America v. Religion: a saga

America has always had a bit of a funky relationship with religion.

We’re certainly one of the most pious countries in the developed world, although that status is quickly fading. And we evolved from a collection of persecuted religious minorities, who came to North America and founded colonies — like Massachusetts and Maryland — with overtly religious charters.

But when we decided to make a country, we created a pretty secular one. The Constitution bans religious tests for offices in the government and guarantees both freedom of expression of religion and freedom from the establishment of religion by the
government. 

Americans are given almost total free reign to practice their religion in whatever way they choose, so long as it does not infringe upon others’ rights, like sacrificing virgins to Quetzalcoatl, the winged Mesoamerican serpent god. We let doctors of certain faiths opt out of providing medically necessary procedures if their faith demands it. Despite the growing trend in Europe, we allow Muslim women to cover themselves in whatever way they see fit. 

But what happens when two parents, due to a belief in faith healing, don’t allow their children to receive life-saving medical care? Some believe this issue — which gets down to the fundamental core of these parents’ beliefs — is a philosophically and legally taxing question that pits the state’s interest in the child’s life against the parents’ rights to practice their belief system.

Those people are wrong. This one’s easy. We shouldn’t allow parents to sacrifice their children at the altar of faith healing any more than we would allow human sacrifice in the West African Voodoo religion.

This gets down to the core of how we value religion in America. There is a sense by some, especially on the right, that religion is an especially valued subcategory of belief — that the state should not endorse a religion but should actively encourage people to be religious.

To this end, religion catches a lot of breaks in America. Churches get tax breaks, Catholic school students get to ride public buses and the like.

But that’s not how it should be or how it was meant to be. The dude who wrote the Constitution, James Madison, viewed any favoritism of religion over secularism as clearly unconstitutional — the Constitution, after all, prohibits the government establishment of any religion, not just of a religion.

So think of the question this way: there are two parents who don’t like their kid very much and so refuse to allow the child to receive life-saving medical treatment. The kid dies.

Should that be protected?

There are two parents who love their kid a lot but have looked at the medical information and made a scientifically informed but incorrect decision that the doctors are wrong and the child will be fine. They refuse the treatment.  The kid dies.

Should that be protected?

There’s no reason why the parents who were religiously motivated should be found not guilty of the crime that the other parents committed.

They killed their child.

America protects your right to worship who you want, where you want, when you want, why you want, and for the most part, how you want. What we don’t protect is your right to use your religion as an excuse to harm or kill others.

­— schlumorg@indiana.edu