God, Man and Robert Frost
I’ve worked on two projects with an Iranian-American academic in the past, once when I interviewed him for The Indianapolis Star, the other time when we collaborated on a chapter for a journalism text I was editing for Routledge. We had cordial relations throughout and at one point I asked him an admittedly leading question: Which is paramount, the laws of man or the laws of God?
“Oh, the rule of God, for sure,” he said, or words extremely close to these. “What I don’t understand is how some people think God is speaking to them, but not to anyone else.”
In liberal Western democracies it is the people, through their representatives, who make the laws, which take precedence over religious beliefs. As an accommodation, though, we mandate a separation of church and state that protects both church and state from each other. This is high school civics, of course, and I expect most people reading this post would agree with the wisdom of that solution. We don’t ban religion as did the old Soviet Union (at least officially), and we don’t impose religious law on anyone, either.
There are reasons people accept religion, and I don’t discount them. Whether it’s as a moral guide, an answer to the mystery of life, or the promise of immortality, religion is attractive to a lot of people. Millions and millions of people have been sustained through good and bad times by their faith.
On the other hand, millions and millions of people have been killed in the name of God. In fact, we see this playing out today, and you know where.
Nonetheless, I saw a glimmer of hope in my colleague’s response. No way was he rejecting the preeminence of the word of God, but at least he rejected people who say that they, and they alone, have a direct line to God. He might even have been advocating for a kind of democratic theocracy where everyone gets to vote on what God’s intentions really are, then they’ll follow it blindly.
This little discussion was on my mind recently because of the strength of the Jihadist movement. There’s nothing new in that movement. The ancient Hebrews spread their religion by invading the Land of Canaan. Islam was spread by conquest in its early days and the Jihadists proudly boast that they are recreating that “perfect time” in history. And, while there’s nothing in the foundational Christian texts to suggest violent conquest (a major, major distinction) Christians have certainly killed countless numbers over the centuries in the name of their God.
Not all religions are monotheistic, of course, and while not many people would think of some of the alternatives as religions, that’s what they are. In Leon Trotsky’s “A Revolution Betrayed” the theorist and founder of the Red Army justifies killing millions of human beings after the October 1917 coup d’etat by Lenin as necessary to save “the Revolution” from reactionary forces (i.e., non-believers). It’s the Beloved, the Holy, the Revolution! Fidel Castro made similar rationalizations to justify public hangings in soccer stadiums after he seized power in Cuba.
So, my Iranian-American colleague gave his answer, along with that interesting caveat. Here’s my answer: Poet Robert Frost famously wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” That’s what the separation of church and state is, a good fence that leads to good relations between state and religion and among religions themselves. Whether monotheism in the Abrahamic tradition, any form of Buddhism that posits a “universal consciousness,” or enduring ideologies such as Communism, they’re all non-empirical, non-falsifiable beliefs, simply matters of faith. Let people believe what they want to believe, so long as they let everyone else freely believe something else, or not at all.