Religious vs. legal dogma
A dense blind spot often obscures religiously faithful people’s perception of rationality.
A case in point is Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column on Sept. 14, in which he claimed that it was un-constitutional for U.S. senators, during candidate reviews, to question a federal Appeals Court judicial candidate about how her strong Catholic faith might affect her future court rulings.
Gerson charged in the article that the questioners of Amy Coney Barrett, a “brilliant,” respected Notre Dame Law School professor and self-described “orthodox” Catholic, “displayed a confusion of the intellect so profound, a disregard for constitutional values so reckless, that is amounts to anti-religious bigotry.” That’s an unreasonably harsh assessment. Remember that many voters strongly questioned then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s commitment to American values over the Pope’s during the future president’s campaign in the early 1960s. Kennedy was Catholic, but he was elected, narrowly (over Richard Nixon), anyway. American’s have a right to ask how the private beliefs—religious or otherwise—of any candidate for anything might shape their public policies. But, of course, no candidacy can be formally blocked from consideration solely by religious beliefs, or nonbelief. There’s no law against people voting for or against anyone for purely religious bias, however.
As the country has steadily grown more secular in its outlook in the past few decades and religious ideology has become more political, it’s natural that people are more frequently questioning how candidates’ attitudes are shaped by their faith—and how they thus might be expected to govern. That’s rational and fair. Faith is a foundational thing, after all.
When Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) parsed for Barrett during her review the difference between religious dogma and law, Gerson characterized it as, “Don’t let your dogma mess with my dogma.” Yet, herein lies the rub: there is a profound difference between a dogma based on reality and one based on unreality. One is based on verifiable truth in the real world; the other wishful thinking. And that is what Feinstein was saying: the law absolutely must be wholly real in its crafting and its execution. She implied law could be corrupted if its executioners inserted their personal religious imaginings into the necessarily secular—“blind” to all but the facts—legal process.
For an excellent analysis of this issue, read the Sept. 21 Washington Post article by Cathleen Kaveny, “No, Dianne Feinstein is not an anti-Catholic bigot.” Kaveny is author of “Prophecy Without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square.”
Gerson proposed that the cliché exhortation that Christians “should be building the kingdom of God” implies a realm “not of this world,” so secularists should not worry about Christians trying to transform our earthly nation into a Godly kingdom.
In fact, evangelical Christians have been doing little else for nearly a century or more.
