The Phony War: Science vs. Religion
Nearly half of Republicans, 45 percent, believe that God wanted Trump to be president.
—THE WASHINGTON POST, FEBRUARY 14, 2019
CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGIOUS CONVENtion is a centuries-old problem. Science does not preclude belief in a higher being, and there is very little in the core beliefs of most religions that requires a categorical rejection of observations made through science. But all too often the two are pitted against each other, with tragic consequences for the rule of law.
For decades the USSR and other communist countries used scientific discoveries and Marxist theories of social science as excuses to persecute religion. Religion, they said, was inconsistent with scientific advancement and with social and economic progress. Religious Russians were subjected to discrimination, and those who dared to teach religion to others were often imprisoned and sometimes killed.
Through much of human history, however, it has been the other way around. Religion, often cloaked with the authority of the law, has been used to persecute and silence those who believe in science.
Galileo was persecuted and even tortured by the Catholic Church for suggesting that the earth wasn’t flat. It didn’t matter that the “flat-earth” theory lacked scientific evidence. Church leaders had convinced themselves that a flat-earth theory was the only scientific theory consistent with religion, and they steadfastly held to that position—until the scientific evidence in Galileo’s favor became so overwhelming that the Church risked badly losing face.
EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION
With the nineteenth century came Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. At first Darwin faced near uniform rejection. The Church of England, the Catholic Church, and just about every denomination denounced his theory.
Then, once again, strong opposition receded in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, as the Anglican Church, Catholic Church, and other denominations reconciled biblical accounts of creation with scientific revelations about how we and the earth evolved.
In America, pockets of resistance remained into the twenty-first century. The drama—like the 1690 drama in Salem, Massachusetts, over the superstitious belief in witches—would again play itself out in the courtroom. It wasn’t just a battle between scientific ideas and religious beliefs, but it was a battle over the rule of law.
No one would be hanged as in Salem, but courts would have to decide whether religious viewpoints still held by some denominations, as opposed to generally accepted scientific viewpoints, would be taught in the public schools.
The battle between modern science and myth reared its head in March 1925 after the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
A month later John Scopes, a public schoolteacher, was arrested for teaching evolution. The case became headline news. Two of the most famous lawyers of the day took part: Clarence Darrow championed the teacher’s right to teach science, and William Jennings Bryan, a four-time Democratic presidential nominee and leader in the anti-evolution movement, spoke for the state of Tennessee.
Bryan argued that the biblical word of God took priority over all human knowledge.
Clarence Darrow retorted, “We find today as brazen and as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was even made in the Middle Ages.”
The judge ruled for the prosecutors when he banned expert testimony from scientists. Bryan agreed to join the prosecution’s team, and Darrow called him to the stand to testify as a biblical expert.
He asked Bryan whether he really believed a whale had swallowed Jonah, and whether Adam and Eve were really the first humans. Did all languages emanate from the Tower of Babel?
“I accept the Bible absolutely,” said Bryan, though he conceded that the six days described in the Bible were probably not literal days.
Darrow concluded his examination by saying, “I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.”
The jury convened for nine minutes and fined Scopes one hundred dollars.
Bryan died in his sleep five days later.
The next year Mississippi also passed a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Arkansas followed a year later.
Tennessee’s Butler Act was repealed in 1967. A year later the Arkansas and Mississippi laws were struck down by the courts. The back-and-forth process of regulating these teachings and then changing course continued in other states. In 1973 Tennessee passed a bill saying that the account in Genesis had to be given equal weight when evolution was taught. Two years later, a federal appeals court declared the law unconstitutional.
Not surprisingly, evolution is still a controversial subject even though the Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations have accepted the science.
Next came a national debate over prayer in public schools. In April 1962 the Supreme Court heard Engel v. Vitale. A group of parents in New Hyde Park, New York, complained that the official prayer written by the state board of regents to “Almighty God” contradicted their religious beliefs.
Steven Engel, who was Jewish, challenged the constitutionality of the state prayer in the public schools. He was supported by groups including the ACLU. They argued that the prayer violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which says in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” They also argued that the Fourteenth Amendment imposed these same restrictions on the states.
