Essay: Religion in Government
In August 2001 I stood at the top of the World Trade Center. It was a moment I remember because it was an exhilarating experience: being so high up, gazing down at New York. The city looked so peaceful and likeable so when I came home just two weeks after returning from the USA and turned on CNN I was horrified by what I saw. Like a newly appalled America I wondered ‘Why?!’ I wanted to know why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden thought it was their duty from Allah to murder 2,974 people. Dad has always been hostile to religion; he wrote in support of Rushdie after the fatwa was issued, and Mom was a pacifist Buddhist: so the idea of peace being fundamental to religion seemed normal to me. But we all saw something very different on that Tuesday morning; and now we find that not only are individuals and groups intent on destroying the West, but whole countries. So once again we must ask: Why?
Many Middle-Eastern theocracies claiming revelation and instruction from scripture have made it clear that they wish to destroy the West. To understand and appropriately address this growing threat, debating the role of religion in government is imperative. Religions claim that through revelation, religious experiences, and scripture they accurately and fully convey God’s will; and all of the major world religions state that God’s word supersedes any human law. The gravity of such a statement necessitates the involvement of religion in governance because God’s proclamations about human conduct come from the highest authority.
With the exception of Judaism, every religion says that scripture, revelation, and religious experiences should determine what laws we live under. Examples of this include the Ten Commandments in Christianity and the Pancasila in Buddhism. Considering God is believed to be the ultimate perfection, there should be no issue with using his commandments to govern the world because they are words of an omniscient and omnibenevolent being. We all agree that we should not murder, or steal, or commit adultery. So it appears there is no moral conflict between what we believe to be morally good and what is written in holy texts.
However, despite the fact that most of the edicts presented to us make appear morally sound and therefore corroborate our own moral sensibilities, many appear to be entirely immoral. Exodus 12:29 ‘At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt.’ If we read this as literally the action of God, the inherent immorality of it causes concern. Why should we allow a God who slays innocent boys and animals for the crime the Pharaoh, to be involved in our self-governance? When concerned with our penal system, 1 Samuel 15:3 offers ruthless indiscriminate murder as punishment for wrongdoing; often seeing the sin of one man in a tribe as the sin of the entire tribe.
In a democracy, sovereignty rests with the people and we govern with laws that we consent to. But to ensure that we only accept the very best laws, which we are all happy to abide by, we must debate them. Someone presents a thesis, another a hypothesis and so on until we reach a synthesis. We need to govern ourselves because if we don’t, apathy can set into place: If someone higher knows better, why should we contribute? This is why the laws we live by need to be crafted not by a transcendent God but by us. We live by these laws, so we should make them. Furthermore, we should make them through debate and deliberation. We need to confer with each other to form the best government possible by debating, and refining, just as the Founding Fathers did, because correctly forming the law we use to govern ourselves is paramount.
While we don’t use a literalist interpretation of religion in law, many Middle-Eastern theocracies do. During a fire in Mecca at a school housing 800 girls, 15 died because the Mutawa’een applied a very strict policy of separation of the sexes. Girls were not allowed to leave because they did not have headscarves on, and because male relatives were not there to receive them. Amnesty International goes on to state that rescuers were prevented from entering because they were men. Separation of the sexes is based in Shari’ah which is used by all Muslim nations to underpin their legal system, or as in the case of Saudi Arabia, as their legal system.
Under Qisas, in 2003 a man in Pakistan was punished to blinding by acid because he did the same to his fiancé. The basis of Qisas is in Sura 5:45 of the Qur’an in which the concept of an eye for an eye is enshrined into Islamic teaching. However, the role of the modern penal system is to foster rehabilitation not to enact vengeance. If an element within the Pakistani judiciary wanted to reform the penal system, they would be met with intense protest from clerics, riots, death threats because the sacrosanct nature of Qur’anic teachings means they cannot be altered.
Reading from scripture and prosecuting the law is impractical because society has changed dramatically. Through processes like Judicial Review, we ensure that the law is appropriate to our time, but interpreting scripture in an adaptable fashion undermines the concept that it is the revealed word of God which, because God is perfection, applies perfectly without needing change, throughout time. Since we cannot know God, any interpretation will be seen as incorrect because it would not convey the true meaning of the revealed word. Nevertheless, the literalist approach taken in most Middle-Eastern theocracies means such adaptation and interpretation is considered blasphemy and heretical.
Recently the New York Times ran a story about a case in Saudi Arabia where a female rape victim’s sentence was increased from 90 lashes to 200, after the court grew irritated by her lawyer’s public criticism of the judiciary in the case. She had been raped by seven men, and had appealed the case because their sentences were too lenient. Wahhabi interpretation of Shari’ah led to the judgement in this case which drew an outcry from the media. The sentence administered was obviously unfair and yet under Shari’ah was entirely correct. Women are treated as an inferior sex under Shari’ah and in the teachings of the Qur’an. Before marriage, they are owned by their fathers and when married the husband owns them. Sura 4:34 states that if a husband feels the wife is being highhanded, he may ignore them, then hit them as appropriate. Women are not allowed to drive and are required to dress modestly which when interpreted literally means they may only have a slit for their eyes.
The leaders of Middle-Eastern theocracies, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran call for the destruction of the West because of their decadent lifestyles, making a point of homosexuality. In Sura 7:81, Lot says ‘You gratify your lust with men instead of women: indeed you are a people who transgress the limits!’ It is from here and other sources in the Qur’an that the Islamic position on homosexuality as a crime, but not a sin, is founded. Human Rights Watch reported in 2005 that Saudi Arabia sentenced 100 men to floggings or death for homosexuality. This dogmatic position is typical of how most countries apply Shari’ah; without any interpretation or adaptation for the modern world. That we don’t do the same insults them and is why they declare us their enemies.
Religion has an important part to play in our lives. For billions of people it is the revealed truth from God himself and is therefore supreme perfection. However, the manifestation of religion in scripture condones and proposes slavery, torture, genocide, subjugation of women, cannibalism, murder, and is totally intolerant of homosexuality. In a world where we must not just tolerate but celebrate diversity, accepting homosexuality is fundamental. And in a world where slavery, torture, genocide etcetera are all intolerable, using texts which celebrate them to form our governing codes is extremely dangerous. We saw this month in Saudi Arabia what happened when a literalist reading of Shari’ah meant 200 lashes for a woman raped by seven men because she was in a car with a man who was not her husband. Religion has a vital role to play in the lives of billions of people, but should not be a part of our government.Thomas Jefferson in a January 1, 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, got it right when he wrote ‘…I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.’
