Tag: religion

‘Round Midnight

November 26, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.
Image by Zach Dulli from Pixabay

And so it begins…

The public and judicial enshrinement of the idea that “sincerely held belief” and “religious liberty” supersede public good, health and general wellbeing started last night when the Supreme Court, shortly before midnight, issued their opinion in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York.[1] From Amy Howe at Scotusblog.com, “The Supreme Court late Wednesday night granted requests from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and two Orthodox Jewish synagogues to block enforcement of a New York executive order restricting attendance at houses of worship.[2]”

As I look at the case as it was presented to the Supreme Court, I can see the writing on the wall for LGBTQ rights…this new conservative court is going to support exemptions in favor of religious institutions without regard for the broader harm that those religious institutions may cause.  Their majority opinion can only be seen as a tip of the hat to conservative religious communities that see themselves as somehow being victims under attack.  Never mind the nationwide assault these conservative organizations have waged on general LGBTQ rights, women’s autonomy, Transgender health and public accommodation and even survivors of sexual assault. Associate Justice Gorsuch’s concurring wink and nod opinion hints at this when he states:

Government is not free to disregard the First Amend­ment in times of crisis. At a minimum, that Amendment prohibits government officials from treating religious exer­cises worse than comparable secular activities, unless they are pursuing a compelling interest and using the least re­strictive means available. See Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U. S. 520, 546 (1993). Yet recently,during the COVID pandemic, certain States seem to have ignored these long-settled principles.[3]

To be clear here, the Lukumi case that Justice Gorsuch references is one of the most quoted in cases seeking religious exemption to LGBTQ inclusion.

As a minister who currently wrestles every day with what it means to create, support, generate, fashion and design spiritual community without the benefit of physical presence, I understand the challenges faced by faith leaders.  I grew up in traditions that were based on holy communion, I have a deep theological understanding of the sacraments in the Christian tradition and I have studied Jewish practices for the last decade as part of my education as a minister.  But the argument as presented seems to be making the point that Governor Cuomo is somehow “anti-religion” in his position and favoring commercial business over spiritual wellbeing.  Yet, they don’t mention the essential difference between how people gather to worship and how they gather in a restaurant.

Without getting into a lengthy analysis, the basic difference between the two is the way in which dining and worship manifest as intimate experiences.  Communal worship is designed around the premise of bringing together people who aren’t normally in close proximity by creating a forced intimacy; by its very definition, communal worship is a super spreader event, meant to spread faith and shared experience.  Sadly however, it is also a super spreader for Covid-19, the flu and any airborne illness.  Dining on the other hand allows people to bring their isolated intimacies into the public setting and therefore can be managed in terms of maintaining isolations while providing unique intimacies.  Diners are not sharing the same plate and glass.

But this is not the main problem with this decision.  The Arch Diocese case is wrestling with the question of whether or not a government entity has any right at all to limit how and when people worship.  The conservative court has ruled here that government cannot intervene in religious practice in any way under any circumstances even in a global pandemic.  This is an incredibly dangerous premise because how then does one intervene when church organizations claim that conversion therapy is part of their religious practice?  Or worse female genital mutilation and racial segregation?

Freedom of religion is important to maintain our Constitutional standards, but freedom from religion is equally important.  What needs to happen here is that not only does church and state need to remain separate, but the question of religious belief as a personal framework needs to be separate from religious practice as a public facing act as well.  If the method in which a religious practice is being carried out creates a public health threat for those who do not practice that religion, reason says that there must be limitations and considerations as to how it is exercised.

Moving into the next era of Supreme Court decisions will require all of us who are progressive faith leaders to remain vigilant and informed.  This ruling was handed down around midnight before a national holiday.  It literally snuck in.  What is more, law is based largely on precedent.  The precedent set by this decision is chilling.  It is an onramp to solidifying the foundation for religious exemption to be the broad law of the land giving a pass to violent discrimination and bigotry.  The conservative justices are poised to lead the way marching civil rights in the United States all the way back to 1789 one midnight decision at a time.

