Ed Simon on Religion & Politics, who I quoted for a Word Of The Day, doesn’t much care for the current SCOTUS and their biased rulings:
Regarding Carson v. Makin, Chief Justice John Roberts argued in his majority opinion that Maine had violated the “Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.” Kelly Shackelford, President and Chief Counsel for the conservative advocacy group First Liberty Institute claimed that the rulings represented a “great day for religious liberty in America.” In actuality, it was the exact opposite. Neither this ruling nor the one in [Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, decided in favor of a praying football coach, and in which the decision was flawed by a misstatement of the facts by Justice Gorsuch, IJ] was in the tradition of a vibrant American secularism; neither decision will encourage a rich agora of religious introspection and theological contemplation. Those attributes of American society which so impressed de Tocqueville will be further blunted, allowing agents of the state to give official sanction to their own personal faith to the detriment of all others. The decree of those six justices wasn’t just anti-American – it was also anti-religious.
Why?
Not only is mandated, state-sanctioned belief damaging to the government and to all of those whom the state represents, but such decisions are also destructive to religion. Drawing upon that vibrant religious tradition of non-conformism, exemplified by theologians like Rhode Island founder Roger Williams and Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn, Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “separation of church and state.” He reflected that if God will “ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World.” Jefferson, the anti-Trinitarian deist, understood well the intrinsic religious value of disestablishment; in the intellectually separated quiet of non-compelled religion, there is a flourishing of faith’s flowers.
Power’s responsibilities compel attention, and thus removes attention from the spiritual elements that are the sects’ supposed reason to exist. The one that achieves power inevitably stains itself with dishonor as it finds governance, already a difficult endeavour, made near-impossible by the arrogance of men and women who think some Divinity has anointed them incapable of error.
Simon is quite right: deprived of power, sects will have a chance to grow true to their nature, whether they are Quakers or a Jim Jones sect.
