Should religious believers be placed in straitjackets?

Last updated on: August 1, 2015 at 10:59 am by Dan Peterson

Should religious believers be placed in straitjackets? 2015-08-01T10:59:31-06:00 Dan Peterson

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One fairly prominent writer (for, among other outlets, the very respectable Atlantic Monthly) says “Yes!”

Unfortunately for his noble vision, though, it will require more jackbooted thugs and more force to bring it to fulfillment than are currently at his disposal.

And, contrary to the fond hopes of some vocal atheists, faithful religious believers aren’t actually going away. In fact, they still survive in large numbers.

The battle lines are simply becoming clearer:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421860/america-religion-atheism-demographics-polarization

(Note the mention of the Mormons in the article to which I link above.)

I’m reminded of a passage from Stephen Webb, Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 144-145:

Before modernity, Christianity pretty much ruled the West, or at least it tried to. After modernity, Christianity became a matter of individual choice and personal taste. Religion was removed from the public sphere of shared values and collective history and thus demoted to the private sphere of family values and individual piety. When Christians enter the public square today, they are typically asked to leave their faith behind. In a way, modernity forcibly returned Christianity to its earliest days, since the Christian faith came of age as an illegal sect in imperial Rome. Christianity spread in large part due to persecution, and Christians were always at their best as martyrs rather than rulers.

In other words, the era of strong state and social support for Christianity in general — and the time of relative respectability that Mormonism enjoyed throughout much of the twentieth century — may well have been an aberration and is almost certainly finished.

And, unpleasant though that may sometimes be, it could also offer some lasting (even eternal) benefits.

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia

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