Religion and Government in America: An Act of Violence?

The Roman Catholic Bishops: Are They Killing Their Church?

I never thought I would live long enough to see birth control become a major political issue. Nor did I think I would ever hear the desire to provide women with safe and effective contraception be referred to as “a war on religion on the part of the Obama administration.” Granted that presidential election years frequently reveal the politically bizarre, it still seems that this year’s rhetoric has reached a new low on the scale of the absurd. It also reveals some frightening realities in the body politic of this nation that I find all but inconceivable. In this column let me try to cut through the polarizing propaganda and locate, if possible, the facts.

First, if the national polls are to be believed, about 98% of the American population uses contraception at some point in the course of their lives. That statistic appears to be true whether the users are Protestants, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, non-believers or atheists! There is no correlation between one’s religious tradition and one’s use of contraception. The “pill” has been determined to be not only safe, but of great benefit in the emancipation of women from being chained to their biological destiny. Family planning is no longer regarded by significant majorities the world over as a sinful thing to do, but has become an absolute virtue in our overpopulated world. In some nations, contraceptive help is actually forced on their people as a tactic of national survival. Contraception has also been demonstrated to be a strong bulwark against abortions since it dramatically lowers the unwanted pregnancies that fuel the number of abortion seekers. The Roman Catholic Church’s leadership, however, still acts as if it has the power to dictate what public policy is or what it should be on this issue. Unable to gain the loyalty of those they call “the faithful” they have now apparently decided that they will seek to impose their practices on the entirety of the nation’s citizenry. It is not working. The birth rate in an overwhelmingly Catholic Italy, for example, is about 1.5 children per family. Italian parents are not even reproducing themselves and the Italian population is actually declining. Does anyone think that is achieved through abstinence? Because of successful family planning women have been freed to make major contributions in such fields as politics, business and the professions. The idea that once emancipated from biological necessity women can now be coerced to return to the practices of yesterday is not just unrealistic, it is an act of violence!

A Vatican study commission on which sat some of Rome’s most respected moral theologians recommended to Pope Paul VI in 1968 that Rome’s ban on birth control be moderated significantly, but Paul VI, elected to bring the Roman Church back in the paths of the past after the dynamic pontificate of John XXIII, vetoed his own commission’s recommendation and, in an encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae, reasserted the anti-feminist position of that Church’s most oppressive past. The only problem was that Catholic women in significant majorities simply refused to be obedient and the authority of the Church was visibly weakened in all areas by their refusal to comply with their Church’s teaching in this area. Ecclesiastical influence always declines when church leaders overstep the limits of their power and seek to impose upon their people an authority they no longer possess.

In American politics, the Roman Catholic bishops have become increasingly aggressive on public issues over the last fifty years. When John F. Kennedy was seeking to become America’s first Catholic president in 1960, he assured a gathering of clergy in Houston that he would not seek to impose his religious rules upon this religiously pluralistic nation. That answer seemed quite satisfactory to Catholic bishops at that time. By 1984, however, when a Catholic woman, Geraldine Ferraro, was a candidate for the vice presidency, her position of separating her personal code from what was legally possible in the public arena was ruled by the Catholic bishops as no longer a satisfactory position for a Catholic to hold. John Kerry, as a practicing Roman Catholic, was told in his bid for the presidency in 2004 that he was forbidden to receive Communion because of his position of not repudiating the law that gave women the legal right to make their own abortion decisions. Now this Church’s bishops have taken that battle to what seems to be both a political and a religious absurdity. Though already given a “conscience” exemption of not being required to provide contraceptive coverage in the health care offered to employees of Catholic churches, they are now demanding the right to impose that teaching on employees of their Catholic universities, hospitals and charitable institutions. Those institutions, while Catholic sponsored, serve a diverse population and receive public state and federal money to carry out their work. They have many non-Catholic employees and many Catholic employees who do not want Catholic teaching imposed upon their own health care decisions. The bishops have gone on to argue that any business run by a Roman Catholic CEO should also have the right to opt out of the requirement to provide contraceptive care to their employees. If this principle of exemption for Catholics is allowed, where will it stop? Some religions practiced in America object to blood transfusions, others do not believe that any medical intervention should be allowed since sickness is thought of as punishment for sin and still others have in the past sought to be exempted from the law that requires only one partner in marriage. Must the laws of America respect their consciences also? When the public good and religious values have come into conflict in the past, the state has always protected its understanding of public good and the various religious bodies have had to accommodate that policy. That is what it means to live in a multi-cultural state, where people enjoy freedom to worship as they wish, but where no religious system can impose any religious principle or practice on the entire nation. Are the Catholic Bishops and those politicians who want to dictate the details of health care that will be offered to employees of religiously affiliated institutions now find that this basic American premise is no longer acceptable? That is a frightening change.

The Roman Catholic Church’s recent history with the laws of this nation in regard to the criminal behavior of both abusing children and of protecting abusive priests had them asking for and receiving great leniency. Subpoenas of church records relating to the transfer of known child molesters have not been aggressively pursued. Cardinal Bernard Law, perhaps the guiltiest prelate in America of protecting abusers was allowed to move to the Vatican rather than have to answer his accusers or their attorneys under oath. Cardinal Law probably should be in jail today not in a respected post in the Vatican. This Church has a history of putting its own well being ahead of its victims. Now they want to dictate the kind of health care available to women who are in their employ. I shake with rage at that suggestion and at that kind of self-serving duplicity.

