I have read many articles and letters to the editor about the Health and Human Services (HHS) rules mandating that religious institutions (other than houses of worship) cover birth control. It seems as if the various sides have made their points, some arguing that it is a women’s health matter and others that it is a religious freedom matter. Commentators have weighed in on both sides of the issue and pollsters have explained how Americans of various viewpoints look at the matter. But I have never come across anyone trying to explain the poll numbers.
I am less interested in the poll numbers that reflect the political divide. One would expect Democrats to support the president’s policy and Republicans to oppose it, especially in the highly partisan environment that now exists. But the numbers I find most interesting is how various religious groups view the matter: as of a few weeks ago (when I last came across the statistics), 55% of mainline Protestants believe that the HHS policy does not impinge on religious freedom, while 68% of evangelical Protestants think it does. Roman Catholics are split, with slightly more (48%) saying it does step over the line than not (46%). Why are mainline Protestants okay with the rule, but evangelicals aren’t? Why are Roman Catholics split nearly evenly when it will be their institutions most affected by the policy?
The short answer is that a person’s view of religious freedom depends on what he or she thinks religion is. One of the difficulties in any dialogue among or about various faiths is that people tend to think that other religions function in a manner very similar to their own. Thus, Christians often mistakenly assume that other religions are all about teaching how one can get into heaven or some equivalent. While they acknowledge that the answers may differ among religions, they assume that this is the task of all religions. But it is not, as anyone who has done a serious study of the world’s religions knows. In the same way, each religion has a different idea of what its scope is and therefore of what freedom it needs to operate fully. Moreover, every religion comes with a defining narrative, which often includes the quest for a particular type of religious freedom as an integral part of that narrative. But since different religions have different histories, their narratives about the quest for religious freedom are not identical or even always compatible.
Above all else, mainline Protestants prize individual conscience. They see history in general, as well as the history of the church (if properly understood), as tending toward greater freedom of the individual. The Reformation broke the back of papal tyranny; Roger Williams and his “soul liberty” freed Protestantism from Calvinist orthodoxy; and John Stuart Mill (and a host of other post-Enlightenment thinkers) gave the Anglo-American world freedom from society at large and all its institutions. Also by the end of the nineteenth century, mainline Protestantism had had its bouts with both revivalism and Deism—and accommodated both. When the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy broke out, mainliners were unwilling to banish adherents of a more avant-garde theology. It wasn’t that all mainliners were overwhelmingly liberal, but rather that they didn’t think that the boundaries needed to be drawn so narrowly. The last real mainline heresy trial was in the 19th century, and in the 20th century James Pike’s atheism did not prevent him from remaining an Episcopal bishop in good standing for many years.
Because mainliners emphasize the freedom of the individual conscience and do not emphasize a particular creed as normative, they make the church (and institutions in general) subservient to the individual’s needs. In addition, mainliners have always thought of themselves as cultural dominant (even when they have been declining in numbers) and are not particularly alarmed when one of their institutions gains a large measure of autonomy. They tend to believe that enlightened institutions will always accord well with the goals of Christianity, even if their formal ties with the church are attenuated or abrogated. Indeed, mainliners have a particularly rosy perspective that believes that both secular and Christian history is nothing but one step of progress after another, a few knuckle-draggers notwithstanding. Thus, few mainline Protestants are troubled when they see the schools and hospitals founded centuries earlier becoming generic private institutions since top-notch scholarship or medical care is ultimately what those places are all about. If such an attitude wouldn’t quite sit well with their Puritanical or more orthodox forebears who founded such institutions, that just goes to prove how much they have progressed from the days of their Neanderthal ancestors.
It is not surprising, then, that mainliners find Roman Catholicism particularly offensive. It is also quite easy to understand why mainliners tend to focus on two things when discussing the Roman Catholic Church: sex and dissent. They are galled to think that any prelate would dare to voice his opinion on such a personal matter as sex, but are delighted whenever they can find a hint of dissension. Mainliners don’t mind individual Roman Catholics adopting any particular dogma; if someone wants to eschew birth control or believe in the virgin birth of Christ, mainline folks have no objection, just as they are perfectly willing to welcome vegan New Agers and carnivorous Wall Street types as fellow congregants. What they object to is Rome’s insistence on teaching its dogmas and expecting a certain level of assent from its parishioners. In their mind Rome is one step away from the Spanish Inquisition whenever it behaves in this way.
If mainliners emphasize the individual in religion, evangelicals stress the personal. Though “individual” and “personal” are often used interchangeably in common parlance, there is a slightly different nuance here. Both evangelicals and their mainline cousins are loathe to countenance “priestcraft”—anything that could interfere with the relationship between the believer and God. But while mainliners would see such priestcraft as an unwarranted intrusion on the sanctity of conscience, evangelicals would say that it interferes with the direct, personal relationship between God and a believer. Many mainliners are content not to have had a direct, personal encounter with God, but no evangelical would be.
Given that both mainliners and evangelicals are somewhat anti-institutional and wary of creeds or anything else that might be too restrictive, why are evangelicals so worked up about the new HHS rules? In large measure it is because they know what it is like to be excluded institutionally and to be exiled from cultural influence. While mainliners are optimistic, evangelicals are not—as experience has taught both of them to be. While mainliners thought that their seminaries and other institutions were following a positive trend in embracing liberal theology in the late 19th and early 20th century, fundamentalists (the forebears of today’s evangelicals who were at the dawn of the 20th century the more conservative wing of mainline churches) saw it as nothing but apostasy. Even worse, fundamentalists saw that mainliners weren’t exactly as tolerant as they claimed to be, since they were quick to tolerate modernists but marginalized fundamentalists.
