Expelling the Quakers from Plymouth

Last updated on: February 25, 2011 at 10:29 pm by Fred Clark

Expelling the Quakers from Plymouth 2011-02-25T22:29:01-05:00 Fred Clark

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Here’s the exact quote from Southern Baptist Hierarchy spokesman Richard Land on Thursday on NPR’s All Things Considered, discussing the Obama administration’s announcement that it will no longer fight to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.

Every time the people have had an opportunity to vote on it, they have voted to defend marriage as between a man and a woman. And so they [same-sex marriage proponents] have had victories among the elites in the court system, but they have not had any victory with the people.

Implicit in this is a notion of democracy that we’ve encountered again and again among American evangelical Christians attempting to engage in politics. It is the idea that democracy means everything is subject to the will of the majority — including the rights of minorities, which therefore aren’t rights at all, merely privileges permitted or withheld by the sentiment of the majority. It is, bluntly, the idea that democracy is just a fancy word for mob rule.

We see this in things like the absurd annual ritual of the so-called “war on Christmas” and in a thousand similar obsessive resentments of imagined offenses. We see it in the ugliness of the anti-mosque movement. We see this in the fear that equality under the law for GLBT people will somehow constitute an infringement of the religious liberty of those who regard homosexuality as a sin (this despite the hard-to-miss fact that Fred Phelps remains free to say whatever vile things he wishes, whenever and wherever he wishes). We see it in the aggressive sectarian impulse to piss on trees and mark territory by erecting officially sanctioned sectarian holiday displays or Ten Commandments plaques or official prayers and other ostentations of sectarian allegiance.

What’s driving all of this is the conception that this is how democracy works — that if the Christian majority does not impose its hegemonic sway over others, then those others may arise to impose their sectarian sway over Christians. They don’t believe in religious freedom per se. I don’t mean that they’re opposed to it, but that they don’t even understand the idea. They don’t seem to realize even that it is an option.

When you think of democracy as whatever the majority wants — unlimited by any guarantee or protection of the rights of minorities — then you are in a fight to impose your will over that of others.

This misunderstanding, this missing of the point, has a long pedigree among Christians on this continent. The early pilgrims, schoolchildren are taught, came to the New World in order to be able to worship freely, in the manner they chose. That much is true, but for a great many of those settlers seeking religious freedom, that freedom was still conceived as a zero-sum prize that could be rewarded to one and only one group in any given society. If they were being denied the freedom to exercise their Puritan Protestantism in their former lands, they would come here and establish a colony in which everyone else would be forced to worship the way they did. Then, they thought, they would be “free.”

For more than a century, that idea was what many colonials in many parts of what is now the United States meant by “religious freedom.” The competing notion — the idea that won the argument and became enshrined in the Constitution and the laws of this nation — was that religious freedom is not a prize reserved exclusively for the winners, but a right that cannot be denied to anyone regardless of whether they chose to worship like the majority. Under this idea, it doesn’t matter if you are a minority of one — you still enjoy the same freedom, the same rights, protections and guarantees, as everyone else.

It’s astonishing to hear the spokesman for America’s largest Baptist association speak in a way that demonstrates he utterly fails to understand this. But at least it helps us to understand the fear that motivates him and his subjects in the no-longer-Baptist Southern Baptist Hierarchy.

If you don’t understand religious freedom — don’t understand that the rights of minorities are guaranteed as vigorously and undeniably as the rights of majorities — then you live in perpetual fear of losing your own religious freedom. And the only way to defend it is by going on the offensive — attacking everyone who doesn’t worship the way you do, whether they be gays or secular humanists or Muslims, Mormons, pagans, Jews, Quakers, mainline Protestants or actual Baptist Baptists.

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