tomndebb Civil Religion would be the nation-state itself. We consistently get into wars over ideology. For the past 50 years every one of our wars has been about ideology, with the possible exception of Desert Storm which was refreshingly actually just about oil. However, we’ve been trying to impose Democracy on the whole world since World War II.
The establishment clause is completely shredded in this country. The needs of the Mammonite capitalists generally wins out, and other rights are trampled into the dirt. Why can’t I smoke pot/hash/lsd as a sacrament? Why do I need to PROVE to the civil authority that my religious ritual is a valid expression of my religion? Every time you talk about sacramental rights, people start with bullshit arguments about human sacrifice and cannibalism as a sacrament. While almost no one actually sees moral equivalency between taking LSD and Cannibalism, why can’t consentual cannibalism be allowed as a sacrament, if we truly want to respect the establishment clause?
The truth is that there are a lot of conflicting ideologies, and the way we argue about them is generally determined by the way they are organized. One can take two paths toward arguing their right to practice their own ideology. One is establishing oneself as a religion and showing that one’s religion fits within the legal framework of what is a religion. (This is of course establishing some religions over others) Or they can argue that their ideology is not religious but secular in nature. Now the organized religion has an advantage because there is a way to actually organize people under a single banner. The advantage of the other type is one of loose affiliation. The organized religion can bring to bear considerable weight by voting as a bloc. The other one can take the tactic that their ideology is not religious in nature, and therefore should not be debated as a religion, regardless of whether it directly conflicts with religious belief.
A good example of the civil religion’s attempt to establish it’s secular ideology is the middle-east. We look at theocratic regimes as a bad thing. So we try and impose democracy. This takes away their right to their religion, because many of them believe that religion should be an integral part of the functioning of the state. So by denying them the ability to build a muslim theocracy, we are denying them the right to practice their faith as they see fit. The prevailing wisdom however, is that it’s not a religious matter, because we aren’t imposing ‘religious’ values, we are imposing ‘secular’ values, so it’s not a religious matter. However, the people being imposed upon see it quite differently. In America our legal system is based entirely off of semantic tricks, it’s all about how things are worded, wording is very important. This figures very centrally into the entire system, so if we word something so that it is no a religious ideology, but rather a secular ideology, then we don’t have to worry about the whole religious issue. However, the conflict of ideologies is most DEFINITELY a religious matter, because we are imposing it upon people who don’t speak our language, for whom the words secular and religious probably do not translate directly in the way we understand them in English.
There most certainly is an establishment of religion in this country. The national religion of the United States of America is Secularism, clever semantic wrangling that seperates secularism from the idea of religion in our minds doesn’t make it so, especially when our ideology is being imposed as superseding another’s religious belief. Not only that but we look at those other people as being unreasonable for not wanting to accept a secular ideology. In many cases a secular ideology is in direct conflict with the doctrine of a person’s faith, as anyone who has ever actually bothered to read what Osama bin Laden has written would understand that this theme figures pretty centrally into why he wants to bring down America.
Erek