Religious convictions and gay marriage law: Two issues, not one

Should a religious conviction be a good reason for voting one way, rather than another?

In the gay marriage debate, we often here refrains like: “As a devoted Christian (or person of faith), I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and so I oppose same-sex marriage”. Such statements can make it seem that particularly devout religious people have special reason to vote NO, once they ascertain that their scriptural and religious authorities dictate that marriage is between a man and a woman.

But this misses the point that there are at least two issues of moral and religious conviction in play here, not one.

What does my religion say about marriage and homosexuality?

The first question is the obvious one that springs to mind. Presuming for the sake of argument that I am a religious devotee, I will of course want to enquire into what my religion (and my interpretation and understanding of that religion) says about marriage in general, and homosexuality in particular.

Now I am not a theologian, or any sort of expert on scripture, religious authority (like the papacy) or religious interpretation. So for our purposes here, let’s simply accept that I (as a devoted religious citizen) can – on the basis of a reasonable interpretation of my religion’s commandments – decide that my religion forbids same-sex marriage.

This decision about what religious authority requires will have obvious implications for my own actions. For one thing, it will impact powerfully upon what I will do in my own personal life. Obviously, I will have strong reason to not get married to a same-sex partner. Also, I will probably want to encourage my friends, and educate my children, to follow the same religious convictions.

As well as these ramifications for my own personal behaviour, my religious convictions will also have political relevance. Most importantly, I will not want the law to prevent me having these convictions, speaking about them, and acting upon them. That is, I will want to protect my freedom of religion to follow the dictates of my God and my tradition. This does not mean that 'anything goes' in terms of how I can treat others, but it certainly does provide an important reason for me to ensure the law provides room for me to act upon my religion’s commandments in my own personal life. (In a later post, we will talk about the implications here for conscientious objection.)

What does my religion say about the relationship between religion and law?

There is another, further way my religious convictions might turn out to have political implications. Having decided that my religion says that marriage is between a man and a woman, I might vote in order to ensure that this understanding of marriage is reflected in law.

This is a very different application of my religious views. Why? Because in this case, I am no longer using my faith to determine how I will live my life, but using my faith to determine how others will live their lives. The religious articles of faith I possess are now impacting on the law that coercively governs all citizens, including those of different sects, different religions, and the un-religious.

While in my personal life, I could move more or less immediately from an evaluation about my religion’s requirements to a decision about how I should act, in the case of democratic voting, the move is not straightforward.

The reason this move is not straightforward is that my religion, and my commitments to my religion, may also give rise to powerful reasons to resist imposing my religious views on others through the force of law.

Three considerations about the relationship between religion and law

There are three types of reasons my religion might give me pause before I vote on the basis of my religious convictions.

The separation of church and state

The first reason is that my religion might itself declare that there should be a gap between church and state, and that the former should govern our personal, spiritual lives, and that the latter – in having charge of our social and interpersonal lives – should be based upon secular (or at least non-sectarian) principles. Consider, in this light, Jesus’ command to, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Now of course it goes without saying that all religious quotes are subject to varying interpretations, but I think it is fair to say that at least one sensible interpretation of this saying is that there is an important distinction between the temporal and the spiritual spheres, and that our political decisions may rightly include consideration of temporal factors and issues that we do not need to consider in our personal and spiritual affairs.

It should be pretty clear that if there is to be a distinction between church and state, then this cannot be realized if we live in a democracy where everyone votes simply as if their own religion’s dictates should apply to everyone. If there are enough voting Catholics to take control of both the upper and lower houses of parliament, then (in such a world) the entire society can be required to eat fish on Fridays, to criminalize homosexuality, to be punished for blasphemy, and all the rest. The distinction between church and state will exist in name only. The fact that this doesn’t happen (even in cases where religions command a strong majority) is because many religious people acknowledge a distinction between the temporal and spiritual fields.

Tolerance and social peace

The second type of reason is that my religion may say things about tolerance, and about social harmony, that give me pause before imposing my views upon others. If my religion says that other views should be respected, and that non-religious people should be persuaded, and not forced, into religious practice, then this will affect the way I vote on such matters. Similarly, my religion might speak a lot about the importance of social harmony and peacefulness. If I think that forcing other people into religious practices they do not themselves accept is a sure recipe for internecine divisions and sectarian conflict, then this will shape how I contribute to political decision-making on the basis of my religious convictions.

These were the sorts of lines of reasonings that led John Locke – the 17^th Century political philosopher and devout Protestant – to mount some of history’s most powerful and influential arguments for religious tolerance in his Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke did not laud religious toleration, and a separation of church and state, despite his religious convictions – he did it because of his religious convictions.

The right to freedom of religion

The third type of reason recalls the importance (mentioned above) of my being able to act on the basis of my own religious convictions – and therefore of my right to freedom of religion. When my own co-religionists are in the majority in a democracy, I might not perceive any tension between my religious liberties and the practices the majority enshrines in law. But demographic shifts are possible, and so too are changes in people’s religious convictions. If the majority comes to hold a different religious view to mine, then I might suddenly perceive a very powerful tension between democratically made law and my own religious liberties.

