Freedom of religion…
Arthur Miller’s allegorical attack on McCarthyism, The Crucible, has a good film version. I watched part of it on Encore the other night and it caused me to start thinking about freedom of religion. This is another first amendment right that the Founding Fathers forgot to put in the original Constitution. They quickly fixed their error. There are two ironies here. The first is that they forgot this important right, initially. Many immigrants to the English colony came here to practice their religion freely, so it wasn’t that they were unfamiliar with the concept. The other irony was signaled out by Mr. Miller: here you have Puritans, who wanted to practice their religious freedom, doing some very unchristian things to their fellows.
The Puritans were rather strange practitioners of the Christian faith, in fact. They convicted Roger Williams of sedition and heresy and banished him from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here we have another irony which might explain why the Founding Fathers, so dominated by old Massachusetts white men, initially and intentionally forgot about freedom of religion: Roger Williams not only believed in freedom of religion but also separation of church and state. Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and many of Williams’ seditious opinions were subsumed in the first amendment.
You see, a fundamentalist will avow that everyone is free to practice any religion they want as long as it’s the same as the fundamentalist’s. This is as true of the Puritans back then as it is of al Qaeda today. This medieval way of thinking leads to theocracies—the Massachusetts Bay Company, in spite of the name, was a theocracy, in many ways just as oppressive as Iran’s. In fact, many of the communities and colonies of North America were little theocracies, close-knit tribes of similar thinking men (the women weren’t supposed to think and just be subservient to their men). We are lucky to have outgrown that.
Or have we? There are many sects and religions in the United States that I qualify as fundamentalists. The people in them would love to have a theocracy. This seems ironic because these people claim to be moved by the spirit. Yet fundamentalism and spirituality are two very different things. My novel Soldiers of God goes to great lengths to illustrate the difference. In fact, how you relate to others is largely determined by whether you are truly a spiritual person or a fundamentalist. Most fundamentalists are intolerant boors at best and dangerous psychotics at worst. Even an atheist who thinks that no one should believe in God is also a fundamentalist, but an atheist who thinks that any other person can believe what he damn well pleases is spiritual, if only in the sense that he is recognizing that other person’s right to his own spiritual life.
Yes, fundamentalism was, is, and probably shall always be common in the United States. In Massachusetts, that bastion of liberal progressive thought, we start with the Puritans. Then came Thoreau and his transcendentalist buddies who drank the winter nights away back in the Concord pubs while their wives and children were starving back at the farms (Henry David almost burned down Walden Wood too—some environmentalist!). The persecution of Catholics started early but was exacerbated by the waves of Irish immigrants that started in 1846—Kennedy’s Catholicism was a sticky point in the 1960 election.
Then we have the poor Mormons. The persecution was so bad for them that they fled to Utah, for the most part. Now, it’s not much fun to be a non-Mormon in Utah, so patience and time were on their side. However, Mormons are mostly peaceful folk, as are the Amish, Quakers, Mennonites, and other sects dotting the American landscape. Yet most of these people are as fundamentalist as they come—no dissension is allowed within the tribe. Catholics aren’t any better, of course. Ignore the Pope’s edicts and you’re toast—prohibition to take communion at best, and excommunication and eternal damnation at worst.
Yes, we have fundamentalism in our own country. In most cases it is not violent-in other words, it doesn’t translate into terrorism. I always wonder if it could become so without that little first amendment. So, let’s give a little prayer, spiritual people, that we will always have that first amendment, even though it’s an addition to the Constitution, proving that, in some cases, we can be thankful that it does change. Take that, Mr. Scalia!