[1] Amy Howe, Justices lift New York’s COVID-related attendance limits on worship services, SCOTUSblog (Nov. 26, 2020, 2:18 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/11/justices-lift-new-yorks-covid-related-attendance-limits-on-worship-services/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Per Curiam, “2 ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF BROOKLYN v. CUOMO,” 2020, 33.

When Belief Becomes Policy…

November 5, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

I recently began studying for a Master in Public Policy degree at Tufts University.  Someone asked me why I was doing this when I already had a Master of Divinity degree and they wondered how the degrees were related.  My answer is playing out in real time this week with the 2020 United States Presidential Election.  Although my initial impetus to pursue the degree came from a desire to counteract the harmful ways in which I recognize religion is being turned into a policy weapon, I see that this violence is much more wide spread.  Nor is it specific to one religion’s (Christian) fundamentalism.

…we are living in the age of the…“celebritician.” These are people who are not so much public servants who wish to help govern our society as they are eager to craft and promote a brand that has a high market value.

As we watch an electoral map unfold in what is an unthinkable way for many people on both sides of the political spectrum, what we are seeing is a combination of things. First, there is the vast difference in which sources people use to acquire news.  With the emergence of Fox news as a veritable state television network for Trumpism and with CNN working to create some kind of counternarrative to that bias, news and news sources have become inherently political.  Add to this the plethora of podcasts, YouTube channels, vlogs and blogs, none of which are regulated or assessed for bias, people are capable of creating their own comfortable echo chambers tuned specifically to what they want to hear…24/7.

Next, we are living in the age of the celebrity politician…“celebritician.” These are people who are not so much public servants who wish to help govern our society as they are eager to craft and promote a brand that has a high market value.  We first flirted with this with Jack and Jackie.  Then Ronnie and Nancy literally brought Hollywood to Washington. The Clintons monetized their political lives to a level that has been questioned by GOP pundits as criminal.  Michelle and Barack were the total anomaly that we couldn’t/can’t get enough of…and are willing to pay for no matter what the cost.  The pinnacle of celebritician has been “The Trump Show” fully produced for syndication with story arcs, villains and heroes, costumes and characters and of course fabulous hair.  Think Dallas in D.C.  Where this becomes problematic is when a celebritician becomes the total embodiment of what we expect to see as the face of public policy.

The final piece of this toxic equation is the level to which aspirational culture has taken over our political sensibilities.  I recently described this through the metaphor of how people attach a personal affinity to sports teams.  For many people in the United States, we attach a personal sense of ownership and aspiration to what sports teams do on the field, ice or court.  We don’t just cheer them on, we invest in knowledge about their training and the makeup of the team.  We follow and work hard to predict the statistics on how well they will perform and we believe on a certain level that we can will them to an outcome.  We project on sports teams a level of aspiration to “win” that may or may not be healthy from a psychological standpoint, but when applied to politics and policy is obviously doing us all tremendous harm.

What I’ve realized is that together these elements (information, embodiment, aspiration) add up to the reason I’m pursuing my degree.  Together they create the framework for something that is the cornerstone of what ministers are trained to understand deeply: belief.  Religious belief is based on a source of information, how it is embodied either by prophets or within the self and how that information and embodiment add up to aspirations for everything from having an afterlife to literally turning your body back into the earth.  Ministry is the business of belief and more and more so are our politics.

But it is not just that we have entered into a time where politics are beliefs, it is that we have no modern, evolved tools or language to process what that means.  This leaves the left and right hunkered down in their opposite corners assuming that every move made by the other side is going to be one of aggression or attempted erasure.  Ministers will tell you that living in suspicion is much more dangerous than living in fear.  Suspicion is the ground in which assumption grows and assumptions are what eventually become underpaid women, caged immigrant children and dead unarmed black people.

We are in a desperate need of a way to completely rethink what it means to be political.  We have to ask tough questions about what it means to navigate the world we have created where belief drives policy.  What are the common sources of information, the embodied sources of mutually respected leadership and the unified goals and aspirations that we can all work toward within a wide range of belief systems?  These are the questions that our policy makers must learn to be asking.  That is what I believe the future of public policy will hinge on.  Without it, we may literally tear each other apart.

–ALD