In a six-to-one vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the promotion of religion by persons exercising governmental authority in a public school setting violated the Constitution.
The ruling didn’t sit well with religious groups in Southern states, who have been fighting to bring back prayer in public schools ever since.
In a rally in Hartsville, South Carolina, in September 2014, Pat Gibson-Hye Moore, a school board member, complained, “We’re taking God out of everything. We are taking the creator, the one that created everything, we’re just trying to kick Him out and He’s not happy with that.”
Those who demanded prayer in public schools argued that since the Engel decision, the schools have replaced morals and values with sex education. Some even argued that the removal of religion from the classroom has led to violence. “Should we be surprised that schools become places of carnage?” asked Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, who is also a minister. Huckabee didn’t mention guns, or the fact that just about every Catholic diocese and mainline Protestant denomination in the United States has called for stricter gun laws to protect children. For him the relevant issue was school prayer.
The public school prayer debate wasn’t fought between believers and nonbelievers. Rather, much of the debate was between those who belonged to denominations that dominated local government (these are almost always Christian denominations, although most Christian denominations do not support public school prayer) and persons of other faiths (Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, and others) who prefer to pray with family at home or in religious institutions. Many Christians also believe that Sunday school, church groups, private schools, and homes are the best places for a child to pray without forcing a particular religious viewpoint on other children.
Another constitutional debate focuses on public support for private schools, usually religious schools. Some religious conservatives—having abandoned public schools over both racial integration and removal of school prayer—seek government funding for their private religious schools. Such funding is not unheard of elsewhere; for instance, some European countries provide for it. But the establishment clause of the United States Constitution prohibits any government endorsement or financial support for particular religions and creates a serious impediment to public subsidies for religious schools.
We will not summarize the political and legal battles over public subsidies for religious schools here, but this issue, which was first championed by the Catholic Church and has been taken up by evangelical Protestants, continues to challenge the rule of law in America to this day.
CONTRACEPTION AND ABORTION
The battle between scientific advancement and religious principles next shifted to human reproduction. Because of the disparate impact of contraception and abortion laws on women, this debate involves equal protection considerations as well as the influence of religious principles on the law. It also involves government intrusion on personal privacy, a right not explicitly guaranteed under the Constitution but implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids the government from taking away a person’s “liberty” without due process of law. Laws requiring women to have children when they don’t want to raise all of these concerns.
The battle started with contraception.
“Birth control” was first advocated by Margaret Sanger, who opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1916. Sanger had ten siblings, and she observed how without birth control women were helpless to direct their lives as they wished. As a nurse she saw women who gave themselves abortions with coat hangers and ended up very ill or dead. She vowed to do something to prevent this.
Sanger created a firestorm. Not only was it illegal to teach women about contraception, religious conservatives considered it obscene.
Nine days after she opened her clinic, she was arrested, and the clinic was closed. Bail was set at five hundred dollars. She returned to the clinic and was arrested again, charged with running a public nuisance. Sentenced to thirty days in jail, she went on a hunger strike and had to be force-fed.
At trial, the judge declared that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”
But in 1918, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that doctors could legally prescribe contraceptives.
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, remained a target of some religious conservatives long after her death, but it wasn’t until 1960, when the FDA approved birth control pills, that the legal battle heated up. “The pill,” invented by Carl Djerassi, quickly became popular with the public, and also a target of restrictive birth control legislation and enforcement.
The Catholic Church, a powerful force in American politics, has been a primary opponent of contraceptive measures. The battle over birth control also reflected long simmering social tensions between mainline Protestants, the most powerful religious group in American society and politics from the founding up through much of the twentieth century, and Catholics, who arrived as immigrants beginning in the nineteenth century and then acquired considerable political power in the Northeast and Upper Midwest.
Most mainline Protestant denominations embraced birth control in the 1950s once it was found to be safe, whereas the Catholic Church to this day rejects it.
