One Nation, Under...?

Today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the Pledge of Allegiance. Yesterday, David Brooks seized the occasion to write a New York Times column (registration required, but free) on the role of religion in schools, government, and public life.

Brooks opens with a brief mention of the importance of religion in the civil rights movement, but it isn't long before he's turned the impressive legacy of Martin Luther King into a Trojan horse for the erosion of your First Amendment rights:

If you believe that the separation of church and state means that people should not bring their religious values into politics, then, if Chappell is right, you have to say goodbye to the civil rights movement. It would not have succeeded as a secular force.

Beware of neoconservatives bearing gifts. No one can deny that Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders did use religion as a force for equality and progressive social change. But if you believe that has any relevance to the issue now before the Supreme Court, then you’ve fallen for Brooks’ shell game. Let’s look at that first clause again:

If you believe that the separation of church and state means that people should not bring their religious values into politics,

Is that what people who believe in the separation of church and state actually believe? Or do they simply believe that the government should not be endorsing any religion, or forcing religious views on anyone?

To put it another way, there is a fundamental difference between a private citizen allowing his religious values to influence his actions, and a government agency or employee asking citizens to pledge allegiance to one God. Religion in public life is not the same as religion in government; Brooks is misrepresenting the case for separation of church and state in order to make it look like it would exclude King and the civil rights movement.

Having already fed us one bait-and-switch, Brooks then launches into some vintage neoconservative (or, as Ishmael Reed would put it, "paleoconservative") arguments on why religious thinking is better than secular thinking:

Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class.

Whether the topic is welfare, education, the regulation of biotechnology or even the war on terrorism, biblical wisdom may offer something that secular thinking does not — not pat answers, but a way to think about things.

Amazing, isn’t it, how conservatives are still arguing against the 1950s? To listen to Brooks, you would think all secular thinking can be reduced to one guy in a white lab coat doing statistical analyses for a toothpaste company. And, apparently, the scientific method is no longer "a way to think about things" - but I digress. Even if we're talking strictly about social behavior, these paragraphs make a deeply inaccurate assumption.

“The Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave.” True. So, for that matter, can Shakespeare, or Voltaire, or Austen, or The Sopranos. Religion doesn’t have any particular monopoly on the study of ethics or human nature, and it's perfectly possible for schools to teach students to think about "what human beings are like" without also endorsing one particular set of religious views.

But you have to hand it to the neocons, once they sniff blood in the water they don't just settle for a bite of the chum. Brooks uses the pretext of the Pledge of Allegiance case, and his elision of public life and government, and his convenient omission of ethics and human observation from everywhere but the Bible, to culminate in a call for religious instruction in public schools:

The lesson I draw from all this is that prayer should not be permitted in public schools, but maybe theology should be mandatory. Students should be introduced to the prophets, to the Old and New Testaments, to the Koran, to a few of the commentators who argue about these texts.

First of all, let’s not be fooled by Brooks' throwing the Koran in there. (“Hey, kids, we aren’t preaching one monotheistic religion; here’s three!") Like the King discussion that opens the article, it provides a veneer of inclusion, a little sop to multiculturalism that ultimately fails to conceal his assault on freedom of religion. Is teaching prophets from three religions any less of an intrusion of public religion into citizens' private beliefs than teaching prophets from just one?

Then we have Brooks' chilling final paragraph.

From this perspective, what gets recited in the pledge is the least important issue before us. Understanding what the phrase "one nation under God" might mean — that's the important thing. That's not proselytizing; it's citizenship.

No, that’s proselytizing. And oddly, it contradicts one of the most common arguments in favor of religious displays in government, the idea that they're ritualized traditions that don’t really convey any religious doctrine, like the “In God We Trust” stamped on our coins. But Brooks says we need to overlook the empty ritualistic aspect of the Pledge of Allegiance, that children need to be taught – in public schools, on the public dime – what it means to be “one nation under God.” That’s proselytizing!

To be honest, I'm not that worked up about the Pledge of Allegiance case - even the Supreme Court at its feistiest cannot match the power of millions of independent, freethinking, or just plain inattentive teenagers to ignore the "under God" addition, and in fact the rest of the Pledge, every single morning. But if conservatives like Brooks use the case to push for even more religious indoctrination in our schools and in our government, well, that's worth getting worked up over.

Comments

[Shane]

He seems to not realize that if religion is taught in schools just those three religions or even ten religions is not enough as they would still be forcing those choices as the only viable choices for that person. That impedes on the student's religious freedom.

[Shane]

He also doesn't seem to be able to distinguish the difference between moral thought and religious thought.

[David Van Domelen]

Oh, I'm sure he CAN make the distinction. He simply chooses to, in practice, define the difference as zero. To our neocon buddies, while there may be some theoretical, hair-splitting difference between morality and religion, there's no practical difference.

[Ken Lowery]

Brings up that old question -- do we need religion in order to have a moral society? I would argue that, in Old Testament times, the answer was probably yes. You needed to be given a REASON to do more than look out for number one, and the OT spent a lot of time emphasizing the importance of community responsibility.

But to suggest that this is still the case is absolutely stupendously ridiculous. I take especial beef with his claims about the civil rights movement -- that religion was the only way it was going to get done. I wonder, exactly, what kind of selective memory allows the writer to forget that it was, in fact, the impetus of many southern churches to keep segregation (and other such laws) enforced.

A minor detail.