NOW AS WELL AS THEN: Religion and the political society

 

I watched a PBS presentation, which dealt with the topic of separation of church and state as well as issues, which have been in focus as a result of this decision in the constructing of the US Constitution. The discussion panel consisted of a Muslim sheik, a Jewish rabbi and a number of Christian groups including a Southern Baptist Minister. I wondered why I have never seen such a discussion in Barbados. I believe that we have been so brainwashed into believing that we have such total freedom of worship that there is no need for such “arcane” discussions. Indeed, in local religious terms, I have only encountered three “liberal” religious leaders, two of whom were Anglican and one Catholic.
 
The issues covered by the PBS programme were in some cases ones which we would not necessarily encounter directly. One such issue was same sex marriage and the right of, say, a shopkeeper to refuse service to such a couple on “religious” grounds, that is, the shopkeeper’s religious beliefs. While I have never heard of such a case in Barbados, I should make two salient points: first, we do not have same sex marriage in Barbados; secondly we still share the same prejudice at a legal level, since same sex (at least male) copulation is illegal. What is most interesting about this is that the law is not normally enforced and that homosexuality is not alien to either political party. Then why is the law still on the books when only cases of same sex rape are punished?
 
The answer may simply be that we do not have the courage to do what is, after all, the logical thing to do. No one wants to be seen to support such a law in the eyes of the public. Publicly (since the Barrow era) politicians tend to shy away from doing what is right and sensible for fear that it will affect their chances at the next election. Why was our founding father so bold? He saw his job as one of guiding the nation forward, not matching public opinion. Whether we like it or not, public opinion is often wrong. No, I am not in favour of curtailing the right to have an opinion: in fact, I wish we had sensible defamation laws that allowed for greater freedom of expression of opinion.
 
Returning to the PBS panel discussion, the pastor of the Black church, the rabbi and the imam were interestingly the most liberal, largely because they had all experienced the status of outsider and being discriminated against. The African American pastor noted that while Hobby Lobby was against providing contraception for their workers or that some clerk in a government office had refused to produce a marriage license for  a gay couple, neither would have hesitated to serve a Klu Klux Klansman on any grounds. His basic argument was that the Bible insisted that we should love all human beings. (I can live with that argument!) Racism was as egregious an offence against humanity as anything else and totally against the teachings of the Bible. Muslims or Jews are not normally faced with such a problem, even though there is racism in some Muslim and Jewish communities.
 
Living in a society like ours, where a proposal for a multi-faith ceremony omits Muslims from that ceremony because one Christian group threatens to boycott the ceremony if Muslims were included, makes it all the more clear to me that we need to have such a discussion on CBC and that the discussion should be well advertised. I would even be prepared to chair the panel.
 
What is it that makes us believe that our brand of religion is superior to any other? And here, I am not only speaking about the difference between Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. I also mean the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, between Sunni and Shia, etc. Is the God of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. not the same creator God of ancient Egypt, Amen? (Amen was sometimes rendered as Amun, but in all pharaonic names it was Amen as in Amenophis or Tutankhamen). Is the concept of God, whether we say God, Jehovah, Allah or use any other nomenclature, really that different?

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