The term Fundamentalist Religion carries more of a political tone for me than what I think of when I say belief and belief systems are fundamental to living. I have been in other parts of the world. Trust me, these cultural groups who you fear as oppressive or tyrannical or what ever were that way before religion reached them and will be when it leaves. For this reason I think we give religion a bad rap.
Somewhat on that topic, there was this article in the Sunday paper that might be of interest to the "original intent" crowd, which has some overlap with the "Christian Nation" crowd, in my experience. The bad rap on religion may be little broader and more central to our heritage than you might think.
A Nation Still Learning What Madison Knew nytimes.com
Madison's original animus against the states was also tied to his concern for the
protection of minority rights. Here, too, he challenged conventional wisdom. For
most 18th-century liberals, the problem of rights was to protect the whole people
against the coercive power of monarchy.
Madison was the first to realize that this formula was irrelevant to the American
republic, where real power lay with popular majorities, who would use legislative
power to burden whichever minorities they disliked. Because such unjust majorities
could form more easily within the narrower compass of a state than in an extended
nation, the best way to protect rights was to enable Congress to intervene within the
states, restricting the ability of popular majorities to run roughshod over minorities
and individuals.
That analysis was premature for 1787, but it was ultimately vindicated by the
modern application of the equal protection and due process clauses of the
Fourteenth Amendment, which applied the provisions of Madison's original Bill of
Rights against the states. In this sense, the rights revolution of the 20th century
fulfilled Madison's original vision of 1787.
How did Madison acquire this understanding of rights? In large part, through his
powerful commitment to freedom of conscience. For Madison, as for Thomas
Jefferson, the horrific religious persecutions of the 16th and 17th centuries were the
equivalent of what the history of racial slavery and discrimination has been for us: the
most compelling example of the systematic denial of fundamental rights to unpopular
minorities. Their radical solution to the religion problem was to recognize that every
individual retains a sovereign right to accept or reject the claims of religion, entirely
free of the coercive authority of the state or community.
Today, efforts are repeatedly made to suggest that Madison and Jefferson were not
quite the ardent advocates of separating church and state that their strongest
statements on the subject suggest. In fact, the more Madison thought about the
subject, the more militant his thinking grew.
The great virtue of his approach becomes evident the more we wrestle with the
confusing interpretation of the First Amendment's religion clause that is the legacy of
the Supreme Court's unhappy efforts to develop satisfactory tests for evaluating
government aid to religion.
Madison's radical solution to the problem was simply to privatize all religious
activity. He was confident that competition between denominations in the spiritual
marketplace would keep religion healthy, while freeing government from the
impossible task of deciding whether, when and how to support religion.
On all these questions, anyone who delves into Madison's writings will discover an
original, creative, skeptical, quizzical and discriminating mind. These very qualities
make him a more elusive figure to understand than Jefferson, with his passionate if
problematic commitment to equality, or Benjamin Franklin, with his wit and wisdom,
or even Alexander Hamilton, with his better grasp of public policy. But Madison
was our most penetrating political thinker, and his birthday is well worth
commemorating. |
