Society and Religion: What is the proper relationship?

Much has been said over the years about the "social gospel." The Catholic church has its own "conflict theology" movement, and a Jewish rabbi, in justifying his involvement in an anti-nuclear weapons campaign, said something to the effect that if religion doesn't have something to say about everyday life then it's useless.

Most every religion establishes some sort of humanitarian, charitable organization designed to help people cope with this current, temporal life. My own denomination has established the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) with a worldwide humanitarian presence. Every religion I know of encourages its followers to acts of selfless service for the less fortunate.

The very fact that a religion's followers are members of a particular society makes some sort of social-religious interaction unavoidable. But the exact nature of that interaction has long been debated, with many different approaches taken by different social-religious mixtures. Today, in the United States, this interaction has become the stuff of politics. The evangelical churches of this country have taken up a major political movement, with a specific "church-friendly" agenda.

On the front of this movement it sounds like a very valuable approach to the ills of society. Morality, particularly sexual morality, is a major focus of this movement. This morality emphasis has been given a code name "family values." (In the early 80s, opponenets of this movement had the audacity to point out that some of the so-called "family" candidates were unmarried, while their opponents were married with children! This made it clear that the term "family values" was a code word and not an accurate description of the agenda.)

But I'm concerned about the effect such a merging of religious and political interests might have on our system of government. And I'm even more concerned about the legitimacy of a Christian religion becoming thus involved. In this paper I could say much about the political dangers surrounding the merger of political and religious interests taking place today. But I think others have expressed that concern more adequately than I could. I refer you particularly to James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments."

Instead I'll focus on what I believe to be the appropriate and inappropriate social interactions of the Christian religion (based on what I believe were the goals and methods of its founder). I do not here pretend to spell our the appropriate interaction of other religions with their governments, though it is possible adherents to these religions will find food for useful thought. I personally believe that the current move toward a removal of the barriers between church and state stand to do more harm to the church than they do to the state, and there are plenty of dangers for the state.

So-called skeptics tend to view religion as a human invention that resulted from certain emotional needs. The behavior of most established religions has, I believe, helped to foster this view as well as to confirm these people in their skeptic views. One of these behaviors has been the willingness of religion, including Christianity, to serve as a tool of society to ensure the compliance of individuals.

Individual compliance with social norms and mores has long been pitted against the human's natural (and, I believe, God-given) desire for independence. Books like The Watcher, or a short story like Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 explore this conflict. Societies need to have at least a level of individual compliance in order for the specialization of roles to work. In some philosophical views this becomes a trade-off. The individual gives up certain rights to individuality in order to enjoy the benefits afforded by social specialization. Drawing that line is a continual struggle between people whose individual preferences place them at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Maintaining compliance involves the use of social sanctions. Our criminal justice system is simply a very formalized tool of social sanction. Societies tend to seek out all means for applying sanctions to the population to further their own survival needs. And what better sanction than to deny someone not only life, but eternal life in a supposed hereafter! I doubt there's any history to document the development of this use for religion, because the two probably developed in parallel. Certainly the entanglement of religion and social sanction was firmly in place when the founder of Christianity showed up. He was killed for his refusal to comply.

Karl Marx commented on this phenomenon when he reportedly said, "Relgion is the opiate of the masses." What he referred to was the observed use of religion to make people content with their underprivileged status. Religion promises a better world to come; a sort of ultimate delayed gratification. Live a compliant and subservient life in this existence and you'll earn a better existence in the "next" life. That might be fine if you could prove that the "next" life exists and that subservient compliance is actually a condition of obtaining that life. But you can't!

Marx envisioned a world free of religion so the masses wouldn't be "doped" into serving the interests of the wealthy without adequate compensation. When some of his followers tried to implement his ideas by viciously attacking all forms of religion, they gave his ideas a bad name, and I think the world is a worse place as a result. But I also personally believe that a truly legitimate religion would NOT fill the role Marx saw it carrying out. Religion should not be about the individual's relationship to society, but about the individual's relationship with God.

Now the devoted religionist would argue, "But one's relationship to God affects one's relationship to society." I guess I'll have to agree with that at that level. But most religions put a whole lot of strictly social restrictions into their religious requirements as if that's what God requires. The New Testament does call on Christians to live as useful citizens of society, but only after the authors have firmly established that such compliance has no value toward eternal salvation.

The hijacking of the Christian religion for social control purposes was predicted, and not all that subtly, in the New Testament book of prophecy, Revelation. And this depiction is entirely negative. Using the symbol of a harlot also called "Babylon" the book predicts the fall of this false religion. And listen to who gets upset when that happens!

  For all nations have drunk
    the maddening wine of her adulteries.
  The kings of the earth
    committed adultery with her,
  and the merchants of the earth
    grew rich from her excessive luxuries.
 (Revelation 18:3)


Later verses describe the mouring of the kings, the merchants, and the sea captains (government, commerce, and transportation) all of whom had prospered as a result of their illicit relations with her.

Now let's try to dig a little deeper into the metaphors used. The woman depicted in this passage commits adultery. In an adulterous relationship there is an exchange, particularly in the case of a harlot. Here the adultery is depicted between the kings of the earth (governments or society) and the woman (the Christian religion). The church is supposed to be the bride of Christ, and her offspring (people whose lives are changed by God's intervention) are the result of this relationship.

But as the church loses her purity and wanders away from God, she loses the ability to positively impact the lives of her followers. Before long she's inventing stories of the horrors of the punishment of an angry God to frighten her followers into outward changes that mimic the inward changes wrought by the work of God on the soul. And as even this loses it's power to control, she forges an illicit alliance with the ultimate power of society, government. How do government and commerce benefit from this affair?

For helping the church enforce its dogma, society (in the form of government) gets the power of the "ultimate" sanctions to encourage socially correct behavior. And commerce gets the benefit of a willing workforce less likely to complain about the unfair and unnecessarily inadequate remuneration for their labor. The merchants grow rich by withholding what rightfully belongs to the laborers who produce this wealth. Do I imagine this?

Back in the early '80s I heard an evangelical preacher state this idea explicitly (though without mentioning the negative connotations). He was preaching the importance of the family. Enforcement of family values, he said, had economic consequences. If a man had to marry to fulfill his sexual desires, then he was likely to produce children. Now he'd have to provide for that family. Instead of working only enough to meet his immediate needs, he's forced to work full time to earn the money needed to provide for his family.

It is no coincidence that the political party in the United States that supports the integration of religion into society is also the party generally aligned with business interests. The breakdown of the family threatens the availability of a workforce willing to be exploited to produce wealth for those few lucky enough not to have to work for their living. Why does this party oppose expansion of welfare? People on welfare don't need to work, and are removed from the pool of wealth producers. Why the homophobia? Homosexuals don't produce families and aren't pressured to work to support them. So we see religion and the interests of government and commerce linked in a way that has little to do with eternal salvation and a lot to do with the consolidation of wealth.

According to Revelation, God will not forever tolerate this corruption of his worship. Babylon (representing this unholy alliance) will fall and the true followers of God, those who rejected the social control functions of religion, will be vindicated. In the world to come individual self-control based on selfless love will replace social control. Individuality can flourish without the threat to social well-being. The tension between individuality and social values will vanish.

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