But how is that relevant? The Founders may have been (mostly) religious people themselves, they are precisely the people who drew a line in the sand regarding religion in politics in the first place. Thanks to GWB, that line became more and more obscured and that’s one of the things that empowered the far right religious in the subsequent years to insist their own religious beliefs are the only ones that should count.
All that said though, I don’t think it would be wise, even if he wanted to do so, for Biden to just shut down the office at this point. Let’s hope that the people he’s put into his faith office will be able to repair some of the damage done in the past. It would be great if after they’ve done sufficient repair, they would make the decision themselves to close the project down and take religion out of government where it simply does not belong.
I say this as a Christian who is deeply involved in social justice. Certainly it’s entirely appropriate for our moral and ethical beliefs, derived from our religions, to inform our political activity and spur us to action. But when the government itself has a religious component, it will inevitably tilt toward whatever group happens to have the most political clout at the moment, a recipe for disaster.
A significant portion of the decline is the result of many denominations being splintered by “purifying” themselves into smaller factions & fixating on controlling the lives of others.
That’s not even the worst thing about it. The worst thing is that faith-based thinking is how we got in this situation in the first place. The Republican Party is nothing if it’s not faith-based. That means they believe whatever they want to be true, regardless of the evidence.
I can live with religious people. I’m a strong supporter of freedom of religion (though not in the way Christian nationalists want us to take that phrase, that laws don’t apply to Christians). But all religions are faith-based, and faith is the problem.
We need evidence-based people. We desperately need evidence-based voters. It’s time we decided that having good reasons before believing stuff is actually a good idea - and that means evidence, not… whatever it was you were taught to believe as a child.
I’m against the Faith Office, because faith is a vice, not a virtue. And I’m also against it, because it doesn’t belong in the U.S. government. We’re supposed to have a wall of separation between church and state, and there’s a good reason for that.
Religion needs to be voluntary, and the government needs to remain neutral. Certainly, the government shouldn’t be supporting religious faith! Again, faith is a vice, not a virtue. If you disagree with me, fine. We can agree to disagree. But keep our government out of it.
Make your faith-based initiatives private, keep the government out, and you’ll have no complaints from me.
Extremists who support autocratic power arrangements often gather more attention than the majority of religious communities whose quiet, off-camera compassion, mercy and love for justice help fuel the engines of democracy.
President Biden made a speech in a virtual National Prayer Breakfast on Feb 4th. Hopefully he will find some alternative to this event which is run by a right wing cult known as the “Family”.
I hear ya’. I’ve go a lot of nonprofiteer friends and colleagues who go to that parish. Unfortunately the dioceses’ typically heavy-handed influence over the first investigation is damning in itself.
Which illustrates the problem of having the government and religion intertwined: Some politician somewhere decides who has an acceptable religion and who doesn’t. I like President.Biden’s wider selection much better than Trump’s but it is not a decision the government should be making in the first place.
There’s a bit of difference between supporting charitable efforts on the part of the religious and the favoritism of establishing a state religion.
Full disclosure: I’m an atheist who donates to charities of all stripes (as long as conversion and proselytization aren’t part and parcel to receiving assistance).
A follow-up to the comments from Atheists on exclusion from the President’s panel. The full title is “Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships”. Hopefully the last part is, at least, some recognition that responsible social activity is not limited to the religious community. That said, it would be nice to see someone from the Atheist or Humanist communities included.
That was the one really jarring part of Biden’s speech yesterday. It’s one thing to say it in a speech about redeployments or something; then it’s not much different from “God bless America”. But closing out a speech that didn’t mention the military at all except how they were going to help administer vaccines was like a record scratch.
