November 20, 2000
Religious liberty liked as idea more than practice
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___HOUSTON--Americans support religious liberty as a concept but often are willing to restrict the religious liberty of others in practice, according to research by a political science professor.
___"There is widespread support for the idea of religious freedom as a symbol, but many Americans are quite willing to restrict the actual religious liberty of specific groups considered dangerous or strange," said Ted Jelen, professor of political science at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
___He made this assessment during a presentation on the persistence of church-state conflict given at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Houston.
___Americans might best be described as "abstract separationists" and "concrete accommodationists," he said.
___"Large majorities of respondents in opinion surveys in the United States endorse such concepts as a 'high wall' of separation between church and state," he reported. "However, many Americans also are supportive of particular public support for religion, such as organized school prayer, public displays of religious symbols (especially during the Christmas season) and the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
___"Many citizens of the United States appear to experience little tension between these attitudes," he added.
___Likewise, many Americans want rights for themselves they are not willing to grant others who hold different religious views.
___While professing to support religious liberty for all, "a great many Americans would deny so-called Moonies or Satanists the right to recruit among high school students or deny Native Americans the right to use hallucinogenic drugs as part of religious rituals," Jelen reported from his own research.
___The key to understanding these paradoxes is realizing most Americans have little exposure to "genuine religious diversity," he suggested.
___"In focus groups we conducted ..., we found many respondents favored various accommodationist practices, such as organized school prayer. However, we also found it was quite easy to persuade these respondents to switch to more separationist responses when we raised the issue of accommodating the religious beliefs of non-Christians such as Mulims or Hindus."
___For example, the idea of rotating a daily school prayer among members of different religious groups "was rejected with virtual unanimity" when respondents understood that Muslims or Buddhists might be included in the rotation, Jelen said.
___This dynamic is further illustrated by understanding that politicians who take the most strident stands on issues such as school prayer tend to be running for local or state offices rather than national offices, he continued.
___"American presidential candidates typically do not take strong positions on church-state issues and tend to confine themselves to pious generalities about the importance of religion in public life," he noted. This is because at a national level, candidates must appeal to a much more diverse constituency than candidates for a city's mayor, for example.
___And although most church-state cases hinge upon the U.S. Constitution--a federal document--most church-state cases revolve around local issues, Jelen said. "A very high percentage of church-state questions have dealt with elementary and secondary education, which is a policy area in which decentralized local control is a prized political value.
___"When local governments deal with issues such as Sabbath observances or school curricula, they are operating at an applied level, in which many citizens and some public officials are unaware of the possible relevance of a more general constitutional principle."
___The trend toward seeing church-state issues through the lens of one's own smaller community also impacts churches, Jelen said. Those who believe government ought to accommodate their form of religion tend to think they are in the majority because people of like mind congregate together at like-minded churches, he explained.
___For these and other reasons, church-state conflicts in the United States are not likely to diminish any time soon, Jelen predicted.
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