A good example is what happened among the Presbyterians in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Modernist theology held sway in the northern Presbyterians’ mission board and all of its seminaries except for Princeton. But even that was not good enough for the modernists. After forcing Gresham Machen and his colleagues out of Princeton, they continued to harass him when he founded Westminster Theological Seminary and an independent mission board, until finally he was drummed out of the denomination. Thus, evangelicals today are sensitive to the way that liberalizing and secularizing forces can take over institutions that evangelicals themselves have founded. Also, given their long public exile from the death of William Jennings Bryant until the election of Jimmy Carter, they are quite familiar with being cultural outsiders and people without any political voice. One would expect then that evangelicals would be wary of allowing government interference in their faith institutions, since they would see it as inherently weakening them.
An interesting group akin to evangelicals is the confessional churches. Pollsters usually don’t list them as a separate category, even though they have unique concerns. Like evangelicals, they know what it is like to be marginalized, in their case from the state church. Unlike evangelicals, they have never been a cultural force in this country and don’t want to be. For a variety of reasons (some theological and some sociological), confessionals have tended to stay out of politics.
In part, this is due to the fact that the government (not other members in their churches) has been the main source of their oppression. The king of Saxony allowed my forebears to worship as they pleased and to think whatever they wanted, but wouldn’t allow them to meet with their pastor at any other time than on Sunday morning—not even to study their faith more deeply. It was worse to the north in Prussia, where the king allowed pastors to preach and people to believe whatever they wanted—as long as Lutherans embraced an institutional union with the Reformed that undercut whatever Lutheran beliefs they had. (The Prussian king thought of himself as liberal and open-minded; he was no Grand Inquisitor probing into people’s beliefs. But he did insist that institutions conform to his specifications.) But my forebears understood that freedom of religion is meaningless if a church cannot develop its own institutions to practice and to pass on the faith.
Even in this country confessionals have endured government opposition. Upon their arrival, they saw that the public schools were firmly in the hands of people who sought to turn all nonconformists into good Reformed Protestants. In response, confessionals established their own schools, much as Roman Catholics did for much the same reasons. And from time to time (such as in the 1920’s) state governments have responded by trying to shut down all parochial schools and make all students attend the public schools.
Thus, in recent weeks confessionals have been alarmed by the prospect of a government telling religious institutions what they may or may not do. They see it as 1830 all over again, with Prussian jackboots marching toward confessionals to force them to stay within the confines of their own minds, while the Kaiser takes over their institutions at bayonet point. This has forced confessionals out of their natural reluctance to enter the public realm and has compelled them to protest the new HHS rules.
But why are Roman Catholics split, with a slight plurality in line with their bishops in opposition to the HHS rules? The simple answer is that the social dimensions of the faith are far more important to Roman Catholics than to their Protestant neighbors. Whereas some Protestants can imagine themselves as being perfectly good Christians without having any connection with other believers, such a notion is utterly foreign to Roman Catholicism. Even if a Catholic has no more connection to their church other than baptism, it is enough to make him or her part of the community.
This appreciation of the importance of belonging cuts two ways. On the one hand, this view can be used to emphasize the need for an authoritative magisterium and for the obedience of the faithful in order to maintain a cohesive identity as the church. On the other hand, belonging can become more important than believing, with the result that people with very limited ties to the church still count themselves as Catholic, whereas Protestants who have wandered from the church of their youth wouldn’t be as likely to still call themselves Methodists or Presbyterians. That explains why the most devout Catholics, even those of liberal bent, are upset that someone is interfering with their bishops’ work. And it also explains why many Catholics for whom Catholicism is a cultural or ethnic identity rather than a belief structure oppose their bishops. How dare those bishops hint that they aren’t part of the group!
In addition, the last couple of centuries have been rather painful for the Roman Catholic Church, especially in those countries where it had been the only church of any note. Over the centuries it had developed schools, universities, hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions, which it saw as an integral part of its mission. But beginning with the French Revolution, Rome saw itself shorn of its institutions, which were then placed in the hands of the state. What institutions it retained were often placed under tight governmental control. For example, in the days of the Paris Commune (1871), the government took possession of the church buildings, but permitted congregants to worship there as long as they would open their doors in the evening for community gatherings. Even to this day, the French government retains an extraordinary power in the appointment of bishops in their country. This was the process of laïcité; from the perspective of the French government it was a movement to wrest control of society from clerical dominance (and many of its advocates still considered themselves good Catholics, just anti-clerical), but from Rome’s perspective it was nothing short of an attempt to abolish Christianity. A similar development occurred in Latin American countries, and Germany’s Kulturkampf between Bismarck and the Roman Church is well known to most readers. Rome does have a point when it argues that Europe’s present secularism is due less to natural developments in modern society than to calculated attempts by governments to suppress religion.
By this point it should be clear to the reader why the polls have tracked the way that they did. Far from being just about the HHS rules, the attitudes reflected in the polls reveal different ways of understanding not only what religion is but what religious freedom means. Mainliners and cultural Catholics see religious freedom essentially as the freedom of individuals to believe whatever they want to believe and to reject conformity with society, government, or even one’s own church. Evangelicals, confessionals, and active Catholics believe that the freedom of the individual to believe means nothing without the ability of like-minded individuals to work together to build strong institutions that will foster and carry out those beliefs. These different visions of religious freedom account for the impasse today.
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