As part of their effort to incorporate more religion into government, religious conservatives have tried to sell the idea of a “generic American religiousness”: that government should endorse “religion in general,” but just keep out of sectarian differences. This notion has even infected First Amendment jurisprudence, where prominent conservative legal scholars argue that the Establishment Clause only prohibits the government from endorsing the tenets of a sect, but do allow the government to endorse “religion in general,” or even “Christianity in general.” This is known as the “nonpreferential” theory of the Establishment Clause. See, e.g., Patrick M. Garry, Religious Freedom Deserves More Than Neutrality: The Constitutional Argument for Nonpreferential Favoritism of Religion, 57 Fla. L. Rev. 1, 3 (2005) (“the Establishment Clause aims to keep the government from singling out certain religious sects for preferential treatment, but it does not prevent the government from showing favoritism to religion in general.”)
The problem is that there is no such thing as “religion in general.” Certainly there is no way of demarcating the things that separate “religion in general” from “non-religion” in a way that makes consistent sense to sectarians. Is belief in the trinity “religion in general” or is it just sectarian? What about belief in the divinity of Christ? It’s easy to say that the first thing is just sectarian because we’re used to seeing Protestant sects that don’t believe in the trinity. But what about the latter? If even atheists can be Quakers, surely someone who doesn’t believe in Christ’s divinity can still be a Christian…no? I don’t think so, but who am I to be making such distinctions about another person’s religious beliefs? And if we can’t draw that line, then the idea of government endorsing “generic religion” is an invitation to just the sort of religious controversies that the First Amendment was designed to keep out of government.
All of this comes to mind when you read a story like this. The religious right’s embrace of Mitt Romney is a set up for an inevitable clash with those who rightly see that there are some serious differences between Mormonism and the Christianity that most Americans embrace—differences that those people will definitely take seriously. Republican cheerleaders like Hugh Hewitt ignore these differences only at the expense of constructing this silly notion of “generic religiousness” that nobody who knows about these things—not believers (i.e., the Republican base), and certainly not non-believers—buy into. The only people who will are those who don’t take these issues seriously enough to know about them, and who therefore don’t see the inevitable conflict down the road.
Allapundit is certainly right that “a debate between Mormons and Christians about whose beliefs are more farcical is Christopher Hitchens’s wet dream. Dawkins may fly in just to be able to watch from ringside.” But unfortunately, that fight will take place right in front of American voters.
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