America’s Lethal Admixture of Politics and Religion

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.politicususa.com/en/lethal-politics-religion

What does religion have to do with politics? In the ancient world, the answer would have been “quite a lot.” After all, the gods made the state and the state gave and sponsored worship of the gods in return.<1> The same was true through most of subsequent history until the European Enlightenment began to break that system down. The “divine right of kings” and the idea of “state sponsored religion” were incompatible, you see, with the modern liberal democracy birthed by the colonists in North America. State sponsored religion is the enemy of the “we the people” modern liberal democracies are founded upon: God did not make the state; the people did.

As it turns out, and the Founding Fathers recognized this: for everyone to have equal freedom, everybody has to give a little freedom up. This is the basis of the social contract theory of government, and that theory was never put more to the test than in the establishment of the United States of America, the first national government established outside of the old European order.

The Constitution was not handed down by a god, nor decreed by a king, but debated and compromised into existence by free men acting upon their own will in accordance with the ancient pagan idea, given new life by the European Enlightenment, of natural rights.

As it turned out, the Christian religion and the idea of the modern liberal democracy were at odds. The Constitution is all about the granting of rights and liberties, guaranteeing equality before the law for all and an equal right to the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.” The Christian religion is not about the granting of rights but the placement of restrictions and obligations.

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