We often tend to talk about religion in terms of "faith" and "belief," which are merely subjective terms that indicate nothing said in that realm can be proven true or false. What has been lost is something which George Washington, James Madison, and the Founders understood: That religion is also based on the claims of reason, or the canons of natural law. If this is not the case, how then would civil society be able to pass laws banning the practice of suttee, in which an aggrieved widow throws herself on the funeral pyres of her deceased husband? After all, she is just practicing her religion, right? Think again:
In contrast, there is the understanding made explicit by John Paul II, that the Church has always moved with two wings, faith and reason. Anyone engaged in the serious study of theology knows how demanding is the discipline of reason that is bound up with the efforts to explore the depths of theology. But beyond that it seems to be one of the best kept secrets in the country—a secret apparently not revealed to many Democratic politicians—that the teaching of the Catholic church on moral questions such as abortion does not depend critically on appeals to faith. The Catholic position on abortion is a weave composed mainly of embryology, the facts of science, and principled reasoning. The Catholic position has been argued in the style of natural law, with reasons that are accessible even to people who are not Catholic. One doesn't have to be Catholic in order to understand the Church's position on abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, or marriage—and that has been precisely the teaching of the Church: that one doesn't have to be Catholic in order to understand these arguments woven of moral reasoning.
Though Arkes is a Catholic, this reasoning is not simply true just for Catholics. Case in point, Arkes on what is really going on in the arguments against the provisions in Obamacare that mandate that Catholic hospitals among other religious entities offer contraception coverage in their employees' health plans:
Bishop William Lori pointed out that the Church was not seeking an exemption from the policies on contraception in the way that "conscientious objectors" sought exemptions from service in the military. The Bishop was appealing to "conscience" in the sense once explained with exquisite care by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor : conscience as an understanding ordered to a body of objective moral truths. John Paul II remarked on that facile tendency to accord to the "individual conscience the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil":
But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself', so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.
What is lost then is the recognition that conscience is not directed inward to the self and one's feelings, but outward to the natural law: The "natural law discloses the objective and universal demands of the moral good," and the function of conscience is "the application of the law to a particular case." That seemed to be the understanding at work with Bishop Lori and his colleagues for they were not, as I say, seeking an exemption from the mandate on contraception. They were pronouncing the mandates to constitute an "unjust law, no law at all," and therefore rightly binding on no one. (Italics in original.)
What this means for our understanding of "religion" and how far removed it is (or is not) from what the Founders had in mind:
But just before the drafting of the Constitution, in the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," James Madison had drawn from the Virginia Declaration of Rights as he set forth with a crisp clarity what he and many of the Founders understood by religion: "the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it." Years later, that understanding would be restated by the redoubtable Justice Stephen J. Field in Davis v. Beason (1890), one of the cases dealing with the Mormons. That is probably still the understanding held by most people in this country about the meaning of religion. It is the religion marked by the presence of the God of the Declaration, the God of the logos, of reason, who was understood to have brought forth, as the peak of His creation, those creatures with the capacity to give and understand reasons over matters of right and wrong. There is no understanding of religion more bound up with the deep principles of the American regime and the very ground of the laws. That is not to say that we would be retreating to some notion of "the god of the place," the God associated with thistribe of Americans. The God of the Declaration was not a local god. Serious Protestants, Catholics and Jews understood the God of the Creation as a God with a universal jurisdiction, the Author of moral commands universal in their reach.
But, as Arkes points out, the understanding now dominant in our Courts is one of nihilism, relativism, and atheism. In an odd irony, judges have deemed that the principle of the rule of law now entails the rejection of the grounding of that principle: that we no longer have access to the moral principles which used to be thought were available to all.
Please ponder over this essay because the implications drawn from it will be very helpful in continuing the defense of natural rights and natural law against the full implementation of the provisions of Obamacare in the coming years.
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