The biggest threat facing America today isn’t China or Russia. It’s not radical sexual or racial ideologies, nor globalism and widening economic disparities. No, all of these threats, however real and legitimate, all dim in comparison to a much graver menace to our shared future: the dramatic decline in citizens’ religious affiliation and belief. A recent anti-religious op-ed by the Washington Post’s Kate Cohen hints at what awaits an America untethered from Christianity.
“In America, you have to opt out of religion in public life. That’s backward,” reads Cohen’s provocative title. Citing a number of examples, from court-mandated addiction recovery programs, to the language of the Pledge of Allegiance, to abortion restrictions, Cohen claims that it is “backward” that the religiously unobservant are the ones who must opt out of various aspects of American civil life that retain, however tenuously, a religious character.
She approvingly quotes a recent legal argument that Americans have the “absolute right to live free from the religious dictates of others.” She adds: “But as long as this country’s default setting is religious—both culturally and politically—we have to fight for it.”
In short, Cohen believes it is unjust, and even a very repudiation of our secular tradition, that the default character of our national civic life remains in some ways sympathetic to a bland, non-sectarian recognition of the divine. Demanding public-school students say the Pledge of Allegiance—even if students are permitted to opt out of it—places an undue burden on such students, she avers. A true secular state, Cohen believes, would ensure an entirely “naked public square,” to cite the old phrase of the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.
Of course, atheists and secularists in America have been making such arguments for many years, thankfully with mixed success. But the rise of the “nones,” those Americans with no religious affiliation, portends a future that will be far more hostile to Christians and Christian organizations. Indeed, Gen Z, the least religious generation in America, is also the least supportive of religious freedom and religious exemptions for people like Jack Phillips. That means they will be more sympathetic to anti-religious arguments like those made by Cohen.
Imagine, for a moment, not only John Lennon’s hope that “there’s no heaven,” but that there is no religious belief anywhere in the public square. In Cohen’s “utopian” vision, religious organizations losing their tax-exempt status would be only the beginning. Many professions would become fraught with such moral quandaries that faithful Catholics could no longer in good conscience inhabit them. Forced to be morally complicit in abortion, assisted suicide, distribution of contraception, and any other number of moral evils, Catholics would be forced to vacate many medical professions, and many Catholic medical providers would shutter.
Forced to provide health insurance for morally impermissible things like abortion and contraception, or offer certain services in direct contradiction to Church teaching, many Catholic-owned businesses would fold. Catholics in public education, forced to teach explicitly anti-Catholic, immoral content would quit; and Catholic parochial schools, compelled to teach the same, would close. The same would happen to Catholic adoption agencies and Catholic relief organizations serving millions of Americans in need of various basic services.
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