Who controlled the law on this subject became a test for whose religious ideas would hold sway. Lost in the power struggle—which also included ethnic dimensions—was the idea that in a country without an established church, one person’s religion should not hold sway over another’s personal decisions.
In an article in 1939, Father Francis Jeremiah Connell, a highly respected priest and professor of dogma theology, said this about birth control:
[W]hen husband and wife deliberately and positively frustrate the procreative purpose of sexual intercourse, they prevent the order of nature and thus directly oppose the design of nature’s Creator. And since the reproductive function is so vital to the upkeep of the race, and since any exception to this law would be multiplied indefinitely, every act of contraception frustration is a gravely immoral act, or, in Catholic terminology, a mortal sin.
By the 1960s, the Catholic Church was deeply embedded in a fight to keep contraceptives from people who wanted them.
In Connecticut, an 1879 law said that “any person who uses any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purposes of preventing conception shall be fined not less than forty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days.” The law provided that anyone who “assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to commit any offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he were the principle offender.”
Estelle Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a doctor and a Yale professor, were both arrested and found guilty of providing contraception. They were fined one hundred dollars each.
The US Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 reversed the decision. Judge William O. Douglas declared that married couples had a right to privacy. He said their use of contraception was a “fundamental right.”
In 1972, in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended this right of privacy to all women, married or not.
In some ways the Eisenstadt case was as important as Griswold. Before 1972, unmarried women had difficulty obtaining contraceptives from anyone other than a registered physician or pharmacist.
William Baird gave a lecture at Boston University on April 6, 1967, and invited members of the audience to come forward to take contraceptive materials including a vaginal spermicide. Baird was then arrested for violating the law that allowed only doctors and pharmacists to pass out contraceptives. In court he was found innocent of presenting contraceptive items but guilty of distributing them. He faced a three-month prison sentence. When the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found his conviction to be unconstitutional, he was released.
Then came the battle over abortion. Many of the same considerations underlying the contraception battle were relevant here as well (science vs. religious belief, privacy, and equal protection). The scientific component, however, became more complex as science also could be used to form opinions about, if not to determine, whether and when a human life begins inside the womb.
This battle escalated quickly after the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.
The debate was not just about science, religion, and personal privacy, but also about the law’s equal protection of women.
In 1965 illegal abortions comprised one-sixth of pregnancy-related deaths. A survey conducted in the 1960s revealed that eight in ten poor women in New York City who had an abortion did it by themselves.
In 1970 two University of Texas School of Law graduates brought a lawsuit on behalf of a pregnant woman, “Jane Roe” (real name Norma McCorvey). Roe claimed that Texas’s law criminalizing abortions except to save the life of the mother violated her constitutional rights. Though her life wasn’t in danger, Roe didn’t have the money to travel out of state to get an abortion in a safe medical facility. The suit was filed against Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. When a Texas court ruled for the plaintiff, Wade appealed to the US Supreme Court.
By a seven to two decision, the court in an opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun ruled that the Texas law violated “Roe’s” right to privacy. The court ruled that the Constitution’s First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments protected her “zone of privacy” against state laws. The court said that a statute that did not take into consideration the stage of pregnancy or interests other than the life of the mother violated the plaintiff’s due process.
The court considered the physical, psychological, and economic issues a pregnant woman must endure. The court also considered three reasons to ban abortions, but dismissed the first two—discouraging illicit sex and protecting women’s health—as irrelevant. The third reason—protecting prenatal life—was by far the more complex question. The court examined a wide range of scientific evidence, and centuries of religious and philosophical teachings going back to the ancient Greeks. No field of inquiry—philosophy, religion, or science—gave definitive answers.
But the court reached a conclusion and ruled that the unborn fetus during the first trimester was not a person under the law, and thus that protecting the fetus at this stage was not a sufficient justification for a state to prohibit abortion. Despite all of the criticism that Roe v. Wade has received over the years, the decision was unique in its use of science, religion, and philosophy to answer a very difficult question: At what stage of pregnancy is a human life worthy of legal protection, at substantial cost to the mother who does not want to give birth? The court implicitly rejected two alternative approaches—one that would allow state legislators to decide this question for pregnant women, even at the very beginning of pregnancy, as well as the other extreme of always allowing women and their doctors to make these decisions without any state regulation, regardless of the stage of pregnancy. The court held that the right to abortion during the first trimester was near absolute. Abortions during the second trimester could not be made illegal if the abortion was needed to protect the life of the mother.
