Theocratic Quips Less Scary Than Advertised

I’m enjoying the process of deflagging quotes. Today, I came across an article on Slate describing what are portrayed as theocratic tendencies among Republican Presidential candidates. So without referencing the original Slate article with these quotes, see if you can match up the following statements to the following Presidential candidates competing for the Republican nomination:

I’ve left out some other quotes, because they aren’t explicitly religious the way the above quotes are. Those are from Gingrich and Santorum and they bear analysis because they point to rather expansive visions of Federal power. But that’s a different post than this one.

The Slate article is intended to scare civil libertarians (among others) about the continuing presence of ambitious theocracy within the Republican party. I’m an atheist civil libertarian so I’m at the dead center of the target of this scare attack, but I’m less scared than I suspect the author wanted me to be. Only the first three quotes even make me itch.

Part of the reason is that the speakers are all pretty well marginalized in the primaries at this point. Also consider that in some cases, there are (cherry-picked) historical facts grounding the sentiments expressed. For instance, Blackstone did reference the Decalogue, although that was hardly all of what he wrote about the origins of British common law. I’m conscious that the quotes here have been mined from a forum aimed at goading the candidates to reach out to Christian voters so I am aware that what I’ve been presented with has been filtered at least twice (by the forum sponsor first, then again by the author of the Slate article). Finally, I’m sanguine about candidates, particularly ones playing catch-up, making bold statements in a bid to distinguish themselves and attract votes.

The first quote (“…our civil laws have to comport with the higher law”) does bug me, though. Part of it is the intellectual dissonance that while it’s bad for “Islam” to unite religious and civil laws (See, e.g., the constitution of Iraq, which mandates that civil laws not contradict the Koran), it’s okay for the USA to harmonize religious and civil laws. Part of it is the selective ignorance of the substantial amount of civil governmental regulation that is found in the Old Testament, enshrined as the religious law, demonstrating that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, religious and civil laws were, at least at one time, a unity. It’s double talk and it reveals that unifying Christian moral teachings and American civil law would be just fine. And part of it is the intellectual hurdle race the candidate goes through, very quickly, to get from using Muslims as whipping boys to unifying Christianity into our civil laws. This isn’t theocracy, but it opens the door to it; it’s more than just indicating that “As President, my moral compass will be guided by my religion.”

The second quote (“He [God] created government”) bugs me. If the speaker wants to state as a profession of faith that God created Man, okay, I disagree but go ahead and speak your mind. But God did not create the government. The American people did that, in Constitutional conventions held over the course of 1787 and 1788. If God was involved, He was most indirect indeed about His participation. The vision that disturbs me here is that government obtains its legitimacy based upon its divine origins rather than democratic approval. If governmental legitimacy is handed down from above, then the consent of the governed is irrelevant and legitimate government may run contrary to the will of the citizenry; the use of the law to compel compliance with God’s will becomes the appropriate mission of government. That couldn’t be more wrong. That doesn’t open the door to theocracy. That is theocracy.

And the third quote (“…as people of faith, we have not fought back”) is disturbing in its ambiguity. The candidate acknowledges that there has been organized pushback against – what, exactly? Civil liberties? Enforcement of the First Amendment? But it’s not enough for him. He wants to “fight,” not just “push.” The word “fight” invokes imagery of violence. Now, I doubt the candidate seriously advocates violence; it is obviously a metaphor. Nevertheless, it seems that to this candidate, the passage of laws at the Federal and state level to protect and promote governmental expression of religious ideas and imagery, efforts to enshrine Christian moral norms into law, and the packing of the judiciary with judges sympathetic to both the normative moral goals of these particular voters as well as a vision of a diminished scope of application for the Establishment Clause, have been somehow insufficient to “protect” religious voters from the “intimidation” wreaked upon them by a minority of seculars who would like our government to leave religion a matter for individuals to as they see fit.

But at the end of the day, while these things raise issues for me, they are not worthy of my anxiety. They are, however, reasonable starting-off points for a discussion about a vision of the appropriate relationship between religion, politics, government, and society — particularly in a society that has as cultural touchstones both a rich Christian heritages as well as substantial pluralism, upon which robust Constitutional guarantees of individual liberty and limitations on the power of government are superimposed.

After all, if a Presidential candidate can invoke the book of Isaiah, then so can I, chapter 1, verse 18: “Come now, and let us reason together.”