Religious Freedom- What It Is And What It Isn't.. Some History.

This post was originally written on 3/16/2012

Does anyone actually believe that the writer's of the Constitution wrote the first amendment with the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church in mind?  Is anyone that delusional?
   
     Let us take a brief moment for a little lesson on history and world religions, shall we?  Good.  I thought you would be game for that.
   
     The men who wrote our Constitution were primarily of English descent.  They were, most of them, either born and raised in England, or their ancestors of a generation or two (maybe three) before them were.  Certainly some of these men were scholars who had studied vast amounts of literary works that were written by men (and a few women) from around the globe, but most of these guys were farmers or business owners who had little contact with anyone who wasn't of European descent.
   
     With this in mind, just what examples would have come to mind for these men when considering the question of whether to form their fledgling government as a theocracy, in whole or in part?  Why, the history of England and those countries which England had interacted with, of course!  England by itself has a long history of "squabbles" amongst it's citizens, it's leaders, and different religious leaders, beginning in Roman times and continuing into modern day (If  you consider the fact that England as we Americans view it also incorporates such countries as Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and Canada.into their area of influence).  Plenty of information there from which to draw, without even having to get into the religions of those countries whose citizens didn't speak a lick of English back in the late 1700's.
     
     Keeping in mind that, prior to the time that the Constitution was drafted, the history available to our founders is the same history we have (slightly better) access to; let's begin with the Romans.  I begin here, because the language of the Romans was Latin, which just happens to be something that every well educated young man in the 1700's was likely to have had to learn.  It stands to reason that they would have picked up some history of government as the Roman's saw it, and it does seem that some of that seeped through into our own government.
   
     As you probably know, the Roman Empire over a period of time took over a hell of a lot of territory through conquest.  Now, this happened over a very long period of time, through the reign of several leaders and the rule of several governing bodies.  As a general rule, the Roman stance on religion was fairly relaxed, with some glaring exceptions.  The popular beliefs of the time were mostly polytheistic, which allows for a slightly more lenient system of belief.  Christianity did rise during the heyday of the Roman Empire, and was at different times embraced and demonized.  Usually, the motivation behind the prevailing attitude towards religion was political.  Either the religious beliefs of a group were helping those in power, or they were undermining them.  Part of the reason that the Roman Empire was able to expand and hold as much territory as it did while it was a going concern, was that Roman leaders didn't put too many onerous restrictions on the peoples that they conquered.  It was easier for people to accept a change from being the subjects of one group to being the subjects of the Romans if their daily life didn't have to change much.  Eventually Christianity (more specifically early Catholicism) became more widespread, and the leaders of the Roman Empire began to negotiate with the leaders of the church that sprang up to organize followers of and convert people to Christianity.  The predecessor of the Roman Catholic Church grew in power, and the Roman Empire died.
  
     Moving on to the history of the British Empire, or what we would consider to be England, Scotland, Wales, and part of Ireland.  We'll ignore the territories that England has taken over outside of Europe, just for the sake of simplicity..  These three countries were the ones from which our founding fathers mainly traced their lineage anyways.  The British Empire actually sprang from the ashes of the Roman Empire, since it wasn't until after the Roman's moved out that the native peoples of these countries started to get their shit together and get organized.  It was the Romans who brought Christianity to the British Isles, and different variations of it have flourished in this area of the world ever since.  The problem has been that the followers of these different versions quite often question the validity of anyone else's version.
   
     Eventually most of the countries that we are discussing settled on a monarchy version of government, headed by a leader who was seen as having the God given right to rule over it's people.  Transition in this type of government from one leader to the next is usually determined by some rather fluid rules of hereditary succession.  The sticky part in this type of government comes from different interpretations of which version of God really intended to rule, and over what territory he intended them to rule.  There have also been some big problems with the practice of religion under this form of government, as many monarchs have chosen to extend their God given right to rule to include their God given right to make all of their subjects worship their God the way they prefer to worship him.
   
     Because the founders of the Roman Catholic Church were also the ones who did the most to spread the belief and practice of Christianity through the Roman Empire, and thus through the territory that later became the British Empire, many of the people in these countries followed the teachings of the Catholic Church even after the Romans gave up the ghost.  Much like now, the Catholic Church of old was all up in everybody's business, laying down some pretty strict rules for their followers.  Since the British Empire was right smack dab in the middle of the European continent, and was surrounded by a whole lot of countries that were a lot closer to them than Rome, some different versions of Christianity made their way into this area as well.  Plus you had people living there who had never really bought into the Christianity thing to begin with.
   
