The Washington Nationals recently suspended John Moeller, their chapel leader. The suspension came not because prayer was ineffective at lifting the Nationals out of their second-half rut or because Moeller called for the assassination of a South American leader. It came because Moeller did his job.
According to the Washington Post, outfielder Ryan Church approached Moeller and asked if Jews were doomed because they did not accept Jesus. Moeller nodded in reply and thus the fracas began. Jewish groups jumped on the Nationals front office, accusing them of “bringing hate into the locker room.” The Nationals, in turn, did everything they could to distance themselves from Moeller’s nod, claiming it did not in any manner, reflect the views or opinions of the Washington Nationals franchise." All the while, no one bothered to ask if what Moeller did was really wrong.
I consider myself Jewish and I don’t believe the ousted chaplain to be in error. He was approached as a representative of the Christian faith and answered the question honestly in that capacity. Christians believe acceptance of Jesus is necessary to avoid damnation, cut and dried. Why this bothers Jews is beyond me. Aren’t we just as free to dismiss this condemnation as nonsense as they are to condemn us for our nonbelief (I should sure hope so, inasmuch as I wish to remain free to believe Trinitarian Christianity to be polytheistic blasphemy)?
While the answer is a simple “yes,” religious propriety was probably not the key consideration among those doing the complaining. Instead of accepting that Moeller said the right thing religiously, they chose to focus on the fact that Moeller said the wrong thing politically. As a representative of the Nationals, he showed poor judgment. As someone whose views were fit to print, he failed. But John Moeller is not, nor is he expected to be, any of those things. He is just a chaplain and he did his job.
If the above does not illustrate why the separation of church and state is a sound idea, let’s examine the flip side. Asking religious leaders to frame the tenets of their faith in a politically appropriate context is odious, but asking those charged to make laws to do their jobs only in a religiously palatable context is no less so.
When we look at politics, we often make the error of equating political decisions with moral ones. Politics, however, is as inherently amoral as religion is inherently apolitical. A political — or, to use a less maligned term, procedural — question does not ask “is this right or wrong?” Instead, it asks “is this the right thing to do according to the rules of conduct we have laid out for ourselves?” The moral question that is left out of politics is then given to us to decide as individuals, guided by our conscience, our family, our faith, etc. When an attempt is made to merge the two questions into one, the results are often disastrous.
To illustrate the point, I’ll offer the example of sodomy. More so than many other activities, has been maligned by politicians who have been unable to distinguish the jobs they hold from the jobs they do not. As lawmakers, the kinds of questions they should be asking themselves are, “does the government have a legitimate public interest in doing something (severely restrict or ban outright) about this behavior? And, if so, does it have the authority to do so?” The answer, in both cases, would be no.
Acknowledging this ‘no’ does not remove the moral question, it just leaves it to be answered by more appropriate agents. Fundamentalist values groups can still condemn sodomy and be justified in doing so according to their beliefs. And the politicians who opt not to criminalize it for procedurally correct reasons can remain personally opposed to it if they feel it is personally inappropriate.
Alas, what happens far too often is that lawmakers stop making the procedural judgments they are counted on to make and start making moral judgments instead. Thus, we go from “should the government be doing something about this?” to “is this right or wrong?” Once the latter is determined, the authority to act accordingly is often presumed whether it actually exists or not (translation: if something is wrong, acting against it can only be right….right?).
To draw a parallel here, let’s replace a moral issue with a health issue: smoking. The procedural question a lawmaker should ask is whether there is a public interest in banning smoking and whether the government has the authority to do so. In saying “no,” the politician is not saying that smoking is healthy. Rather, he is leaving it to doctors and health advocates to say that it is unhealthy.
Bottom line: inasmuch as politicians continue to usurp the functions of religious leaders, the role religion plays in deciding moral issues will gradually become obsolete. Why would anyone seek out religious guidance when Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum are there to tell them right from wrong (because we all know they are paradigms of virtue, right ;p).
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