In Response to the Easily Offended: Hostility to Religion Harms No-One

In my morning routine, an aid to coffee in getting my cold-hearted blood recirculating comes with a quick once-over of the day's op-eds. In today's shabby pile of political nonsense, I found a pity party letter addressed to the “relatively small but powerful sector of society composed of influential people” who direct a “flood of hostility” toward the reverent which the author, Kelly Shackelford*, claims as detrimental to us all. The whole of the essay is rested on a dodgy survey conducted by Mr. Shackelford's own company which purports to document the “dramatic rise in attacks on religious liberty” in America during a three year period from '12 to '15.

Mr. Shackelford holds three executive positions at his presumptuously-named First Liberty Institute, a curious example of Alan Smithee's Law extending its reach outside cinema. According to my half-hearted research, the FLI is a forty-year-old religious advocacy organization with a spectacularly unoriginal modus operandi of attempting to use the First Amendment against itself. Their main field of work appears to be in the southwest regions, predominantly Texas with an apparent home base in Plano. I attempted to find out more about their history, but the parading links for “PRAY,” “LEGACY,” and “DONATE” on their homepage, bookended by intimidating headlines warning of science coming to take Jesus away, reminded me how meaningless the effort would be.

The FLI has made its hay wasting the court's time on frivolous hurt feelings lawsuits entirely revolving around the right of the religious to impose their nonsense on the rest of us in public places. The remarkably scant information I could find on them, barring their own statements and remembering that I don't care enough to look very hard, shows a history of attempting and failing to undermine the First Amendment for the reasons one would expect. Be it trying to force religious funeral services on members of our military in direct defiance of the family's wishes, sneaking scripture into schools piggybacked on candy canes, fighting against the removal of eyesores from the landscape, or a bizarre coverup of an investigation into Sarah Palin, there seems to be no windmill Mr. Shackelford won't tilt with.

As I also have a vendetta against the windmills, I wanted to go over the points Mr. Shackelford raises in his article, taking them in reverse order and trying valiantly not to roll my eyes out the back of my skull.

To start, Mr. Shackelford asserts that religious freedom is the most important provided in the First Amendment because all other freedoms are derived from it. “Without the concept of a higher authority to make government accountable to unchanging principles of justice,” he argues, “all other freedoms are at risk of being violated, redefined, or revoked...”

The concept of higher authority in and of itself would seem to erase the need for a government of the people to exercise it. Since there is no higher authority, it falls to imperfect and irrational primates like ourselves to make an effort to regulate ourselves. It should be obvious to you that at no point in our conception of justice has it ever been unchanging. The First Amendment is a wonderful example in that it is, by name, an amendment to what came before it. I shouldn't need to explain to you the ghastly reality that would exist if we operated on a judicial system that was biblically informed and unchanged for two millenia. It can be seen inside the borders of our unfortunate cousins to the east, locked in totalitarian nightmares of wholly religious construction.

It is true that the Establishment Clause is a vital support for our American way of life, but it is wildly arrogant to state, as Mr. Shackelford does, that it is the only pillar on which we build. In fact, the interdependency of the five components could not possibly be more obvious. The freedom to assemble makes the free expression of religion possible, for example, as well as free speech ensuring the press is not hampered by either the state or the church. Elevating established religion as a keystone doesn't make the amendment stronger, it hamstrings the ability of the population to avail themselves of the remaining mandates.

Religion crushes free press and free speech by allowing a subsection of the people to determine based on a whim what may or may not be publicly uttered. It eliminates our opportunity to read and hear people like Bill Nye, Neil Tyson, or Carl Sagan, not to mention smothering the advance of scientific progress in favor of idol worship. We would likely never even hear of these people or, in the well-known case of Mr. Rushdie, their church-funded death sentences, simply because they wouldn't exist in the form we know them. A religious government precludes the ability to petition and assemble against it, as any attempt to exist outside the narrow confines of religious law would obviously be profane. Mr. Shackelford's misguided idea that divinely-bestowed rights require a government to secure them belies both his inability to trust his fellow humans to govern themselves and his lack of faith in his god to enforce divine law, with all the unaddressed theological contradictions contained therein.

