President Biden has a religious freedom problem.
Biden’s agenda suggests he’d support forcing religious orders to provide insurance coverage that infringes on their rights of conscience. He’s indicated he’d sign the euphemistically named Equality Act, under which houses of worship would be treated manifestly unequally. Despite his lifelong Catholicism, it seems Biden has no problem treating religion as a matter of private choice, which ought not inform public affairs.
But the president is wrong. Religion is essential to public life. The supposedly egalitarian legal efforts to bar religion from the halls of public deliberation rest on shaky foundations. American public morality always had religious sources. The secular set tells itself a fairy tale about American history that goes something like this: Despite lingering religious superstition, the comparatively farsighted Founding Fathers — who were mostly religious nonconformists, mind — created a strict separation of church and state. This protected the public sphere from religious bigotry and set the stage for governmental moral neutrality. Current efforts at implementing public-accommodation law nationwide are the natural fruition of this humanist project.
Nonsense.
First, it’s simply not true that the Founders were an especially irreligious lot. The fairy tale involves some conceptual smuggling. It’s true the Founders had disproportionately unorthodox views compared to the general population. But this tells us little about what the Founders actually believed and what ideas influenced their thinking. As it turns out, many prominent statesmen of the Revolutionary era were Trinitarian Christians. Furthermore, even non-Christian Founders were heavily influenced by the Christian ethical tradition. Discussions about the nature of man and the justice of self-government relied on a moral vocabulary deeply indebted to Christianity.
Second, the separation of church and state enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was never meant to make religion private. If anything, the opposite is closer to the truth: It was intended to keep public affairs healthy by safely fostering religion. The Establishment Clause stopped Congress from picking an official, national church. The goal was keeping the stakes of religious disagreement low by eliminating winner-takes-all outcomes. Keep in mind that at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, many of the former colonies had established churches at the state level. This lasted well into the 19th century.
The public secularist argument never made much historical sense. In addition, it has significant philosophical problems. The effort to bar religion from public life presumes that there is some mode of ethical reasoning that is simultaneously universal, obvious, and obligatory and that these kinds of value judgments can inform legislation and other public policies, because they are neutral. The absurdity of this should be obvious: value judgments by their nature cannot be neutral. Secularists want to have their cake and eat it, too: that they can retain the binding force of moral commandments, yet strip these commandments of controversy via appeals to public neutrality. But there is simply no compelling reason to privilege non-religious value judgments in this way.
It’s true the American system precludes theocracy. Thank goodness. Except perhaps for a few grumpy integralists, nobody is calling for a national religious establishment. But that is another false equivocation. A nation that allows, and even encourages, religious motivations in public policy discussions is not a theocracy. This is a normal and healthy mode of discourse, reflecting the best of our small-d democratic commitments. Religion in public isn’t going anywhere, because the public is still religious.
In his farewell address, George Washington proclaimed, “Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” There’s a reason he joined these together. Religious freedom is a non-negotiable American value. That includes the right to be religious in public — indeed, a “private religion” is a contradiction in terms. Furthermore, a nation that proudly proclaims universal human rights cannot afford to overlook the sources of those rights in Christian conceptions of dignity and personhood. America would be less than itself were we to cloister our faith. The Biden administration had better learn these essential truths about the nation if they hope to govern the nation effectively.
Alexander William Salter is an associate professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, the comparative economics research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a Young Voices senior contributor. Follow him on Twitter @alexwsalter.