The court that decided this case was all male. Only one of the justices, William Brennan, was Catholic, and he voted with the majority. The opinion was written by Justice Blackmun who had been appointed by a Republican president, and three of the other justices in the majority—Burger, Stewart, and Powell—had been appointed by Republican presidents. One Democratic appointee, Justice White, and one Republican appointee, Justice Rehnquist, dissented.
It is too often said that a jurist’s gender, religion, and political party determine case outcomes. In this seminal decision, that didn’t happen. The rule of law need not turn upon the religious or other identity of lawmakers or the judges who interpret the laws. It turns on our ability to put aside our own identity—whether gender, religion, or political party—and call the shots as we see them. That’s what the Roe court did.
The outcry was immediate. Religious conservatives claimed the court was allowing the murder of unborn children. Groups like TFP (Tradition, Family, Property) Student Action, which was founded in 1973, protested abortion clinics. The TFP on May 15, 2009, in a paper, cited ten reasons why abortion is “evil and not pro-choice.” The rationales behind all ten reasons were either religious (abortion is “evil”) or the premise that human life begins at conception (“abortion is murder”).
Other critics of legalized abortion were much more scholarly in their approach.
John Noonan, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, was staunchly pro-life and anti-abortion. He wrote an essay titled “The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives” that concluded with an argument against taking the life of the unborn.
“The perception of humanity of the fetus and the weighing of fetal rights against other human rights constituted the work of the moral analysts,” he wrote. “But what spirit animated their abstract judgments? For the Christian community it was the injunction of the Scripture to love your neighbor as thyself. The fetus as human was a neighbor; his life had parity with one’s own. The commandment gave life to what otherwise would have been only rational calculation.”
The backlash against Roe v. Wade brought protests to abortion clinics nationwide by Catholic and other religious organizations. Planned Parenthood, a provider of women’s health and reproductive care including abortions, became a prime target nationally.
Most protests were peaceful, but the movement had its violent side. Some people, convinced that human life begins at conception, believed not only that abortion is murder but that violence was justified to prevent it. The threat to our democracy and the rule of law was twofold: first the violence itself, and second, the ideological obsession that became so intense that individuals ignored all other aspects of the rule of law. The rule of law has worked when people who violently attack abortion clinics or doctors have been prosecuted and convicted. The threat to the rule of law is that we have such cases to begin with.
But this raises the question of how far others are willing to go without using such extreme violence. What are abortion opponents willing to give up to have a president who will appoint a Supreme Court that will reverse Roe? For example, if a staunch abortion opponent had to choose between a “pro-choice” president whose loyalty to the United States is not in question, and a “pro-life” president likely beholden to Russia or some other hostile power, which candidate would the abortion opponent choose?
SEXUAL ORIENTATION
In 1969 it was illegal in New York City for a man to solicit sex from another man. Police patrolled areas where gay people congregated for the purpose of harassing and intimidating them. To avoid the glare of the cops, many gays who lived in Greenwich Village went to the Stonewall Inn, a safe haven for gay, lesbian, and transgender people.
It was early in the morning of June 28, 1969, when nine policemen raided the bar. They arrested the bartenders for selling liquor without a license, ordered the bar cleared, and physically assaulted the patrons. They arrested three who weren’t wearing “gender-appropriate” clothing.
It was the third raid on the Stonewall Inn in a month.
Bystanders and those in the bar had usually been passive, but this time the anger about police harassment and social discrimination erupted spontaneously and forcefully. More than four hundred gays and lesbians rioted. Police called in reinforcements, fights broke out, and someone tried to set the place on fire.
In the context of the civil rights and women’s movements, the uprising at the Stonewall Inn became a symbol of resistance to what gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender people had long recognized was unfair social and political discrimination.