On to the second-most popular nonsense talking point used in these arguments (the first being the myth of America's Christian foundation): he asserts that criticizing religion harms us all in some vague, undefined way, and uses as example employees “being unlawfully fired,” businesses being “recklessly harmed,” public servants being “driven from their fields,” and religious authorities being “threatened or restricted” from engaging in activities that fall into the catchall of “spiritual callings.” As you can see from the segments of people Mr. Shackelford indicates, he is less concerned with us as a whole than he is with a the members of his particular faith. He offers no solid examples in the essay, and I will be damned if I'm going to buy his nonsense little pamphlet, but it can be easily guessed what kind of situations he's talking about.

Employees and public servants are fired every day, and to the best of my knowledge there are employment laws in place to ensure that an individual's religious attitude has no bearing on finding or losing a job, in fact prohibiting questions about faith during interviews and penalizing employers who are punitive against the religious. Mr. Shackelford intends a picture of well-meaning pious people being fired for having the temerity to proclaim a humble faith, but the only time I can think of people being fired for their religion is occasions where they used their faith to become overbearing and obtrusive in the workplace.

A key barrier to understanding on this point is the judgement held by Mr. Shackelford and the apparent majority of America's religious population that the First Amendment's mandate for free practice of religion includes the phrase “anytime, anywhere.” There is no logical way of interpreting the amendment to conclude that prayer must be in school, the workplace, or literally anywhere outside the walls of a church or home. Prayer is not a public trust, it is a private hobby, and cannot be elevated beyond that importance. Having even one crucifix hanging in your cubicle, making one child say “under God” every morning at school (not to mention the effort to force science teachers to use patently false and exclusionary curriculum), or denying one couple the right to the legal benefits of marriage is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. I don't suggest that public spaces such as parks or town squares fall under this description – and I would suggest that my non-believing contemporaries may wish to examine the thickness of their skin in that regard – but that offices, schools, and government institutions are in no way public spaces. As to the poor ministries, churches, and chaplains being prevented from their self-appointed business of deliberately deceiving children and running other people's lives, I repeat that the imposition of religious doctrine or authority is a violation of my First Amendment rights.

It is then argued that by restricting this nebulous “religious activity” in the name of “political correctness” we heathens are actually preventing the faithful from helping the less fortunate among us entirely. The empty-headed stupidity of this statement should be stunning, but I've heard it so often it's little better than childish white noise. Mr. Shackelford performs a grand sweep of his nauseatingly pious arm at this point, making several baseless assumptions that are easily rebutted. There is no way exclusionary rules such as preventing prayer in school restricts public service by the faithful, unless one looks at lying to schoolchildren when they should be learning facts and how to peacefully co-exist as public service, and I certainly do not. Also, clumsily hidden in the assertion is Mr. Shackelford's belief that people without faith do not do charitable works or make efforts to assist the weaker. This kind of pompous posturing is very common in religious circles, comedically illustrating that they are actually heartless and cruel people who wouldn't help a fellow human if they weren't forced to by way of their membership in a mindless cult. It is the tacit admission of Mr. Shackelford himself that if he wasn't born when and where he was, he wouldn't give a damn for the helpless or destitute.

The “political correctness” condemned in the essay is a little harder for me to pin down, as it's always been a meaningless and intangible phrase. If he's referring to the assertion of my contemporaries that the stranglehold religion historically and presently exerts on our nation is in need of correction, often through political means, then I accept the charge. If, however, he refers to the hyphenation and evisceration of our collective language, or an effort from the political left to rectify social injustices through forced advancement, obviously the accusation is baseless. Our politicians preface empty soundbites with the phrase “As a Christian,” not “Christian-American.” This suggests to me that having the poor judgement to think your ill-founded ideas should have a place in public policy is efficient shorthand for identifying you as an American. And surely Mr. Shackelford isn't suggesting that the political left is working to advance people of religious faith above others, as he clearly intends them to come to mind when he mentions the “small but powerful … influential people and organizations.” This strikes me as a kind of frenzied opposition to the perceived LA/NY set without having to decide if one is anti-homosexual or anti-semitic.

