I was driving down a certain road last week when I happened to see a very large sign at the end of an intersection. It was painted in red, white, and blue, and read in the middle something like “Save Democracy! Go out and Vote!” At the bottom it was inscribed: “Freedom From Religion Foundation.” Upon first reading this, I wondered whether freedom from religion really has anything to do with voting. After a few moments I realized that it does, and that this is the peculiarly Christian perspective. In fact, I had hardly driven two more streets down before I realized that in the history of all the anti-religious activists the most successful by far have been the Christians.
Now, this seems rather obviously to be a paradox; but if it is a paradox it is certainly more paradoxical from the Christian perspective than from the perspective of the Freedom From Religion Foundation; that is, the position of the latter seems to be much more paradoxical than the former. The Foundation has been motivated fundamentally, it seems, by the reaction of the New Atheists to the outbreaks of terrorism at the beginning of the century. If the religious mindset, they say, is the sort that creates extremists who impose their unnatural rigors and anathemas on everyone else, why should we suffer this mindset to spread through our society? Is this religious mindset not the very evil, the very scourge, which has for the last few centuries been identified as the great repository of everything undesirable, everything which keeps Mankind from marching triumphantly into the Utopia of the future? In a word, religion as an ideology is capable of motivating men to do wild and irrational things, and therefore must be considered itself wild and irrational, whereas science can be depended upon to produce motivations only for the sane improvement of Humanity.
This is an extremely fashionable philosophy. It is fashionable because it is fundamentally optimistic. Its optimism outstrips everything else; it is so madly optimistic that its optimism looks like pessimism. The basic formulation of the Foundation’s identity is, of course, negative: all religion is bad and we must be free from it if we are to achieve freedom. But underneath this apparent pessimism which refuses to see the good in any organized religion (much less in any religious creed, however human it might be) comes the rumble of the romantic dream that the perfect society is achievable. It is the same desperate optimism of a drunk man who, having driven his car into a tree, exclaims, “If only I had taken the other route!” If only we hadn’t religion, all men could be free!
To these optimists, it would seem bizarre in the extreme, I imagine, were an out-and-out religious person to agree with them. But I propose that it is even more bizarre for a religious person to think that the optimist really believes what he says. For the idea of freedom is, and has always been, a religious idea. The very first man (whether his name was Adam or not) who put his hand to a bit of earth and claimed it as his own understood his freedom to own it as religious—otherwise he would not have defended it. Nor would he ever have felt that greatest of human emotions, gratitude, if he did not think his ownership sacred and good and in some way contingent. Anders Nygren may suppose that the primitive man who took a cave for his home was asserting his own goodness, and that therefore the act was selfish; I suppose that he took the cave because it made a good home, and that therefore the act was free. What is at stake here is not the “God delusion” or, to use an older phrase, the “opium of the masses.” I am only attempting to point out that freedom means the activity of a person in the face of a good thing. Where there is no goodness, there can be no freedom. Unless, of course, freedom itself is not good; but this even our American Pragmatists have not yet denied, and the echo of its truth resounds in the old, proud cry of the Superman. Those who have given up the idea of goodness have given up the possibility of freedom.
The expression “Freedom from religion,” then, means just that its author has misunderstood the terms Freedom and Religion. He seems to treat it as a natural and inevitable development of the First Amendment. Indeed, the First Amendment does not mean, as many seem to suppose, the freedom of all religion to disintegrate into the meaningless pastime of those too out of touch with real culture to be fired by it. It does not mean the freedom to be liberated from religion, the freedom to forget religion, the freedom to discard religion, or (this least of all) the freedom to consider every possibly religious value equally valueless. What it does mean is rather clear from the preposition: freedom belongs to religion, and therefore the government will not presume to remove the one from the other. Religion is the proper sphere of freedom. This is why the actual wording of the Constitution promises not to compel belief or religious practice. It is a promise made in favor of religious people, that their religiosity might be more perfect, not one made in favor of anti-religious people, that they might do whatever they please.
But Christianity is the source of this kind of freedom. The world in which Christianity first emerged was an intensely religious one in which no activity was without some relevance to religion. No state lacked a religion; no religion lacked some form of praxis or public worship; no public worship lacked its priest. But it was not the business of the priests and the priestesses to discern what is good and what is evil—much less what is true and what is false. Their peculiar specialty was to discover what should be done and what should not be done. Should we hold the meeting today or tomorrow? Should we invade such-and-such a place, or should we erect another temple? But then a strange group of fanatics arrived from the East who cared nothing at all for the gods or the signs or the fires or the slaughters: they cared only for the Truth. They were the ones who were democratic enough to say that truth must be the standard of belief, not fashion or power or where you are from or anything else. They believed in the God who Is, to the exclusion of all the gods who are not. Do not give arbitrary payments on behalf of an unreal god, they said. The religion of the government will not set you free. Only the Truth can set you free, because only the Truth is real and good and solid. Only the promise of Truth can make the choice of one person mean anything in the face of thousands of others who make other choices. In a word, it is only because the Truth can live in the mind of each person that voting has its peculiar dignity. And this is what I expect the Freedom From Religion Foundation meant to say on its billboard, if only it had found the words.
