Valin Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 Power Line: Steven Hayward July 1, 2015 I’ll have a lot more to say in here and in several other venues about the status of religious liberty and religious faith in post-modern and post-Obergefell America. But for now it is worth recalling the observations of Richard John Neuhaus, from his important 1984 book The Naked Public Square: When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church… Our problems, then, stem in large part from the philosophical and legal effort to isolate and exclude the religious dimension of culture…only the state can…”lay claim to compulsive authority.”…of all the institutions in societies, only religion can invoke against the state a transcendent authority and have its invocation seconded by “the people” to whom a democratic state is presumably accountable. For the state to be secured from such challenge, religion must be redefined as a private, emphatically not public, phenomenon. In addition, because truly value-less existence is impossible for persons or societies, the state must displace religion as the generator and bearer of values… [T]he notion of the secular state can become the prelude to totalitarianism. That is, once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it – the state and the individual. Religion as a mediating structure…is no longer available as a countervailing force to the ambitions of the state… If law and polity are divorced from moral judgment…all things are permitted and…all things will be done…When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with the force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless and the marginal… (Snip) _______________________________________________________________________________________________ The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America Richard John Neuhaus September 9, 1988 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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