to be motivated to charitable responsibility and moral action for the needy, chronically ill, or disenfranchised. Many of the most moral people I have known were religious. When people act in a way we would judge as moral or ethical, we often cannot really determine whether they responded that way because of their religion, or whether they would have done it even had they not been religious. Certainly, I am not suggesting that religion is predominately immoral and should be abolished. As most institutions, it is made up of people, and sometimes people as we perceive them, act in moral ways, and at other times they are very immoral or unethical. That is one reason Paul Tillich described actual life as “ambiguous.”
But the antagonism that has often been spawned from a religion is also manifest in much subtler or even confusing forms. It is usually experienced as a mixture of a religious faith combined with a very particular culture, so it is not easy to determine which is the most responsible for creating the estrangement and violence. Theologian Tillich was renowned for trying to penetrate the interdependence of religion and culture. His brief position was that religion is the substance of culture and culture is the form taken by religion.1 His studies prompted him to have to explain the difference between the two when religion, defined by him as “ultimate concern,” is also espoused by those whose concern is not ultimate. He called the latter pursuits “demonic” if they pose as “ultimate” but are not really ultimate. So “religion,” because of its aura of Absolute truth and power, is often used or manipulated—to assist other primary agenda or goals.
If one looks at any particular nation or culture closely, the lines of demarcation that separate concerns that appear to be ultimate and those that simply profess ultimacy is not a bright line. Citizens of the United States can observe in the First Amendment a certain mutual respect and separation of religion and government that the Founding Fathers legalized. It was a separation so that a secular government would not be controlled by any religion, and, in turn, religious people would not be controlled by the government unless they engaged, as Thomas Jefferson said, in “overt acts of disorder,” that is, violated the civil or criminal laws of our social contract.2 James Madison said essentially the same, also warning that government must refrain from making decisions on the basis of religion since it has no cognizance of religion.3 He warned also that of the three branches of government he and his colleagues were establishing, the most likely incursions upon that contract would probably not come blatantly from any of the three, but more subtly might surface through any when it allows itself to be influenced by a sentiment he called “majoritarianism.”4 These Founding Fathers wanted diversity to flourish and be adequately represented in government in order to protect any minorities.
Yet that new government, which had broken the theocratic tradition of ancient “Christendom” in the West in 1789 (which had prevailed for more than 1,400 years prior to this “separation”), within another 230 years would evolve inconsistently to the point that one Supreme Court Justice at the beginning of the present century would insist that the Constitution of the United States gives religion a “preferred” position in the culture, and two other Justices in Van Orden v. Perry would even go so far to say that the U.S. government has the right to defend its own religion by public displays erected from the taxes of citizens who are very religiously diverse.5 That seems to contradict the very words of the First Amendment.
One must acknowledge that these understandings of the various Supreme Court Justices are neither extreme nor violent. But by singling out just one religion by simplistically reducing all religions to a generic religion, which just happens to manifest the Christian ideas and specific paradigmatic articulations of law, does violate the very principle James Madison articulated when he insisted that the real danger in our system was “majoritarianism.” Madison knew that this favoring of a single particular religion, even under the banner of an imagined generic, natural religion or even a “civic” religion, becomes divisive in its exclusivism.
Any nation that experiences religious, racial, ethnic, sexual, or economic pluralism has a need for unity and tolerance of difference. In the United States, most of these categories of private as well as national identities have experienced difficulty in being treated equally in our society or even within the legal framework. Personal identity as well as national identity is multifaceted and lacking in uniformity and equality. When one of these facets rises in importance in one’s mind or by preferential treatment by the government to be unquestionably superior to any competing facet in other people’s identities, a sinister divisiveness ensues. When it is seen as Absolute, it becomes deadly.
So nation, ethnicity, religion, economics, and other natural forms of identity can be turned into the unquestionable, the Absolute. Some facets of identity such as ethnicity, race, and sexuality are usually passed on genetically, and so one never has much choice in the matter. These areas may be provided more protection by government (as “suspect categories”) than economic, national, or religious identity since we assume people have the power to change things in these latter categories. Even so, the nonrational element in even the latter group might also be strong in that one is born in a certain situation in which a particular economic philosophy, national allegiance, or religious affiliation is extremely powerful, making any autonomous change much less probable for an individual.
Behind much of the polarization within a multicultural nation or one with great disparity of wealth is simply people’s feeling that their freedom has been compromised, their autonomous voices no longer count in their culture, or their leaders have become totally authoritarian if not tyrannical, apparently insensitive
