Democracy v. Theocracy

The Supremes have decided in a case from Maine that if public money is directed to providing some support for private schools, than it must also be permissible to direct tax payer support for tuition to religious schools. 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying 

"This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build."

 and 

“… In just a few years, the court has upended constitutional doctrine, shifting from a rule that permits states to decline to fund religious organisations to one that requires states in many circumstances to subsidise religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.”

Which, of course, got me mulling over my own engagement over the years with the issue of the separation of Church and State. The first instance I can recall of a personal encounter with the issue took place during a school assembly in in which we were all directed to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and to include the phrase, one nation under God. That must have been 1954, because that was when President Eisenhower signed an act into law mandating the inclusion of the phrase. I stood mute during the recitation of the Pledge that day in the school assembly, and I never recited the Pledge again. 

I do not recall the chain of events leading up to my adamant rejection of "under God". I imagine that somewhere in my studies I had come across the idea of the separation of Church and State and that I had wholly embraced it as an unbendable bedrock principle of the Constitution. 

What I do remember is that religion played no part at all in the daily life of my immediate family.  I recall no discussion of the subject of religion in our home ever. The closest I came to such a discussion was in my late teens when my mother mentioned that she had no belief in an afterlife -- "when you're dead, that's it" she said, expressing a fundamental atheist view of life which by then I shared completely.

My religious views might possibly have developed in a different direction had my father survived World War II. He came from a large family of Irish Catholics in Nebraska.  I don't think my father was religious, but his sister, at least, was a very devout believer and, had I more opportunity to know that side of the family, I suppose I might have absorbed some level of religiosity. But, I didn't.  Which, of course, did not mean that religion played no part in my life. The U.S. is still the most religiously oriented nation among those which like to consider themselves advanced. There was really no way to avoid that fact.

Aside from a single day's attendance at a Sunday School gathering, my first memorable brush with religion came during a high school dance when I met a very pretty girl whose father was the choir director for a large Presbyterian church in downtown Seattle.  Let's call her Gwen.

Gwen and I never talked about religion, and I don't know what sort of interest she had in the subject. She was expected to go to church every Sunday, and I had no qualms at all about accompanying her. The music was nice. We sat respectfully through the service, and that was it.  We rode her horses together, went to the movies and did the other things teens do including finding secluded parking spots to neck.

On one such occasion we got together with one of my good friends and his girl friend and headed out in my car with a six-pack of beer to a parking spot in the woods not very far from downtown Bellevue. Things were just beginning to get interesting when a flashing red light brought the party to a sudden end.

The officer escorted us to the little police department building in the old part of Bellevue where we were each directed to call our parents to explain what we had been up to, and to tell them they had to come to the police department to have us released to their custody.

Well, there was no legal penalty attached to the parking in the woods incident, but my relationship with Gwen no longer seemed viable.  I recall her expressing some desire to go on seeing each other, but I couldn't see it.  I think I was just too intimidated by the idea of working through a resolution of the issues with the choir director. 

So I moved on to my college years and new romances.  My ideas about religion took on more of an intellectual flavor, possibly as a result of exposure to some history courses.  From that time I recall a discussion, I think it may have been in a psychology class, in which a young woman made a spirited defense of a religious explanation for some social issue.  I raised my hand and proceeded to rain destruction on her argument with what I deemed to be irrefutable logic. The bell rang ending the session shortly afterward. As we all filed out of the classroom, I noticed that she was crying.  I failed to take the opportunity to apologize for my insensitive behavior, and I've regretted that all the years since.

These days when some acquaintance starts talking about their religious beliefs I nearly always nod and say nothing. More often than not, the gist of the one-sided conversation has little connection with traditional religious dogma, but the specifics are immaterial for me.

There was an occasion not long ago when I was tempted to articulate some details of my personal philosophical stance. A woman went on at some length about her spiritual beliefs and then sought to get some response from me about my thoughts on the ideas she had espoused. I found the length of her train of thought had severely tested my patience and I told her I saw no rationality or value in what she was saying.  Her irate response was "Don't you believe in anything!" It didn't seem worthwhile to continue the conversation at that point.

The mixing of religion and politics is a horse of a different color for me, and I'm happy to argue the issue.  Politicians who pander to any religious constituencies are unlikely to win my vote unless their opponent is someone whose political orientation and behavior calls forth immediate revulsion based on a resemblance to those in the parade of despots we have seen over the last century.

Trump, with astonishing hypocrisy, regularly predicts a return to Christian religious values.  Polls routinely say that is not correct.  Fewer Americans each year express affiliation to any of the traditional religious sects. Similarly, a majority also continues to support Roe v Wade and common-sense gun controls.  In the short term, of course, those preferences expressed by most people only matter in a working democracy.