Apr 10 Fri
Should I strip off my religious identity to participate in public life?
In many countries, there exists the “naked public square,” an anti-democratic standard that requires citizens to strip off their religious identities as the price of admission to public life.
Thus, for the church and state to have good relations, the majority of citizens, who are believers, must disavow their basic identity to participate in political and social life. Religion needs to be hidden from public view. In public life. In schools. On the subway.
And I’m not speaking of ostentatious public displays of religion. Catholics would only go to their rooms, close the door, and pray. If it were so, what could Christians do every Lord’s Day?
Prayer and worship are not just commandments; they are also basic human needs because, actually, there is no such thing as an atheist. Every man is a believer because everybody holds to certain absolute core principles – even, ironically, relativism and atheism – as matters, not of proof, but truisms of faith.
Everyone believes in one’s “Absolute,” in one’s personal “god”. That god may be the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or a god like sex, money, or power… or one’s reason. But it is a god with which one identifies and by which one’s life is ordered.
The naked public square does not exclude all believers from the public square, only those adherents of traditional faiths that do not make gods of the goods of this world.
Contrary to its proclaimed goal of protecting religious liberty by excluding explicit religion from public affairs, it in fact fosters a preferential approach to religion, canonizing the inner option of secularism that pretends not to be a religion.
And, in the end, it promotes people living double lives. It does so by privileging certain identities – secular identities – in the public sphere, while other convictions of one’s identity must remain hidden.
Observant Christians and Jews must engage in some form of spiritual self-mutilation (or at least spiritual hormonal therapy) to conform to the expectations of the ‘naked public square’. Those beliefs and values are supposed to stay in the closet because they are religious.
Grisez included “authenticity” as a basic human good. By “authenticity,” he meant that what one held inside and what one showed were the same.
‘Integrity’ unites the various parts within man (reason, will, passions); ‘authenticity’ unites the inner and outer man; ‘friendship’ connects him to his human peers; and ‘religion’ to his God.
Authenticity and religion are, therefore, not optional, “feel-good” things, nor only for believers. They are basic goods necessary for all human beings to flourish.
Social, cultural, and legal expectations that somehow imagine religion as an “optional extra” best confined to the sacristy are, therefore, fundamentally anti-human and in conflict with genuine human flourishing.
I’m wondering why we have to conceal so many people’s core identities to be something normal and even desirable.
Perhaps an even more pernicious effect is the idea that persons of faith should live double lives.
Some excerpts from John M. Grondelski
Pic: Eucharistic banquet (detail of an early 3rd century wall painting), Catacombs of Saint Callixtus, Rome