Church & State

I used to live at the intersection of Church & State here in everybody's hometown. Church Street actually dead-ends at State Street. On the two corners opposite my old apartment are a microbrewery that used to be a grocery, and a grocery that used to be an armory.

(I'm sure there's a metaphor for something or other in all that, but I can't figure out what it is.)

In other news about the intersection of Church & State:

Justice Antonin Scalia, the Jerusalem Post reports, thinks the government ought to do more to support religion:

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used an appearance at an Orthodox synagogue in New York to assail the notion that the US government should maintain a neutral stance toward religion, saying it has always supported religion and the courts should not try to change that. …

"There is something wrong with the principle of neutrality," said Scalia, considered among the court's staunchest conservatives. Neutrality as envisioned by the founding fathers, Scalia said, "is not neutrality between religiousness and nonreligiousness; it is between denominations of religion." …

Scalia said expunging religion from public life would be bad for America, and that the courts, instead, should come around to most Americans' way of thinking. …

"I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions," he said.

Remember when it was conservatives like Scalia who railed against what they called "relativism"? Now he advocates interpreting the Constitution according to majority opinion. Odd, that.

Scalia argues that the First Amendment does not require "neutrality between religiousness and nonreligiousness; [but] between denominations of religion." Scalia's implied distinction here is between legitimate and illegitimate "religiousness." Once such a distinction is allowed, the next question is who gets to decide which "religiousnesses" are legitimate and which are not?

The justice provides a strong hint of which religions he views as legitimate in his use of the word "denominations." That's an oddly Protestant word for a Roman Catholic to be using in an Orthodox synagogue.

While the term also has generic denotations referring to religious structures in general, it cannot escape it's overwhelmingly Protestant connotations. The ELCA, the PCUSA and the UMC are "denominations" in a way that the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church are not. (Nor are the various Baptist conventions denominations. When I worked for the American Baptist Churches, it was considered taboo to refer to our convention with the D-word.) And while the word may be elastic enough to be applied to Orthodox Judaism, or Sikhism, or Sufi Islam, it does not fit such traditions as comfortably as it does the various Protestant sects.

Inevitably, Scalia's interdenominational version of neutrality leads to bias against "nonreligiousness." And just as inevitably, the category of "nonreligiousness" will expand to include those viewed (by Scalia or whoever else is acting as Caesar's pearly gatekeeper) as insufficiently religious, or religious in the wrong way.

Thus we come to today's other piece of news about the intersection of Church & State, as brought to our attention by Josh Marshall:

The United Church of Christ plans to run a major ad campaign in December to raise public awareness of the denomination. One of the ads is meant, in the words of a UCC press release, to convey the message "that — like Jesus — the United Church of Christ seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation." …

Yet, according to a press release out this evening from the UCC, both CBS and NBC have refused to air the ad because the subject matter is "too controversial." …

CBS explained its decision, in part, as follows …

"Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations … and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks."

So corporate broadcasters are afraid to run an advertisement for a Mainline Protestant denomination because that denomination's religious beliefs do not conform with the officially sanctioned religiousness of the "Executive Branch."

That's the First Amendment in action, Scalia-style. All denominations are equal. But some are more equal than others.