Peace Pipe Dream
The Right To Be Wrong:
Ending The Culture War Over Religion In America
by Kevin Seamus Hasson
Encounter Books, 2005
(147 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Amanda Witt
Pilgrims,” writes the founder and chairman of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, are “truth-at-all-costs zealots of one persuasion or another” who think only their religion should be allowed in public, while “Park Rangers” are “equal-opportunity oppressors who seek, in the name of freedom, to exclude all religious elements of culture, whatever the underlying faith might be.”
The Becket Fund, a non-partisan, interfaith, public-interest law firm, has successfully defended the religious rights of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Native Americans, and Zoroastrians. “We defend all faiths,” writes Hasson, himself a Catholic. “But we are not relativists. On any given day, I think most of my clients are wrong. But I firmly believe that, in an important sense, they have the right to be wrong.”
Pilgrims versus Rangers
The Pilgrims are getting a lot of press these days, what with worries that the religious right is trying to establish a theocracy. Hasson notes that early in our country’s history, certain groups did use the law to impose their own particular understanding of spiritual truth on others, including Puritans who went so far as to execute persistent Quaker evangelists (after cutting off their ears proved an ineffective deterrent).
But is the answer to go to the other extreme, as the Park Rangers do? Not unless we prefer our culture “homogenized and bland,” Hasson writes. Not unless we prefer “Breakfast with the Special Bunny” instead of Easter, or “special person cards” instead of Valentines (both real-life examples). Such substitutions not only are aesthetically vacuous, but treat holidays as if they are just an excuse for a party, and not an embodiment of our “understanding of life.”
And contrary to the Park Rangers’ desires, we cannot keep religion to ourselves. “We don’t believe in private because we don’t live in private,” Hasson says. “We humans are social creatures. If something is important to us, we naturally want to celebrate it, or mourn it, together with others.”
Moreover, our religious beliefs affect who we are in public, not just in private. As an example, Hasson traces the history of military conscientious objectors. He then asks:
What, then, should we think of other sorts of less popular conscientious objectors today? . . . What of Orthodox Jews, who must keep the Sabbath? What of the Amish, who must shun technology; of the Plymouth Brethren, who may not serve on juries; of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who may not salute the flag? What of doctors and nurses of a variety of faiths who may not assist in abortions?
Each of these, Hasson argues, has the right to act according to his conscience in such matters, both in private and in public—a right he seeks to ground not in law, or God, but in “observable human traits.”
Amanda Witt discusses Christianity, culture, and life as a homeschooling mother at the weblog Wittingshire (www.wittingshire.blogspot.com). She lives with her husband and three children in Port Orchard, Washington.
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