Susan Jacoby latches on to her own ideological premise that religion should have nothing to do with the government and gets the interpretation of the First Amendment establishment norm totally incorrect.
With all due respect to Obama"s desire to broaden the program beyond the honeypot for right-wing evangelical groups that it became under President Bush, it is impossible to dole out money for programs directly administered by religious institutions without doing violence to the separation of church and state.
The intention of the establishment norm is not to excise religion from public discourse. That sort of argument comes from a clear secularist ideology which she writes at length in her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. Christian Smith then offers a sociological analysis of secularism in which what secularists have done in the past, as in the case now for which Jacoby"s writing is a clear example, is to find ways to de-legitimate policies and constructions of knowledge that have any admixture of religion in order to open up pathways for social mobility among those who think religion is inherently harmful or at least unappealing. To wit, Jacoby continues,
I don"t doubt that secular groups may be thrown a few bones during the Obama years, or that the religious organizations favored by his office will be more to my liking than the right-wing proselytizers favored by Bush, but that is beside the point. When government provides subsidies for religion, civic strife will be the inevitable result.
The point of the First Amendment norm, as argued by Eisgruber and his associates, is not that religion should be excised from public discourse or de-legitimated by the government and civic structures, but that religion should receive equal regard with non-religion as among all religions. That is to say, the government should not favor any particular religion or any particular ideology except for that which is constrained by the Constitution and the rule of law.
Jacoby is arguing against the hard line of the role of religion in politics that is promoted by a specific sector in the political sphere. She then makes the mistake of painting this as something normative in the rule of law as dictated by the Constitution. She is wrong. the government can support religious organizations as with any other non-profit entity. What government cannot do is regard one religious organization with more support than another religious organization or secularist organization on the basis of doctrine or belief alone except where that doctrine or belief is expressly unconstitutional.
Perhaps it would help her case if ideologically secularist organizations would do the same kind of lobbying and practice the same organizational success as religious organizations have had a sound history in the US. However, these organizations are too few and lack competitive advantage to get the same funding.
Along the lines of Smith"s argument, this is not rooted in a religious problem from Jacoby"s view even if she thinks it is. It is a wholly economic issue where secularists are simply being beaten by groups that have a much sounder competitive advantage. In a free economy you always have a loser. Secularists need to work a bit harder to compete for economic position rather than sit back in ivory tower easy chairs and posture with aplomb on lecture circuit soapbox platforms in order to whine about the government""s support of religion which is completely constitutional behavior. Building strawman arguments does not help one""s competitive advantage, it just makes one appear as anemic as one""s assertions sound.
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