For this reason, in order to protect my (and my family’s) religious freedoms, I might be better placed in trying to ensure that no-one’s particular religious views can be enshrined in the law. True, I lose the benefit of seeing others conform to my religion’s view about proper practices. But if I am (and those who think like me are) successful in safeguarding all citizens’ freedom from having religious practices and institutions imposed upon them, then I guarantee my own religious freedoms even in a future scenario where another group commands a democratic majority. The constraint imposed upon me when my group held a majority opinion becomes a freedom granted to me when I hold a different view. That, after all, is how rights work.

What should we conclude?

I am not here providing any sort of definitive moral (much less religious) case that these three types of reasons are decisive in the gay marriage debate. Whether that will be true or not depends on the specific religion in question.

What I am arguing is that a religious devotee deciding about how to vote on gay marriage is – by the very nature of that vote – coming to a stand on all of these three types of reasons. For devoutly religious people, simply considering what the religion says about gay marriage is far too narrow an engagement with their religious scriptures and authorities. It is also essential to consider what the religion says about the relationship between church and state, what the religion says about tolerance and social harmony, and what the religious community thinks about the importance of protecting rights of freedom of religion.

So when providing a full justification or explanation of how they voted, religious devotees should appeal not only to the passages in the scriptures that set down the church’s stance on marriage and homosexuality – but also to appeal to what the religion says about these three further and very significant factors.

None of this should be very surprising

In other contexts, the types of reasons I have been discussing here are routinely accepted by devoutly religious people. Religious devotees may well possess deeply-held and unshakable convictions about proper eating, clothing, cleanliness, sexuality, worship, charitable giving, and so on. But they do not suppose that, on the basis of these views, they should agitate and vote for laws that will bind those people who do not share their religion. They allow others outside their religion to legally do things that are sinful according to their revealed law. These sinful but non-criminal acts would include, for example, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, use of contraception, atheism, apostasy, blasphemy and so on and on.

In many respects, for all these above-noted sins, it just seems common-sense to think that the law should not follow the idiosyncratic dictates of a particular religion. But for some reason, religious devotees, and even religious authorities, seem not to apply the same sorts of considerations about political and legal decision-making to the issue of gay marriage.

Conclusion

My aim has not been to show that it is wrong to incorporate religious thinking into one’s political decision-making. In fact, I have been arguing the very reverse. I have suggested that it is wrong to apply only a superficial and narrow engagement with one’s religion into political decision-making. In decisions that affect other people, and the laws that govern them, many different religious-based considerations matter, and warrant careful reflection.

(This post is one in a series, looking at the arguments in the gay marriage debate.)
   

What relativism isn’t

Moving from a pure philosophy environment to the social sciences and law can be a disconcerting experience. One of the first things that I had to get my head around is the significance of relativism and postmodernism in these domains. Of course, both relativism and to a lesser extent postmodernism are found in philosophy departments, but they do not amount to orthodoxy. Then there was the perplexing assumption that, because I am a philosopher, I must be a relativist or postmodernist. The idea that one could have deep-seated philosophical reservations about these positions was not one they had hitherto confronted in any sustained way. Finally, there was the issue of what exactly they thought relativism amounted to. It seems to me there can be a lot of confusion about this question, and it is the one I want to discuss today.

The title of this blog echoes an excellent 1998 article by William Max Knorpp, Jr., which I highly recommend. However, Knorpp’s treatment is quite technical and at points heavy going, and so I think the basic points are worth explaining and augmenting in a more informal manner.

Here goes:

To begin, relativism is roughly speaking the view that some (perhaps all) facts, truths or claims are relative to a particular standpoint, person or society. It is contrasted with objectivism, which holds that facts, truths and claims can be true or false in an objective sense – that is, in some sense independently of the perspective taken. They are true or false because of how the world actually is, and not (merely) because of how the world is understood by the person or community. An immediate complexity is, of course, that at least some facts are definitely relative. What counts as etiquette in a given society is plainly constructed by that society, and so any claims about proper polite behaviour must be relativized to a particular community. Equally, it is arguable that some facts must be objective – at the very least, one might think, the fact that all (other) truths are relative must itself be an objective fact, if relativism is to be accepted. If it is only a relative fact, then it does not foreclose the possibility that there really are objective facts out there, and the relativist is only telling us something about their own perspective and not something about facts in general. Potential paradoxes loom here, but these are not the focus of this blog. Here I only want to distinguish relativism, so understood, from a host of quite different views with which it can be confused, and which are sometimes (mistakenly) marshalled in support of it.