     The most important thing to remember about monarchs is that they are people too.  They have their servants put their pants on for them one leg at a time just like the rest of us, and they learn their religious beliefs from the leaders of the churches and the people around them just like us too.  Apparently that God given right to rule doesn't come with a direct line to the Big Guy.  Some of these monarchs were Catholic, some were followers of other religions, and some of them were like David Koresh with some batshit ideas of their own.
   
     The unfortunate thing is, the subjects (or plain old people) of these monarchs were subject not only to the taxes and laws and wars that these monarchs got all excited about, they were also sometimes subject to following the rules these Anointed Ones prescribed for following and supporting different religions.  That really sucked sometimes because with all the turmoil surrounding who had the God given right to rule how much at any given  time, those poor folks could never really be sure what rules they were going to have to follow tomorrow, since whoever was in charge today might be dead and replaced with someone who had completely different ideas tomorrow.  Sometimes, you even had to worry about the monarch that you were used to pulling a complete 180 on you halfway through their reign!
   
     The most memorable example of this in England's history is the complete fuckarow that surrounded the reigns of Henry VIII and his two daughters.  Good old Hank was a Catholic when he gained the throne, and the Catholic Church was pretty influential at the time.  He started out being a very popular king, and the story of his first marriage was a love story for the ages.  He married his older brother's widow, whom he had fallen in love with at first sight.  She was also Catholic, and a pretty observant one too.  Problem was that she was a bit older than him, and she only managed to give birth to one daughter, which was bad wifely form when you're talking about a queen whose job it is to pop out indisputable heirs to the throne.
   
     Hank the Horny Goat started making goo goo eyes at a much younger woman named Anne Boleyn,  who wouldn't agree to fuck him unless he divorced his wife and made her queen.  Uh oh.  The Catholic Church was even less in favor of divorce back then than it is now.  Unsurprisingly, Henry, upon being denied not only the poontang that he wanted but also being told that no on the divorce question by the Catholic Grand Poo Bah, threw a hissy fit and decided that the ENTIRE COUNTRY of England wasn't going to be Catholic anymore.  He instead created his own church that was pretty much the same as the Catholic Church, but that allowed him to dump his wife.  Just for good measure, he made himself the head of this church.  Later on, he decided that he didn't like his second queen much either (who, BTW, had given him another girl) and he had her beheaded.  Before he died, he went through a total of six wives, (he killed number 5 too) and left one legitmate son and two daughter that he had declared illegitimate while acting in the capacity of the head of his new church.
   
     Henry's oldest daughter ended up getting the crown anyways after her younger brother died and fighting a little war with some family members and their armies.  When she got on the throne, one of the first things she did was make England Catholic again, and started working with the Catholic Church to clean out 274 people   who hadn't been good Catholics during the whole debacle that Henry created, and had openly acted against Catholicism.  She earned herself the moniker Bloody Mary, and she was one crazy Pope lovin bitch.
   
     Henry's younger daughter succeeded her sister to the throne, and she brought back the idea of England having it's own church with her at the head.  She didn't go around killing folks for being Catholic, but she pretty much pissed in the cheerios of anyone who thought that the old ways of having the Pope as the one with final authority over all things religious was the way to go.
   
     In the wake of this clusterfuck, the next King of England is the one that you can thank for the King James Bible.  He thought that it would be a good idea to bring everyone together by directing some people to get up one version of What Religion is About in a handy little novel that incorporated several of the texts that the conflicting religions were based on.  Gee, thanks for that, it's been SO helpful.  Right off the bat people and their spiritual leaders started fighting wars over whose interpretation of that book was right.  Now we have even more groups arguing over which passages and interpretations of those passages are the most important for people to follow.  Finally, not too long after people started fleeing from England and landing over here, a new king decided that perhaps the best idea was for the government of England to dictate a live and let live approach.  They kept their own little church, but not everyone had to join the damn thing.  People could set up their own churches, as long as they recognized and swore fealty to England regardless of their religious beliefs.
    
