Freedom of Choice

Ever since I started paying more attention to politics, both people’s and the nation’s, I’ve noticed how truly polarizing the issue of religion really is. If it’s not someone’s Facebook status about the hypocrisy of religious people, it’s religious people complaining about the lack of religion in government. In social situations it’s about as taboo a topic as one’s income or stance on abortion, always threatening to lead to friction and irresolvable disagreement. It’s often a determinative issue for voters in elections. It’s an element of our identity that tends to define our social circles and can even preclude certain relationships. Unless of course you live in the South like I do, where everyone goes to church and believes in God, even when they don’t.

The reason for this, I think, is that we can’t get around the implications that our religions have for our lives. Some of us try to. Some find a way to interpret the principles of their faith so that they are all-inclusive, creating a place for everyone, regardless of lifestyle or worldview. But some of us are not so lucky. For some of us, there is, simply put, a very judgmental aspect to many of ours or others’ religious principles. Even if some of them contradict themselves, the contradiction is usually between one exclusive way of life and another. It’s difficult to ignore the call of our respective faiths to live by a set of rather narrow moral standards, where specific behaviors are often prescribed or proscribed, depending of course on who’s doing the interpreting. The polarizing effect of these varying moral standards is a result of our adoption of them as our own and the type of connection we form with them. They are, in essence, the manifestation of our beliefs on right and wrong. For many of us these beliefs are the foundation of our worldview. And ideas that contradict these beliefs threaten this foundation, and thus threaten our worldview. And it is no surprise that we are partial to our own views on the world.

There is something even deeper though about our attachment to these beliefs. Of all the different types of beliefs that we hold, those constituting our personal morality, especially when adopted in the shadow of religious convictions, are held with a special intensity and fervor. Naturally there is a connection between moral standards and certain issues of ultimate significance for adherents of religion, such as salvation (to mention one). This explains a degree of the passion with which some religiously inclined people defend their moral positions. Logically, if a moral standard derived from religious beliefs can be invalidated, the underlying beliefs are possibly suspect. There is also a certain amount of pride in the individual judgment through which individual believers reach their faith-based conclusions about morality. Retreating from these positions could be viewed as admitting an error in judgment about such a fundamental thing as right and wrong itself. And not insignificant either are the social pressures amongst congregations to conform or fall in line with positions accepted by their church or denomination.

I believe the combination of this deeply personal stake in faith-based moral standards and the fundamentalist nature of many religious beliefs brings about a potentially destructive inability among religious followers to see the true subjectivity of their beliefs and consequent moral standards. In effect, their beliefs become truly fundamentalist—there is no other possible alternative, and any suggestions to the contrary are not only untrue, but morally wrong. This is a predictable outcome, given the particular qualities of certain major religions. In Christianity and Islam, for example, the scriptures of both are considered sacred, and viewed as infallible and exhaustive of all revealed truth by many believers. And so treated are the accepted interpretations of the scriptures within certain groups and communities. To stray from the deduced principles and rules is to risk the wrath of the Almighty, or so we’re told.

But belief in God and what this belief requires is an intensely personal and subjective thing. To be clear, this is belief in a usually invisible being occupying another realm whose supernatural status is well beyond our comprehension. The most studied scriptural commentators often come to conclude that the nature of God is a mystery. Even so, those who choose to undertake the notion of faith are often faced with the prospect of forming a relationship with their God and attempting a life of obedience. Naturally it is this area of “obedience” where moral standards come into play. For these standards to be legitimate, they must, for lack of a better term, “come” from God. For a believer to try and fulfill what God commands, they must make decisions about exactly what God does command. Enter subjectivity: the individual’s decision about what God requires of the individual. No one can make this decision except for the individual, and the decision itself is an act of faith.

But faith has become religion, and religion has become morality. People of faith forget that their belief is the condition on which their morality rests. Faith has become somewhat irrelevant really to the question - the question being whether you believe like they do. Right and wrong goes from being a personal faith-based decision to a black and white truth that should be embraced by government and citizens alike. In America, I have witnessed an alarming clash between the conservative religious demographic and the rest of the secular public, and the argument of moral superiority is fueling the fight. Even more alarming is the clamor for religion to play a more prominent role in the laws and governance of our nation. Religion is simply not democratic. What’s right and wrong in religion is not decided by popular vote, but by one all powerful being with the last word. And while some argue that our country was founded by men of faith, those men of faith founded this country on a set of principles that are subject to the democracy which they empower.

This is not to say that religion cannot or should not play a role in a person’s politics. There is a fine line though between supporting a law or policy because it conforms with your belief and wanting the government to enact laws on the basis of your belief. One only has to study the history of theocracies - where the government enacts or enforces laws based on their inherent rightness (according to an inspired and select few) rather than on the will of the people - to know how the combination of religious ideals and governance can turn for the worse. To truly believe in Democracy is to believe in the freedom to choose - but it’s hard to support this freedom when you look at those who choose differently than you as hell-bound sinners who are ruining your country.

When we ask the rest of the world to believe like we do, we are asking them to come to a decision which we arrived at through the intimate channels of our own experience and influences. Before we apply the labels of right and wrong, we must remember the distinction between a faith-based moral standard and standards born out of consensus. One is a standard we have chosen to adopt as an act of faith, and the other is (hopefully) the will of the majority. The freedom of choice is there for when the two conflict.