The essay then hits a rather pathetic note, wherein Mr. Shackelford seems to have a passing understanding of the weakness and incoherence of his argument as illustrated by resorting to tugging my capitalist heartstrings. He quotes one Dr. Rodney Stark's work “How Religion Benefits Everyone” which claims, according to Mr. Shackelford, almost three trillion dollars in benefits to America every year as a direct result of people being religious. This benefit comes in a handful of deliberately vague arenas such as crime reduction, education, mental and physical health, employment, and welfare. Stark's interview with the National Review is fairly revealing as to the poor ethic he applies to his chosen work, and the underlying inability of the religious defenders to think either critically or in a straight line. I wasn't able to find any secondhand information regarding Dr. Stark that was worth citing, so without expecting you to lend it any gravity I will still point out that a search of the good doctor's name provided me with around thirty links, only one of which was not a faith-based organization of some kind, coincidentally also the only critical one and containing an assertion that the doctor had not been taken seriously for over a decade.

Now we come to Mr. Shackelford's ab initio failure: the idea that criticizing, attacking, or in any way restricting a religious faith or the members thereof hurts – another nebulous charge – individuals and families. “The attacks we surveyed” – Mr. Shackelford claims 1,285 of these completely undefined and unqualified attacks over the aforementioned three year period – “are sweeping away small businesses, careers, and ministries.” Since no examples were provided in the essay, I'll attempt to illustrate on assumption why he's wrong.

“Small businesses” means gay wedding cakes, as far as I can tell. On the face of it, the right to refuse service seems reasonable, but there is an important distinction that sometimes gets missed. We refuse service, with very few exceptions, based on things that can be changed: required height for safety equipment to be effective, relative level of intoxication, the proximal relationship of shirts and shoes vis a vis your body, and so on. Refusing service to a person based on color or sexual compass, even once, is nothing but half-pint tyranny of the majority.

“Careers” means that awful woman in the Midwest denying marriage licenses to homosexual couples, and the careers of people of that stripe should be destroyed. Public work means public trust, and putting your own beliefs over the law is a clear violation of that trust.

“Ministries” is slightly more complicated. Mr. Shackelford claims his faith as a “long-held American form” that is being cruelly discriminated against, indicating he means that larger ephemeral Christian ministry (which is somehow both the foundational faith of America that the majority of her citizens actively practice and a maligned and oppressed underdog being warred against by that same population). This ministry is represented on our money and airwaves, it's shoehorned into our politics and business, it is unavoidable in American life. Like a disease, it clings to our skin and resists our efforts to cleanse ourselves. It supports us as the rope supports the hanging man.

If, instead, Mr. Shackelford means actual physical buildings of ministry, churches and so forth, he is again wildly misrepresenting the situation. Churches of all stripes are literally everywhere in our nation. The church is the oldest and original building in many towns, especially where I come from, and often the largest both in height and square footage. I would love to see his jibbering protestation be true, as it would create an actual tangible financial benefit to all citizens as previously wasted and misused high-value land began generating tax.

From tip to tail Mr. Shackelford's essay is a self-serving fluff piece that still passes for weighty analysis in his grubby little circles, something I'm actually quite good at and it offends me to see it done so poorly. His claim of a handful of anti-religious “attacks” is shamefully pale compared to the body count incurred by people like him. How weak and frightening it must feel to have a faith so ubiquitous and yet so utterly fragile. Mr. Shackelford is to be pitied in this regard, but his groundless conclusions are not his alone. He is continuing the narrative of the religious right that relies on failures of critical thinking, crying before anyone's hit you, and claiming that the protestations of the person whose neck you're standing on are biased against the unchoked.

*While it probably would have been simple to find a picture of Kelly Shackelford on the FLI website to ascertain for certain, due to the ambiguity of the first name I am unclear as to the author's gender. I have assumed the masculine, because while it is not impossible for women to hold these same casually ignorant ideas and write about them eloquently, I think it far more likely the opposite is true in this case.