What About Freedom From Religion?

Hypocrites always love the fig leaf, and the Republican radicals crusading against womens reproductive rights have been shrewd enough to cloak their real goal with pious claims that theyre just defending Americas freedom of religion.

But since the issues currently making headlines include the power to deny insurance coverage for birth control to non-Catholics, the rights of the religious are hardly the most worrisome issue we face, no matter how strident the disingenuous claims of the GOPs anti-woman warriors.

To a growing segment of the American electorate, a much greater concern than the freedom of religion is the freedom from religion.

Every election year generates a new round of sanctimonious baloney from conservative Christians who purport to speak for every American in defining what the United States is all about. Whether explicit or implicit, the presumption underlying their pronouncements is the idea that America is a Judeo-Christian country whose actions and policies should be guided by the religious doctrines deriving from that tradition.

Lost in all the overheated rhetoric is a crucial principle: the freedom from a dominant or state-sanctioned religion and its dictates is far more fundamental to American history and everything this country is actually supposed to stand for than any individual church or faith has ever been.

Unfortunately, such historical facts seem lost on Rick Santorum, whose religious beliefs have defined his policy positions in the secular world.

"Contraception is a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to the way things are supposed to be," Santorum opined, as ungrammatical as he is serenely untroubled by any doubt about the way things are supposed to be.

Santorums vision is drastically circumscribed by his radical Catholicism, and like most ideologues, he wants to impose those strictures on the rest of us no matter how our belief systems might differ from his. As far as hes concerned, the way things are supposed to be is the product of a fixed religious doctrine that represents the final word of God. Santorums idea of an omnipotent supernatural creator is the only one that counts, and everyone else is supposed to venerate the same deity and the same dogma.

Among other problems, Santorums views betray a shocking ignorance about the history of Christianity. Since he thinks education is for snobs, he probably wont make the effort to inform himself more fully about the faith he professes to uphold, but anyone who actually wanted to learn something would do well to read Elaine Pagelss new book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelations, which details the suppression of some early Christian books of revelation and the elevation of others by bishops intent on establishing orthodoxy and eradicating dissenting views in the fourth century.

Pagels and other scholars have chronicled the inconsistent history of Christian beliefs and the stunning variability of canonical texts as well as official practices, but the resulting body of knowledge seems lost on the GOP leaders now bloviating about Christian tradition. Unfortunately, a working understanding of American history also seems to have eluded them.

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What About Freedom From Religion?