The Sin of Wages is Death

With every commentator on the net weighing in on Putsch’s "Faith-Based" scheme, it seems redundant for me to try. After all, what am I going to add that won’t be said several hundreds times in thousands of essays? Not just from my fellow liberals and leftists, but from concerned moderates, old-style conservatives, and even quite a few religious folk who see disaster in the melding of church and state. By now, everyone’s seen the quotes from Jefferson and Adams, seen pundits weigh in on the First Amendment, heard the taunting questions about unpopular religions such as the scientologists and Moon–one of Bush’s biggest supporters, bye the bye. Besides, I already wrote a humor piece on it, speculating on the new "non-religious" nomenclature "faith-based organizations" would have to adopt in order to qualify for federal dollars.

So what could I possibly add that isn’t being said elsewhere? Just this: If we drop the separation of church and state in this mad gambit, it will eventually result in the deaths of millions of Americans.

Notice the lack of exclamation points. I’m not even hyperventilating as I say this. Nor am I saying it’s going to happen in the next ten years, or that anyone, not even the strongest proponents of Putsch’s scheme, wants it to happen. I couldn’t even guess which Americans will be slaughtering which other Americans.

But happen it will. Here’s why:

America has never had a major problem with religious strife. There’s been discrimination, of course; against Catholics, against Jews, and against various new protestant sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Latter-Day Saints. In the nearest thing America has even seen to a pogrom, the Mormons had to flee the country to the Utah area. It was that or be slaughtered as heretics.

As colonies, what is now America was reasonably free of factionalism, although the existence of French Catholic colonies to the west, and a British held Catholic colony to the north surely weighed on the minds of the Founding Fathers. They may have never suffered personally for their religious beliefs, but the majority of them were of English or Scots descent, and knew of the then-recent history of the British Isles, the unending carnage, the uncertainty of thriving or being discriminated against because of the church you attended.

The big problem, in England and throughout all of Europe, was struggle for supremacy between the church and the secular state. And the two were always distinct entities, even during the horror of the Cromwell theocratic state. Religion dealt with truths based on faith, whereas the secular government was always a political beast, dealing with the art of the possible, and no place for blind faith. England finally addressed the problem by firing the church and erecting a state-run church, which lead to even wider gyrations in the struggle for control, weaving madly from Mary to the Cromwells. Tens of thousands died for the churches contesting the state, and millions of Catholics perished. England finally reached a point of equilibrium where the carnage stopped, not so much because a just settlement was reached as that all sides were too bloodied and weary to go on with the mass murder.

To this day, Catholics struggle for rights in the United Kingdom. It never really ended there.

Mindful of this, the Founders agreed that the secular government and all churches must be kept as separate as possible. In the Articles of Confederation, and later, in the Constitution, they forbade the government from inquiring into the religions of any elected official or anyone in a position of public trust. The clause, with its unique use of the word "never", is the one part of the Constitution that cannot be amended or stricken by amendment. In the Bill of Rights, they forbade Congress from passing any law respecting an establishment of religion. They meant it, too. They saw what sectarian strife had done throughout Europe and Asia, and wanted no part of it.

It worked. For 200 years, America avoided the pogroms and ghettoes, the tensions, the anger over having to support a religion that you did not believe in. It wasn’t perfect; Jews were discriminated against shamefully, Mormons forced into exile, Catholics denied exemption from having to mouth protestant prayers in the public schools. (One of the ironic little twists in American history is that the Protestants fought vigorously against allowing the Catholics to set up their own, private school system. The Catholics weren’t even asking for tax subsidies of any sort–they simply wanted out from under the repression of protestant belief.)

For 200 years, while religious wars raged around the world, America prospered in a pax secularum, not free of religious bigotry and fears, but forbidding the implementation of them into law.

That was the secret of America’s success. No church got favor or dispensation from the government. The government, on paper at least, played no favorites. No American ever had to pay tax to support another church, an alien god. No church could demand that the government punish people, not for criminal behavior, but for non-belief and heresy. The government never put anyone to death for their opinions on transubstantiation, or the divinity of Jesus, or for "blasphemy".

It has worked so well that most Americans are honestly puzzled by the religious wars that rage around the world. They don’t understand what is happening in the middle East, the UK, the Baltics, the Indian Subcontinent, in China and Tibet, in Africa. Some even deny that the wars are religious, and try to claim that some other factor must be causing them; as if there were other, physical differences between a Jew and an Arab, or a Catholic Irishman and a Protestant one.

Americans don’t have much experience with suffocating theocracies, although it certainly hasn’t been for lack for trying. This country has always had a severe case of Mrs. Grundyism, with resultant psychotic approaches to sex (decapitations are rated PG, nipples R, and in a strangely symbolic move, America’s favorite virgin slut, Britney Spears, will be touring with our most admired whore, Madonna on a tour to promote sexual responsibility) and crazed laws regarding personal behavior and insanely harsh sentencing. But we haven’t reached the point where neighborhood committees can hang people for heresy, and the government can’t refuse employment to non-Baptists. Our society may still be rife with structural institutional inequalities against blacks, gays, women and other minorities, but at least we’ve managed to avoid adding the super-charged element of religion to that mix.

And supercharged it is. Religion can anger people like nothing else. And oddly enough, the closer two sects are, the more likely they are to despise one another. A fundamentalist who basically writes off Jews and Moslems as "unsaved" will seethe with anger over the church up the street, where their teachings about "Father, Holy Ghost and Son" are obvious heresies that damn innocent people to hell since it’s clearly "Father, Son and Holy Ghost".

After 200 plus years of pax secularum, we simply aren’t prepared, emotionally or intellectually, to cope with religious strife.

And now, Putsch is proposing that we put all the churches (identified by that disgraceful right-wing PCism as "faith based organizations") in open competition with each other for government funds and government favor, in order to obtain a captive audience of potential converts.

Millions of virulent religious cranks, sanctimonious and paranoid, armed to the teeth, and we’re about to institute battles for political supremacy among the churches.

Oh yeah. Millions will die. At the very least. The only thing a mix like that needs is time, and one spark, and history shows that both are inevitable.

Nobody wants anything like that, and I’m quite sure that the proponents of this "faith-based" scheme would be horrified at my suggestions that it will lead to genocide. I’m sure that most have good intentions, and the worst of them are mere opportunists.

But I look at history, and the glaring fact that religious strife is the leading non-medical cause of death throughout that history, and look at how well America has managed as a secular state divorced from religious feudings, and I can only repeat the warning.