Religious Freedom Day and the Governor of Alabama

Sunday was Religious Freedom Day and, as Charles Haynes argues in his syndicated column, religious freedom is mainly in trouble around the world. See here. Despite the Court's infamous decision in Employment Division v. Smith, religion is relatively free in the United States. Nonetheless, there are some grounds for despair even in circumstances where the case for constitutional protection is problematic. As David Gibson reports in Politics Daily, Alabama's new governor Robert Bentley stated on Martin Luther King Day that he intended to be the governor of all the people, but if anybody had not accepted Jesus Christ as personal saviour, then you are "not my brother and not my sister." It would be difficult to fault those Jews and Muslims in Alabama who believe that they have been marked out as second class citizens.

Comments

[Michael Perry]

Here's a link to the story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_alabama_governor_christians

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thank the Lord that Jesus himself never became a Christian. In not a few of his teachings, exemplified in several of the parables, in the injunctions about loving one's enemies and loving one's neighbor as oneself, and in conjunction with the Golden Rule (at least as these are bound together in the Matthean Jesus), Jesus concentrates on the spiritual importance if not centrality of identifying oneself with others, beyond any of the conventional and sometimes invidious categories of his time and place that served to divide individuals from one other in ways contrary to Jewish ethics (as he understood same), categories associated with ethnicity, religious identification (especially when this did not coincide with proper ethical and spiritual praxis), gender, class, status, and so forth. Not a few of the self-proclaimed Christians in political office seem hell-bent on using their religious beliefs and expressing their faith in ways that make it harder for people to spontaneously or reflexively identify themselves with their fellow human beings. And it appears Jesus himself practiced what he preached, at least that's an axiomatic assumption of exemplary atonement doctrine. Were it that more Christians who make a public show of their faith embodied the consequences of taking seriously the notion of imitatio dei (as in Matt 5:48).