I’m not quite done yet. Here’s one point worth dealing with. It’s the notion that everyone has a religion, whether they call it that or not – including "secular humanism" – and that trying to curtail Christianity or Islam or any other faith from direct application to political life and civil law creates a double-standard. People can bring their secular worldviews into politics, but Christians cannot bring their religious doctrines. No fair, many argue. In fact, these rules are actively discriminatory against Christian fundamentalists. Hence the so-called "war on Christianity."
This argument is based, I believe, on a misunderstanding of religion. The difference between a world-view, based on empirical evidence or reason or personal experience and open to debate, and a religion, based on an inerrant text or revelation or church authority and closed to doubt, is that the religion demands to be taken much more seriously. It insists on its own divine authority – as it must – and that authority cannot be held hostage to the results of a political conversation or debate or election. It rests on God Almighty. By definition, therefore, the conflation of our politics with the will of God makes political discourse largely impossible, because we don’t all believe in the same God or even in God at all. And so the introduction of religious authority into politics makes all our political dealings inseparable from profound differences over the deepest things – the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of God, and so on.
Politics, as we have come to understand it in the West, cannot operate on those grounds. It did once. And Europe was filled with the smoke from the burning flesh of heretics. The decision to remove such profound issues from politics was definitive of the West’s emergence from the dark ages, and it is integral to any understanding of the American experiment in limited government and individual liberty. The absolute demands of fundamentalist faith make the West’s tradition of civil compromise impossible; and they constantly push the boundaries of what is acceptable to God, as religious purists outdo each other in proving their righteousness – whether it be keeping comatose patients alive for decades or defining a zygote as a full human person. Hence our politics has degenerated into a "culture war." Wars are what happens when politics become impossible. And that is the corrosive effect of Christianism; and why it must be resisted – for the sake of American discourse and for the sake of a vibrant, humble apolitical Christianity.
The Dish 