The Trouble With An Establishment Of Religion

EVERYONE has something to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suggestion that the adoption of some aspects of sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable.”

In the New York Post John O’Sullivan feels that the Archbishop is preemptively appeasing the Muslims in Britain.

He seems to be blessing a creeping development in British life that would divide the nation into religious ghettoes, reduce women’s rights and abolish one of Britain’s proudest achieve- ments: a rule of law that applies equally to everyone.

Everyone thinks he is a fool, and many people think he should resign.

But to me the flap is salutary. For it demonstrates the problem with a nation that has an “establishment of religion,” that is, an official government religion.

And I include in that, naturally, the established religion of the United States, the belief system of the educational and cultural elite which we call multiculturalism and diversity.

When you have an establishment of religion then all questions of moral and cultural values come under the sway of national politics. You get Archbishops preemptively deciding the future of cultural and moral change. Or, in the case of the government universities in the United States you get speech codes and persecution of conservatives who don’t fall in line with the elite cultural consensus.

This is all wrong when you look at society from the point of view of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Novak’s view we should think of modern society as differentiated into three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. Each sector is in some sense independent of the other sectors. Indeed it is their greater separation of powers that guarantees the future of freedom because each sector is deliberately denied the power to oppress the other sectors. And each sector is jealous of the powers of the other sectors and is always ready to point out when another sector is get above itself.

Now, it is obvious to me that all laws promulgated by the political sector issue in some way from the moral/cultural framework in society, the notion that people have of good and evil. When you have an establishment of religion it means that the moral/cultural sector is subsumed into the political sector. In this state you cannot have a free and open contest between differing moral/cultural viewpoints. In fact you get what we have now in the United States and doubly so in Britain. You get a hegemony of the established church, whether the Church of England or the church of university and media liberals.

In the United States and in Britain the overwhelming domination of the Christian world view is coming under challenge from non-Christian immigrants who include not just Muslims but Hindu Indians and Han Chinese and their Confucian tradition.

It is “unavoidable” you might say, that in the future the culture of the United States and eventually its laws will come to reflect the evolving blend of cultures.

That process gets to be very different when an established church is in charge of the moral/cultural sector. For then all changes to the laws end up being a political deal between the current political/religious establishment and the insurgent minorities.

And that usually means more conflict than when different moral/cultural traditions are forced to compete on a level playing field where none have the open support of the government.

Let us learn from the foolishness of the Archbishop and insist that the United States purge itself of the creeping establishment of the church of liberal pieties and insist on a return to a rigorous culture of moral/cultural freedom, where no belief system has the sponsorship of the government, where all moral/cultural traditions must compete for the favor of the American people.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.