The uprising at the Stonewall Inn was the catalyst for the formation of many powerful gay rights organizations, including GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and Queer Nation. In the years after the Stonewall Inn incident, June became Gay Pride month, and the LGBTQ community has held celebratory parades in cities across America.
Since the Stonewall riots, gay men, lesbian women, and transgender and bisexual people have come out of the closet by the millions. They insisted that the state recognize same-sex marriages to be just as legitimate as marriages between a man and woman.
Science once again was on the side of change. According to scientific evidence, people who are attracted to members of the same sex develop their orientation before they are born. This is not a choice. In 2014 researchers confirmed the connection between same-sex orientation in men and a specific chromosomal region. This was thought to be a scientific fact as early as 1990.
Scientific studies also showed the psychologically harmful effects of trying to deny one’s orientation. Studies showed that keeping one’s sexual orientation hidden (“in the closet”) and dealing with the social stigma of homosexuality can result in severe depression or even suicide.
On the other hand, there are the religious institutions that often fight against—but in some instances fight for—equal legal treatment of gays and lesbians, whether the battle be over repeal of sodomy laws or the approval of civil unions and same-sex marriage. Once again different denominations disagree in their approach. Before the late 1980s, most religious denominations agreed to varying degrees to condemn homosexuality, even if they differed in their view of sodomy laws, police harassment, and discrimination against gays and lesbians. Beginning in the 1990s, a growing number of denominations accepted gay and lesbian parishioners, then gay and lesbian clergy and church leaders, and finally same-sex marriage. Other denominations remained steadfastly opposed to equal rights for gays and lesbians inside the church, and yet other denominations were eager to continue discrimination against gays and lesbians in society as a whole.
Among those strongly opposed to gay and lesbian rights in at least some of these areas have been the Catholic Church, Orthodox Jews, Southern Baptists, and other evangelical Protestant denominations. Mainline Protestant denominations and liberal Jewish congregations were the most supportive of gay rights. Many have accepted same-sex marriage, allowing their religious leaders to perform same-sex weddings, including Reform and Conservative Jews, Unitarians, Episcopalians, many Presbyterians and Lutherans and the Congregationalists in the United Church of Christ.
Hawaii made the first move.
In 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled in Baehr v. Lewin that it was unconstitutional for the state to interfere with marriage on the basis of sex.
Immediately other states rushed to pass laws to prevent same-sex marriage. Opponents attempted to show that defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman preserves family values and traditional ethical notions.
Pushed by the religious conservatives in September 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Both chambers had Republican majorities for the first time since the 1950s. The Republicans passed the bill, and President Clinton signed it, despite voicing some reservations. The law allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted in other states. The spouses could not be legally recognized as such for all federal purposes, including insurance benefits for government employees, social security survivors’ benefits, immigration, bankruptcy, and the filing of joint tax returns.
Then federal courts stepped in, recognizing the serious equal protection problems with such laws.
This judicial intervention started with sodomy laws.
Four states were still enforcing sodomy laws against gay men when a Houston resident named John Geddes Lawrence was arrested after police raided his apartment complex in response to a weapons disturbance. They found him having sex with another man and arrested both men, charging them with violating the Texas homosexual conduct law.
After they were convicted and fined, Lawrence appealed. He argued that his arrest and conviction were violations of the right to privacy and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. A Texas appeals court affirmed the conviction, and the Lawrence v. Texas case went to the US Supreme Court, which reviewed it in 2003.
Justice Anthony Kennedy ruled the law was unconstitutional and, with a majority of the justices on his side, overturned the conviction. The court ruled the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The men, the court ruled, were entitled to privacy in their home. The court reversed its own 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had upheld a Georgia anti-sodomy law.
Meanwhile, polls showed that public support for same-sex marriage nationwide rose above 50 percent for the first time in 2011. In 2012 the NAACP supported same-sex marriage for the first time. While poll numbers should not be used to interpret and apply the law (the rule of law sometimes requires that judges be willing to make unpopular decisions), the unavoidable reality is that changing social attitudes are continually shaping the rule of law in America.
