I happen to be in the unique position of being a civil libertarian who also happens to be a practicing Catholic. In practical terms, that means that my sense of right and wrong, of ethics and morality, is shaped by my faith and by Catholic teaching. It also means I’m a firm believer in the separation of church and state, and that I am opposed to legislation born exclusively of faith-based morality. This bears some explanation.
While I believe good is good and evil is evil and there are certain things one ought not do, I also believe that the government’s interest in legislating what a person can and cannot do should not be based on what a faith system says so much as on actual harm caused (and I do not consider something sinful to be “harmful” in a legal sense.) It is easy to say, for instance, that theft should be illegal because the Bible says “thou shalt not steal.” It is also true that taking another person’s possessions violates that person’s inalienable right to his or her property. There is actual, quantifiable harm there. On the other hand, I struggle to find the actual, quantifiable harm in legislating what is or is not permissible between two consenting adults in a committed relationship in the privacy of the bedroom. (This is not to start a discussion about bedroom morality, but rather to illustrate that there are limits to what constitutes legal harm. Whether “alienation of affection” constitutes “harm” is a topic for another day.)
Wouldn’t I love to see a Catholic utopia? Wouldn’t I love to see a society in which a holistic approach is taken to the human person and human dignity, in which workers are paid fair wages and people all work together for the common good? As a Catholic, the idea does have a certain appeal. But there is one huge, fundamental problem with that ideal: we live in a pluralistic society, one in which not even a majority is Catholic. In fact, while the United States can claim to be majority Christian, there is no denomination that can claim to be a majority. And I can say with certainty that what a Catholic would consider an ideal society does not mesh with what a Baptist or Calvinist or Seventh Day Adventist would consider optimal. In short, tolerance is required. Thus, instead of asking what I’d like to see if my perfect government were in place, I’m more interested in asking what protections I’d want to have if a highly-incompatible faith system were calling the shots. Would I be willing to tolerate a life without bacon or Saturday afternoon football, or a mandated month-long fast? Would I be willing to live in a society in which women count only as a fraction of a man? And what of impositions against my own faith (for instance, a blanket ban on alcohol, which could affect the way we celebrate Communion?)
The answer, then, must be that church and state be separated, and that the faith of others be tolerated. The government’s role must therefore necessarily be to protect the common good, provide for redress of grievances and generally promote an environment in which we are strongly discouraged from causing harm to others, and punished if we do. Equally importantly, it is NOT the role of the state to legislate and safeguard morality. Ethics, yes, but morality – at least when real harm to others is involved – falls outside the realm of what a faith-neutral government ought to be doing.
So, without government intervention, won’t the nation just fall into moral derpitude? Won’t every last shred of goodness and decency fall by the wayside? As far as the government is concerned, that’s not the government’s problem… but the very nature of the church-state divide indicates that there are two sides to the coin, and that it is the role of churches, synagogues, mosques, priests, imams, rabbis, shamans and other religions and religious leaders to take a true and actual leadership position where morality and right and wrong are concerned.
Sadly for far too long, the ones who are supposed to have been the strongest defense of morality in this country have been floundering in their most fundamental of duties. What reaches the public eye are the extremists whose often-outlandish and overtly-hostile stances on single issues make them polarizing news fodder, but not exactly role models for how to live one’s life. Similar are the religious leaders (gleefully?) caught in various scandals, usually sexual in nature (one thinks of the priestly pedophilia scandal, or of the anti-homosexual preacher caught receiving a sensual massage from another male, then blaming it on alcohol.) Don’t get me wrong: there are many outstanding clergy out there who live their lives well. But between attempted cover-ups and disingenuous tearful mea culpas, there is a serious credibility problem.
The nature of being a religious authority is that you are therefore a de facto moral authority, and you are expected to live according to the tenets of the morality you preach. If you are a clergy member or a religious institution and you do not live up to the expectations you set for yourself, you undermine your moral authority and it is there that the true moral decline begins. This is not to say that clergy ought to be held to impossibly high standards; I think we all understand that clergy are just human. But I also confess a certain schadenfreude when a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons do not include words like “love” or “mercy” is caught in a compromising position: call it kismet. One of the best sermons on morality I ever heard came from a priest at Catholic U. The gist of it was simple: “I’m not perfect, I’ve made my mistakes, but that doesn’t change the fact that a sin is a sin, and even if everybody is doing it (myself included), that doesn’t make it right.”
In the same way I find it morally and ethically reprehensible that a senior clergy member would try to sweep misdeeds under his watch under the rug and try to make things go away quietly without taking responsibility (as happened in many dioceses here and abroad), I find it equally reprehensible that a religious institution that dares claim moral and ethical leadership would cast aside the core tenets of its faith in the interest of becoming more like state-run institutions (which do not have moral restrictions, but can also not claim to be moral leaders.) If a religiously-oriented institution adheres to a faith that is unambiguously and unequivocally pro-life, how can it make sense for that institution to add an avowed pro-abortion activist to its board? How can it continue to claim that moral imperative? For that matter, how can it claim to be on the “church” side of the church-state divide?
American society and government depends on a separation of church and state: we are a pluralistic and inclusive society, and that means there needs to be room for people of all faiths (including no faith at all). But for the churches who are not permitted to make public policy decisions, the answer is not to bemoan the fact that the law doesn’t permit faith-based intrusions on government. The answer is to lead by word and by example. Every major religion has rules for how to live and how to treat others, and it is incumbent on those religions and their clergy to live that way and to encourage their followers to live that way. Morality is at the very heart of church life. It is at the very heart of how we, as individuals, treat others in our community. For a clergy member or a religious institution to abdicate this duty to morality is the pinnacle of moral cowardice.
