Worship Weblog
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Richard Ostling on religious freedom
From a recent Books&Culture article by Richard Ostling, the longtime religion writer for Time magazine, who will be speaking at Symposium 2008—a review of Joseph Viteritti’s book “The Last Freedom”:
The Viteritti doctrine would “grant people of faith the most generous scope of freedom possible without infringing on public order” or limiting peoples’ right to believe or to disbelieve. He wants to maximize freedom of conscience and “minimize situations in which the state uses its authority to force people to do something they think is wrong.”
The underlying problem, Viteritti contends, has been a “negative predisposition toward religion in the courts.” A “snobbish bigotry,” rooted in fear and ignorance, infects not only judges but other cultural élites. He believes that a wide swath of intellectuals, opinion leaders, and influential media mistakenly suppose that Americans who take religion seriously “are irrational and uninformed, a stupid lot who must be treated with suspicion.”
Unlike the anti-theocracy crowd, Viteritti therefore concludes that the risks from “antireligious sentiment now outweigh the risks that emerge from the outbreaks of religious zealotry that have dotted the political landscape; to put it more bluntly, the threats from the left are more dangerous than those from the right.” He finds that most Americans fall into an ambiguous “hollow middle,” rejecting both rigid secularism and overly intrusive religion. Yet Americans generally favor religion’s role in society, unlike the Supreme Court and government, which Viteritti says engineered secularization of public life and the public schools during recent decades. ...
Events • Interdisciplinary Application • Reading • (0) Comments • Permalink