Corral The Holy Cows

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” First Amendment, Constitution of the United States of America

In grade school, I learned that Hindus consider cows holy. “What a waste of good steak,” I thought. Food aside, the fact that big animals were permitted to roam around at will, messing up the streets and homes and probably spreading disease was appalling.

How could they permit this dangerous and absurd practice to go on? It’s a religious tradition, therefore, by definition, sacrosanct, immutable and above criticism.

A great many people bind their very sense of self to religious traditions. Without them they would experience the terror that comes with losing one’s core identity. The fear and rage evoked when these beliefs and practices are held up to scrutiny is so great it motivates believers to persecute, even to murder, non-believers in “defense” of their particular “one true” faith.

Flaunting the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, American Christian zealots are increasingly using government and the courts to replace secular laws with religion based ones or establishing exemption from laws for the utlra-religious, eroding the already porous wall between church and state.

In doing so they are defecating on democracy like so many holy cows.

A current case in point is the elevation of Mike Johnson to House Speaker. A headline in the Washington Post read “…faith is his political guide.”

Like so many extremist Christians, Johnson makes no bones about openly expressing his wish to encode into law the entire fundamentalist Christian belief system along with every reactionary measure on the MAGA wish list. In the fashion of religious flimflam artists throughout history, he trumpets the conceit that he was “ordained by God” to be speaker. (I wonder how grateful he will be once the frustrations of the job sink in or when that same God ordains he should be removed?)

Among his staunchest supporters is the (dis)Honorable Lauren Boebert, she who had recently put her high Christian moral values, along with her half-bared décolletage, on display when she practically engaged in public fornication in her theater seat and, on being expelled, flashed the bird to the theater manager. This paragon of Christian virtue claims “government should not control religion, religion should control government.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t these legislators swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution? The same Constitution that explicitly forbids the establishment of a national religion? Doesn’t their openly expressed intentions and attempts to replace secular law with religious law violate that pledge? If so, don’t they provide grounds for removal from office?

How absurd it is that our system permits those who openly endorse creating a theocratic state to attain positions of governance at all.

The amendment creates a conundrum, however. Particularly in the case of Christian legislators, the amendment is at odds with itself. Supposedly they don’t have the right to impose their religion on the laws of the land, yet, it gives them the right to freely practice their religion. The practice of evangelical Christianity demands proselytization, the unrelenting attempt to impose Christianity on the world. By exercising their first amendment right to freely practice, evangelical Christian lawmakers can engage in direct violation of the Establishment Clause.

Imagine the uproar that would ensue were an orthodox Jewish Speaker to call for the banning of pork consumption or for forbidding citizens to drive a car or perform any “work,” including cooking or operating light switches, between sundown Friday and sunset Saturday, were a Hindu to call for banning beef or a Muslim to call for all women to be required to wear burkas or to be stoned for adultery.

As more people reject organized religion, adherents to extreme religion are feeling marginalized, angry, frightened and offended. In backlash they politicize their faith and foist it upon society.

This in itself is dangerous, but ultra-orthodox religion poses another danger. Believers assert that “truth” revealed in blind faith is more valid than empirical observation. This establishes an irrational pattern of thinking that spills over beyond religion. They are at war with science, of which they understand next to nothing. As such they are at war with objective reality in general. It’s no coincidence that much of the support for the political right, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, the anti-vax movement and Trump’s “big lie” comes from the ultra-religious whose minds have been trained to disregard facts.

The movement to establish a Christian theocracy reaches its zenith in the “No Compromise” movement, a group of fundamentalist Christians who believe Christianity is the only true religion and that anyone who does not conform to their ultra-fundamentalist interpretation of it should be persecuted and marginalized. It contains a strong element of White supremacy doctrine. For these people, biblical law, as interpreted by them, should rule the land. All secular government should be abolished. There should be no public schools, public funding of infrastructure, Social Security or other social programs. The Holocaust is a myth and Black slavery was good, commanded by God. Homosexuality and adultery should be capital crimes. Women exist to “serve” their husbands. These people are real, and are increasingly inserting themselves into government.

As I see it, the step from the mind set of those like Mike Johnson in Congress and a few Supreme Court Justices to that of these loony extremists is terrifyingly short.

Ultra-religious lawmakers and judges are in the vanguard of the slide of our system into authoritarianism. Because extremists cloak their anti-democratic objectives in religion, less extreme practitioners of the same faith may feel restrained by social convention from confronting and containing them. They may be inclined to tolerate and to underestimate the danger, because they share and endorse the same dogma and moral tenets to a milder degree. Just as less devout Hindus in India put up with the cows out of respect for their more religious neighbors, the misplaced “respect” of less devout Christians helps to enable the holy cows to roam throughout American government.

Should we corral the holy cows by disqualifying religious extremists from government and the judiciary? Too disrespectful or undemocratic you say? Well then, keep your shovels handy. The manure is piling up.