Should Religion and Morality Be Restricted to Private Life?

By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin

Do religious beliefs have a role to play in public policy discussions?  Or is religion simply irrelevant, or too divisive and perhaps too irrational, to be permitted in such debates?

The question came to the fore yet again, when, on 14 May 2003, a French delegate to the United Nations-unnamed in the account we read-lamented the fact that some were trying to inject “moral” and “religious criteria” into the controversy surrounding abortion.

A United Nations committee entrusted with granting or withholding official UN status to nongovernmental organizations or NGOs (and thus permitting them to participate in certain UN deliberations and activities), was considering the application of a group called the National Abortion Federation (NAF).  The NAF is a trade association of abortion providers based in the United States.  Vatican City’s delegation (as an independent state, the Vatican enjoys representation at the United Nations) objected on the grounds that NAF “does not respect life. It destroys life in its budding stages, when it most needs our protection.”  The Vatican representative pled with his UN colleagues to protect unborn children, and to reject NAF’s petition for official status.  (Some fear that the United Nations is inching its way toward declaring abortion an international human “right.”)

At this point, France’s delegation protested.  “Again,” said the French representative, “yet again, my delegation believes that we should reach a decision solely on the basis of public health, and not on the basis of moral or religious criteria,” adding, with the express approval of Germany, that “my delegation sees no difficulty with this NGO.”

The notion that decisions about abortion should be founded “solely on the basis of public health,” without reference either to religious or moral considerations, may seem superficially scientific and objective, and, hence, democratic and tolerant.  But, at bottom, it appears to be fundamentally incoherent.  Is the public welfare really a mere matter for technocrats, to be completely divorced from ethics?  Arguments can surely be framed, and have in fact been, that the general level of public health would be significantly improved if the mentally and physically handicapped, the old and even those of merely low IQ, were weeded out of the population.  Under the “science” favored by German National Socialism in the 1930s, the elimination of “lesser races,” not limited to Jews, could be and was justified on supposed grounds of public welfare.  On what basis, if not on that of morality (and even of religion), should such proposals be evaluated? 

Why, in fact, should anyone care at all about general public health-as opposed, perhaps, to one’s own personal health, comfort, and self-interest-if not “on the basis of moral or religious criteria”?  In the absence of moral values, it is difficult, indeed, to see why anybody should do, or refrain from doing, anything at all.  What does it mean, even, for the French delegate to say that decisions “should” be reached on the basis of public health alone?  What is the origin of that term “should,” if not in some sort of (perhaps only rudimentary) ethical thinking?  Doesn’t the very decision to include or exclude “moral or religious criteria” presuppose some type of value judgment?   It certainly can’t be found in science itself.  Nor does it mysteriously emerge from the morally neutral realm of electrons, bacteria, and chemical reactions.

Legal arguments and cultural forces in the United States have tended to limit religious language and public displays of faith to an ever more restricted sphere, leaving Americans with what Catholic observer Richard John Neuhaus has called a “naked public square.”  Commentators who probably admire the God-given-human-rights rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s overtly religious Second Inaugural Address now often profess terror at the supposedly “theocratic” language of George W. Bush’s speeches, such as his reference to “the axis of evil” and his allusions to God.  And the process seems even more advanced in northwestern Europe, which can plausibly be described as, on the whole, a post-Christian society-and where, for example, contempt for Bush’s moralizing and religiosity is widespread.

There is no question that religion can be terribly divisive.  Daily newspaper headlines document that fact in painful abundance.  Yet it is not clear that the world would benefit were religiously-based thinking, let alone ethical and moral reflection, to be banished from public discourse.  It is not obvious that secularism should be privileged or established as the only legitimate type of discourse in policy debates.  The Catholic-led movement for democracy in Communist Poland, America’s “Underground Railroad,” Martin Luther King’s civil rights speeches, Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent resistance to the British raj in India, the early nineteenth century English evangelical campaign against international slave trading-such morally significant moments would be impossible in any future that somehow enforced a ban on religiously motivated action in the public sphere.

2003Meridian Magazine.  All Rights Reserved.