First, and most emphatically, relativism is not falliblism. Falliblism is the awareness that one’s beliefs may be mistaken, and is associated with having an open mind to weaknesses in one’s own position, and to the possibility that opposing positions or new perspectives may ultimately turn out to be correct. Far from fallibilism being opposed to objectivism, on the usual understanding fallibilism requires objectivism. The fallibilist is someone who is concerned that their beliefs may be mistaken – that they do not accord with the way the world actually is. The relativist has no such concern – the relativist is not worried their beliefs, or the beliefs of their society, may be false, because there is no test for falsity independent of their own perspective, or that of their society. It is impossible, for any given belief X, that they are wrong about X and another society is right in believing not-X, because there is no standard (such as an independently existing world) that for the relativist can substantiate such cross-cultural rightness and wrongness. Fallibilism is opposed to dogmatism, which is a fervent belief that one is right and a consequent unwillingness to consider criticism of one’s own views or the attraction of alternative perspectives. It is of course possible to be a dogmatist about one’s belief in objectivism (‘relativism is so patently false it is not even worth thinking about’), and equally about one’s belief in relativism (‘objectivism is sooo modernist and last century’).

The same follows for being critical. Relativism does not provide a standpoint with which our society’s values can rightly be judged. It denies the existence of any such standpoint. If we have relative-to-us values of critical thought, then we will of course use them. If not, then not. The person who rationally critiques her own views and her own society has her own relative values, and the person who blindly accepts everything his society tells them has his own relative views. Nothing more can be said by the relativist. Relativism provides no resources whatsoever for recommending the former over the latter, and no reason for the latter to think they should become more like the former.

Second, relativism is not scepticism. Scepticism about a belief is the view that we have important reasons to doubt that belief. Philosophical scepticism is of a stronger stripe than ordinary scepticism; it usually entails the view that we have important reasons to doubt widely accepted views about, say, the existence of the world or of other minds. Scepticism does not say that the truth of a belief is relative to the standard of the believer or her community, it says that the belief’s truth is unknowable. Scepticism has objectivist roots. It claims that there are objective standards about what justifies belief and that because these standards are not and cannot be met, we are required to doubt what hitherto were seen as common-sense beliefs. If standards for belief were relative, then scepticism would not be justified in any such blanket or over-arching sense. Each society would have different standards for belief, and some of them would be justified by their own standards in holding their beliefs.

Third, relativism is not pluralism. Pluralism is roughly speaking the position that diversity and individuality (of perspectives, ways of life, societies etc) are good things. On the ordinary understanding, pluralism is an objective moral viewpoint; it says that such diversity is, objectively speaking, something to be valued and facilitated. It says that, objectively speaking, very different life-plans are worthwhile, and that something profound would be lost if each person were cut to the same mould. John Stuart Mill is the best example of an objectivist (in this case a utilitarian) mounting a case for pluralism. But this is not to say that a relativist cannot be a pluralist. For instance, if Bob’s society happens to value pluralism, and has constructed it as a value for him, then Bob will be pluralist. There is however no conceptual link between relativism and pluralism. From the claim that all viewpoints are equally true and valid (because there is no over-arching objective standard from which to judge them) it does not follow that we ought to respect them all equally. No such over-arching ‘ought’ can possibly be justified by relativism because no over-arching ‘ought’ can be justified by relativism period. All that follows from relativism is that we will do what our relative values require of us. Perhaps we will be born and inculcated into a pluralist society, in which case we will be pluralist. Or perhaps we will be born and inculcated into Nazi Germany, in which case we will not.

Inter-relatedly, relativism is not about tolerance. Many undergraduates in ethics courses in my experience often say that we should be relativist because to do otherwise is to be intolerant (or arrogant, etc). It is hard to credit this argument. If tolerance is objectively a good thing, then the argument is contradictory, for it posits an objective value as a basis for believing a relativist conclusion. If tolerance is only relatively a good thing, then the argument simply begs the question, by implying a relativist conclusion through the assertion of a relativist premise.

In any case, from the fact that our views are not objectively correct it does not follow that we ought not impose them on others, forcefully if we desire. As observed above, no such over-arching ‘ought’ can be derived from relativism. We will act on our culturally-relative views because there is nothing else we can do. If those views are invasive, fundamentalist, belligerent and colonialist, then so be it. For the relativist there is no objective value of tolerance that stands in our way.

Inter-relatedly again, relativism is not necessarily a way of respecting the beliefs of other peoples and cultures. To be sure, relativism is an improvement on parochial dogmatism, which will aver that on every point of dispute, our culture is right and other cultures are wrong. But relativism still has something to say about the views of other cultures – namely, that they are relative to that culture. If the culture believes that X really exists, as an objective fact about the world, then the relativist will think the culture is mistaken in representing their beliefs as objectively true. For people from that culture, someone declaiming that no objective facts whatsoever exist may be perceived as far more demeaning than someone agreeing that objective facts do exist, but arguing that their specific belief in X is objectively wrong.

To conclude, none of this is to say that relativism is  wrong (objectively wrong?). The point is merely to be clear about what relativism is. All too often, fallibilist, sceptical or pluralist arguments are made, and then relativist conclusions appear. To the contrary, fallibilism, scepticism and pluralism are not only distinct from  relativism, they are often directly and conceptually linked to objective standpoints.