Feature
The Coming Perfect Storm
Five Reasons Why Freedom of Religion & Conscience Is in Peril
by Randall B. Smith
There have been periods in American history when the anti-Catholic forces in our society, always rumbling just beneath the surface, exploded and flowed out like molten lava down the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius. What brings about these periodic eruptions, I would suggest, is a particular confluence of events: a sort of "perfect storm," so to speak (if you will allow me to shift metaphors).
One such confluence of forces occurred in the early part of the last century, when American Protestant distrust of Catholics came together with the nativist Anglo-American distrust of immigrants from places like Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. To this already-potent brew was added the increasing distrust among America's mostly Protestant upper classes of the working classes and the sorts of socialist ideas they might be harboring and anarchical plots they might be hatching. The results were not pleasant.
I suggest that another such "perfect storm" is gathering on the horizon, and that the "atmospheric conditions" coming together to form it involve a confluence of the following five factors:
First, the cheapening of the notion of religious conscience into a type of feeling.
Second, the loss of a proper sense of the moral good, such that the burden of proof has shifted from those who want to permit acts traditionally considered immoral onto those who want to defend established moral codes.
Third, the turning of the religious freedom clause of the First Amendment on its head, so that it is increasingly taken to mean freedom from religion.
Fourth, the increasingly dominant notion that refusing to affirm what another person proclaims as his or her identity is to do that person harm.
And fifth, the increasingly common failure of the state to recognize the crisis that arises in matters of conscience when it fails to distinguish between permitting something citizens consider morally wrong and requiring citizens to do something they consider morally wrong.
Underlying Nominalism & Voluntarism
There are, of course, other challenges we face—forces even more basic than these five, undergirding them all. So, for example, as sociologist Christian Smith documents in his most recent book, Lost in Transition, most emerging adults in America today claim to have no other basis for their moral judgments than their own brand of personal moral individualism. A high percentage of these emerging adults are also moral relativists who tend to treat every moral code as suspect. For them, the classical notion of freedom as "an ordered liberty directed toward the common good" has been diminished to "the license to have my desires satisfied." Their largely unconscious appropriation of the principles of moral relativism and autonomous individualism has resulted in a culture whose dual mottos can be summed up by the phrases "No limits" and "No regrets."
Randall B. Smith is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas.
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