In the ongoing primary process a faction of the GOP camp has initiated a misguided witch hunt for religious heresy. This is an unfortunate political tactic to stimulate the nether regions of the brain where the neural neutrality providing accommodation for the illogic and irrationality, the special reserved space for the compartmentalization of belief unsupported by evidence or tangibility, the serene silence where notions of science can be suspended, is situated. It is the place where the conduct of human beings is dictated by a non-human entity, or possibly entities, and is monitored by the loudest and most vociferous acolytes of any particular permutation of supernatural themes. This is the region purposefully avoided by the authors of the Constitution when constructing a secular mechanism of civil earthly governance. Any cursory perusal of the Federalist Papers, or any half-hearted study of the on-goings at the original Constitutional Convention or subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights, or any consideration of the academic resumes of the participants, must support the conclusion that they deliberately chose to confine their considerations to the arena of rationality common to all men. If, as Mr. Santorum has speculated, they intended for government and religion to be melded, I believe they had the intellectual fortitude and the literary ability to state such, if it were their intention to so do.
The first clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, has been dissected and debated linguistically and legally for over two hundred and fifty years, and it has been politically and culturally accepted by successive generations, from agrarian to post-industrial, to infer “separation of church and state”, with government being a strictly secular compact between the state and the people, and religion being a personal compact between so-inclined individuals and spiritual and/or moral informants of personal conscience. If religion now wants to blend with government it must accept the foibles and vicissitudes of ever changing political dynamics and demographics, and subject itself and its practice to the legislative process and be held accountable to the requirements of Constitutional compatibility. I wonder if Mr. Santorum would really wish religion to devolve into the jetsam of the political hurly-burly.
Mr. Santorum’s calculated speciousness is unfortunate, insulting, and is nothing more than the meretricious piety of a venal professional politician with an anti-American agenda. I will defend this thesis by suggesting that Mr. Santorum seeks to advance not a Christian agenda, but a Papal agenda. The fallacious and tired argument that the Founders intended this nation to have some theocratic identity is belied by the text of the original document ratified Sept. 17, 1787, which lacks any theological theme in the design or process of state establishment or political procedure. If this omission together with the first ten words in the First Amendment of the subsequent Bill of Rights is not, for some, sufficient evidence of intent (and to Mr. Santorum they are not), we may still proceed by another route. If, for the sake of argument we concede to him the most favorable possible interpretation, and we accept the oft-made contention that the minds of the Founders were undergirded by deep Christian belief that was so central to any public or private casuistry it would present an ineluctable estoppels that needn’t be articulated or written, Mr. Santorum would still have a problem. If under his calculus we were founded as a Christian nation, then it will have to certainly be acknowledged that we were founded as a Protestant nation – since the Founding Fathers were Protestants. So if Mr. Santorum’s Catholicism is as he says it is, and he is as dedicated and subservient to the tenets and teachings of the Catholic Church as he purports and confesses to be, then we must assume as President he will give priority to the direction of the Pope over that of the Constitution since that is his unabashed stance as a candidate. More unfortunate for Mr. Santorum’s dialectic, if this nation can be legally declared a theocratic Christian domain, it is equally appropriate to declare it a Protestant domain. And wasn’t the Protestant Reformation about eliminating both the polluted Papal nexus interposed between God and man and the amalgamation of religious and civil authority? So if it is tolerable in our political contest to advance the dubious argument that President Obama is waging a war on religion, it may then be legitimate to question if Mr. Santorum, a brother of Opus Dei, is waging war on the Reformation. And if in his Papist consciousness he is waging a war on the Reformation and seeking to overturn the Protestant consciousness which prefers the separation of religious and civil authority, then it would be Mr. Santorum, the Republican and conservative, who is actually arguing against our American culture and tradition.
Mr. Santorum, in my mind, is a mediocre one-issue candidate who cynically knows that because of the increasing dullness of the American mind simply waving the Christian flag will cause a certain number of people to automatically salute without thinking about anything else they’re hearing. And of course if you convert from an ‘issue’ to a ‘religious issue’, the answers precede the questions, and the least complicated candidate conveniently excuses us from the effort of individual deliberation, and by guise lures us to indenture as the wards of theocracy and alienates us from the heritage of personal and intellectual freedom bestowed by the Constitution.
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