In the year 2013, the DOMA statute that limited the federal definition of marriage to one man and one woman was struck down in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Windsor. Edith Windsor had been required to pay $363,000 in estate taxes after her wife died because the federal government didn’t recognize the marriage. The court found DOMA to be unconstitutional and recognized Windsor’s marriage under federal law. Despite the ruling, states were not forced to recognize same-sex marriages made in other states.
After the Windsor decision, thirty-six states legalized same-sex marriage through laws, court rulings, and voter petitions.
Pressure was mounting to make same-sex marriage legal nationwide, and in 2015 the United States Supreme Court heard Obergefell v. Hodges. Represented were plaintiffs from four states—Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In a five to four decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court rejected the reasoning in Baker v. Nelson, a 1971 case in which the Minnesota Supreme Court had ruled that a state law limiting marriage to persons of the opposite sex did not violate the US Constitution. The US Supreme Court would not hear an appeal of Baker in 1971, because there was “no federal question,” but forty years later it was abundantly obvious that there was a federal question that needed to be resolved—in favor of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Among the reasons for the decision, the court said, “The right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.” The court held that because “marriage is a keystone of our social order,” preventing same-sex couples from marrying unconstitutionally denies them countless benefits of marriage for no justifiable reason.
“No longer may this liberty be denied,” Justice Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy opined that the decision wouldn’t harm religious liberty, but in his dissent, Justice John Roberts said that “people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, one of four conservatives on the court to dissent, went further. He said the decision represented “a threat to American democracy.”
Justice Kennedy, who was the deciding vote in both the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case and the Obergefell marriage case, has retired. He has been replaced by his former clerk Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has yet to rule on these questions.
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
Despite these rulings on contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage, pushback from religious conservatives continues unabated. Religious liberty—or the right not to follow generally applicable laws because of religious conscience—is now a focal point of legal and political debate. For years pacifists and others made “religious liberty” arguments to avoid military service, sometimes successfully and with support from some political liberals. Now religious conservatives use that argument in very different contexts.
In 2014 in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the US Supreme Court ruled that David and Barbara Green, the founders of Hobby Lobby, did not have to provide four types of contraception in their employees’ health plan, because of their strong religious beliefs.
In a similar case in Colorado in 2012, Jack Phillips, a baker, refused to bake a cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins, a same-sex couple, because of his deeply held Christian beliefs and was sued. In a seven to two decision handed down in November 2017, the US Supreme Court in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that Phillips had faced religious discrimination in a Colorado proceeding. (The narrow ruling did not address his core religious liberty claim but instead the discriminatory conduct of the Colorado tribunal that had heard his case. Such a case has yet to be decided on its merits. Whether the baker has a First Amendment right to refuse to bake the cake has yet to be resolved.)
The United States was founded as a country where the government would neither establish nor interfere with religion. We are now a country of many religions. Science continues to inform many religious belief systems. The growing alarm and activism in many churches and other religious organizations over climate change illustrates that scientific and theological understandings of God’s creation and our stewardship of the earth are compatible and can reinforce each other. Nonetheless, hostility in some religious denominations—particularly some very conservative Evangelical denominations—to climate-change science shows that the tensions of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial are still with us, and with consequences for humanity even more severe than Tennessee schoolchildren not being taught about evolution.
Religious traditions that staunchly oppose scientific findings also can come into conflict with the rule of law if the legal system is used to impose religious views on others. The battle between particular sectarian perspectives on religion and the rule of law has been an important part of our history and will continue.
The question remains of how Americans will fight this battle. Will we allow religious wars to destroy representative democracy in the United States just as religious wars destroyed much of Europe in the centuries before the United States was founded? Will identity politics rooted in religion—whether beliefs in a particular religion or dislike of someone else’s religion—be so important that Americans forget loyalty to our country and the principles upon which it was founded? To return to an earlier question, would we really choose an unqualified man to be president of the United States—a man with a sordid business and personal life and who was perhaps even beholden to a hostile foreign power—so long as that man claimed to agree with us on abortion?