Democracy

Recently, a quote from an Obama speech has been floating around the internet. I'm not sure why it has become so popular all of a sudden since the speech was made in 2006, but I've seen it posted on Facebook multiple times in the last few days. Here is the text of the quote:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."-Barack Obama

Now, there is a sense in which I agree with President Obama. We will never be able to discuss issues effectively if my only reason for believing something is that the Bible says so and you don't believe that the Bible is truth. But that is about where my agreement ends, and in fact, this view that we hold in common leads me to a rather opposite view.

What I think Obama is missing here is what it means to be "religiously motivated". His speech assumes that my religion is a part of my life, a portion of my beliefs, that I can pay attention to or ignore as I will. But that is not the case, because in fact, my belief in the God of the Bible is the foundation for all my beliefs, and ideally every belief I hold stems from this underlying truth. Therefore, either my belief in the God of the Bible will be (explicitly or implicitly) involved in all of my political discourse, or I must recuse myself from politics entirely.

The real problem is this idea of "universal values". There simply is not such a thing. I suspect if there were, we would eventually be able to come to some sort of political consensus. But this is not possible, because my values are inherently "religiously motivated". I know no others. Similarly you, if you are not "religiously motivated", have a basic set of beliefs that your values come from that may not make sense to me. I suspect that even if we were able to find a set of values that every person in the United States could agree on, a person from Bangladesh would find them completely foreign. The idea of "universal values" as Obama means it here is a farce. We all have different assumptions that form our beliefs, and when we talk around them it makes it even harder for us to see eye to eye.

This is why I think that our discourse would be much more civil if we instead acknowledged these underlying assumptions. You will never understand my arguments unless you understand what belief system they flow out of; similarly, I will never understand your arguments unless I understand your underlying worldview. Instead of fleeing from any mention of religious beliefs in political discourse, I think that we should welcome the opportunity to understand more fully what is behind the beliefs of those with whom we disagree. It may not allow us to come to a consensus, but democracy requires no such thing. It will simply allow us to make sense to each other in a way that is quite impossible otherwise.

There are two other problems that I have with this quote, which I will deal with much more briefly. The first is this: I take great issue with the implication that religiously motivated concerns are not amenable to reason. With the assumptions that I hold, my belief system is rationally sound, and reasonable discourse can certainly be achieved within it. A claim to the contrary would imply lack of knowledge of the underlying assumptions, a problem which can be solved by allowing the underlying assumptions into political discourse, as I proposed above.

Lastly, the claim that removal of religious discourse is demanded by democracy seems to go against what the founding fathers of our country intended our democracy to be. From the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." If the very foundation of our democracy required a reference to the Creator, I find it odd to believe that our democracy demands that we avoid making any such reference. I like to believe that our democracy welcomes such discourse as a way of including each individual in the political process of this excellent nation.