This Church has also carried out a destructive public campaign against justice and equality for gay and lesbian people over the last fifty years. They have used their money to defeat initiatives that would have provided equality before the law and end all forms of discrimination against homosexual people. They have done this based on Church teaching that defines homosexuality as deviant, a point of view regularly articulated by Pope Benedict XVI, despite the fact that this definition is almost universally dismissed as little more than dated ignorance in scientific and medical circles. How long do we tolerate religious ignorance that diminishes American citizens? I do not understand religious imperialism in any of its forms. Religious imperialism is what gave us the rampant anti-Semitism that finally erupted in the Holocaust which Pope Pius XII watched without lifting a finger. It has given us the Vatican led Crusades against the people of Islam that marked the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries and that still today feeds the hostility of radical Islamic fundamentalism costing countless lives on 9-11 and in the continuing wars in Islamic countries. It has given us the Inquisition in Europe in the 14th century that burned at the stake, quite legally, those who dared to question that Church’s teaching. Now this institution, which has never allowed equality for women, wants to be permitted to determine the limits of health care for women who work for Catholic institutions. When President Obama worked out a compromise acceptable to the health care industry that allowed women to receive contraception care without cost, but from the insurance industry not from the church affiliated organizations, the result satisfied most Roman Catholic women, including many nuns who run health care institutions. It did not, however, go far enough to satisfy the all male bishops who want to require that no public money go for a medical procedure that the bishops oppose for women, whether Catholic or not.

I never want to go back to the time when participation by Roman Catholics in public life was opposed because of their religion. I recall when one seat on the Supreme Court was designated “the Catholic seat.” Today a literal majority of five of our Supreme Court justices (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito) are Roman Catholics. If, however, the leaders of that church are going to use the political process to impose Catholic teaching on this entire nation then that attitude will surely compromise their ability to fulfill their oath of office. I had hoped that such a day had long gone from American life. The behavior of the Catholic bishops is surely reviving it. I am not willing to sacrifice the health of women or the constitutional rights of homosexual people to accommodate the dated attitudes of present Catholic leaders. The vast majority of American Roman Catholics also seem to recognize that the leadership of their Church is simply badly out of date. I grieve that the present all-male leadership of the Catholic Church is bringing that Church into disrepute in a way that hurts the witness of the Christian faith, a faith that I too represent and treasure.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
George, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I’m a gay man and family physician who has often quoted you and said, “Jack Spong is exactly where I am as a Christian.” My husband and I have met you personally and attend every opportunity we have to listen to your scholarly lectures.
I’m having some doubts after reading Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.” At the same time I’m re-reading his 30th anniversary edition of “The Selfish Gene” Richard has almost convinced me that there is no God. I still think I see God and what is holy in many people, especially in you and in my relationship with the love of my life, Brian. I am a scientist after all, and Dawkins’ arguments make perfect sense to me. Yet we worship at our progressive UMC on Sundays and I’m constantly noting stupid stuff a scientist should reject out of hand. We enjoy the fellowship but I wonder why I am still going. Can you help me find my way? I look forward to your next several essays on “thinking differently and accepting uncertainty.”
Answer:
Dear George,
I am glad you have read Richard Dawkins’ books, “The God Delusion” and “The Selfish Gene.” I enjoyed both books and find Richard Dawkins to be an insightful thinker and a clear writer. He is a pleasure to read.
We are living in a time of rising consciousness and new ways of understanding reality. Richard Dawkins is one of the authors who is forcing us to recognize that the old ways of thinking are simply not working any longer. The problem is that most of our churches are so deep in the clutches of these old ways of thinking that their message is no longer able to be heard. When we examine the prayers said in church we discover that they are all generally addressed to the God above the sky who began to disappear with the work of Copernicus in the 16th century and who then died when we became space age people. We see old and dated thinking when we continue to define human life as fallen from an original perfection and thus identifying ourselves as the victims of “original sin.” These ideas died with the work of Charles Darwin, who taught us that human life was never perfect, but that we evolved from single cells into self-conscious, complex creatures. Now look for a moment at what Darwin’s insight means to the common religious language of our day. If there was not original perfection, there could have been no fall from perfection into sin. If there was no fall, there would have been no need to be saved from a fall that never happened. This means that the whole idea that “Jesus died for my sins” is absurd. I could go on and on but the fact is that many churches today appear to be caught in a time warp. Their destiny is thus either to turn into being clever propaganda institutions of fundamentalism that avoid the issues or they become quickly irrelevant and begin to manifest rigor mortis. The future of Christianity lies, I believe, in breaking out of these patterns and finding new ways to articulate the meaning of life and the God who infuses new life.
So wrestle with Dawkins, but recognize that there are people in the Christian Church who can read and even appreciate Dawkins and still be drawn into the worship of God and a Christian understanding of life.
Live well!
~John Shelby Spong