    Well, by the time that founding fathers sat down to consider just how the brand new American citizens should be handling their shit from that day forward, the pattern of religious "leaders" working their flock into a frenzy to go out and teach the followers of other religions just how "wrong" they were was pretty well established.  Those of our founding fathers who devoted much time to study and personal enlightenment seem to have figured out that whenever you mix religion with power you end up with some bad shit going down for somebody.  So those dudes made it a point to specify that those running the show (the gubbermint) weren't going to be allowed to make everyone switch religions every time that a new person got elected to run the show.  They also made it a big no no for the folks that got elected to make the laws that people had to follow to make it against the law to believe or practice any religion.  In addition to Da Rules, the Constitution sets up a form of government that is supposed to get all the people's needs and wants represented by the people that they elect, and tries to balance things out so that no one person or small group of people can run roughshod over everybody else.
   
     Being human, we have of course managed to fuck things up pretty damn bad since the time in which the Constitution was written.  For one thing, we've bred like freaking rabbits and ballooned our population to numbers that would have been staggering when considered by the founding fathers.  Keeping in mind that in 1776, people still had to worry about getting eaten by wild animals and dying of a cold.  No way they would have believed that this country they were founding was actually going to take off like gangbusters and grow to include among it's citizens so many different people who can live so fucking long!  The idea that the same arguments could go on for generations because people just kept living and living and spouting nonsense to more and more people who believed it, well, I doubt that was envisioned.
   
     As far as the right to religious freedom goes, those men who lead groups of religious minded individuals have worked very hard to establish that as a right held by those who lead a church to try and influence as many people as they can to follow the rules of their faith, by whatever means necessary.  They are wrong, they've always been wrong, and they will always be wrong in this assertion.  The right of religious freedom is a right guaranteed to the citizens of this country as individuals, and applies to each individual equally regardless of how big group of fellow believers they belong to.  Every person is free to believe what they want about the origins of the universe and the way that people are supposed to behave, and every person is equally free to ignore the religious beliefs of others that conflict with their own.
   
     Read the Constitution, the first ten amendments.  That Bill of Rights is all about the rights that we as individuals can expect to enjoy under the system of government that our founding fathers got together to create.  Just like now, individuals are people.  As in one person, by themselves, not made a whole group of them that magically morph into more of a person than someone else.  Unless you somehow can make yourself believe the delusion that Bain Capital or the IBEW or The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a living breathing individual rather than an institution created by and made up of living, breathing individuals, then you cannot reasonably assert that The Catholic Church is an individual either.
   
     Even if you feel that the beliefs you hold that you have learned from your religion, your study of history or science, or from reading romance novels and watching Disney films is the absolute truth as everyone should see it, the only person that those beliefs matters are you and whichever individuals happen to agree with you.  Unless you fancy the idea of having to live under the laws that are thought up by someone else based on their view of things as they have come to see them after watching every Freddy Kruger movie ever made 700 times, you should not be advocating for a system of government that makes it's laws based on your personal views.
   
     The citizens of the United States, and our guests, are afforded the protections set forth in the Bill of Rights to be individuals who are different from each other.  It is not the purpose of our government to legislate everyone into being and believing the same things about everything under the sun.  When a law is necessary to protect the rights of one individual from the actions of another, then that law should be enacted and enforced.  When a law is necessary to protect the rights of an individual from the actions of a group of people, then that law should be enacted and enforced.  When an individual or group wishes to impose their beliefs upon another group or individual in order to make them act in accordance to beliefs that they do not hold and which would require them to make a change in themselves that has no effect on another individual, then that law is bullshit and should never be enacted or enforced.
   
     I can agree with those who say that our government has become too intrusive in our daily lives, up to a point.  It was never supposed to be the role of our government to oversee every thought held  and action taken by the citizens in our daily lives.  This was never envisioned by our founding fathers as the role of either the Federal or any State government.  In our supposedly free society, it was intended to let people make the decisions that affect their own lives day to day, and for government to maintain those parts of our society which we all share, doing so in a manner that didn't let any ruling class of people call the shots for everyone.  The framers of our Constitution were definitely not perfect, but they had the right idea, which is that people had the right to decide for themselves that which should be rendered unto Caesar and that which should be rendered unto God.  That is a right that is protected by our Constitution, and will always remain the right of each individual to decide for themselves if we are to carry on as a society that lives freely under the government that was formed by the body of the Constitution.