Will Biden Stand Up For Secularism?
“Biden threatened with communion ban over position on abortion” ran a headline from The Guardian on 6/19/2021. For those unfamiliar with the story, here is what The Guardian reported:
Roman Catholic bishops in the US have voted to press ahead with moves that could result in Joe Biden being banned from receiving communion because of his stance on abortion, and that risks increasing tensions in a divided church.
After three days of online debate, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted by three to one to draft new guidance on the Eucharist. The unexpected strength of support for the move among the bishops was a rebuff to the Vatican, which had signaled its opposition.
Of course, abortion has long been the number-one issue of the religious right since abortion entered public debate in the 1950s. Jerry Falwell, the famous Baptist Pastor who was an icon of the religious-right from the 1980s until his death in 2007 and one of the two people who founded the Moral Majority in June 1979, once mentioned the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade — which made abortion legal nationwide — as the m oment he decided to become a political activist. (Mind you, Falwell had been preaching politics in his local church as early as the 1950s when he was speaking out against the Civil Rights Movement, but that’s another topic.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, both President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President turned President George Bush (the second of whom started his political career pro-choice and remained that way until the mid-1970s) both talked about abortion all throughout their careers. In 1983, Ronald Reagan even published a book — making him the only sitting President to publish a book while in office — titled Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation which argued in favor of the pro-life position on abortion.
Mind you, Joe Biden is pro-life. And I don’t even mean in the sense that he’s voted in favor of abortion restrictions, although he has (in 1981 he voted to allow states to overturn Roe v. Wade and in 2003 he voted for the ban on Partial Birth Abortion), I mean in the sense that he is openly opposed to the idea of abortion. In 2006, Joe Biden said the following about abortion:
I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy, and I think that it should be rare and safe, and I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions. There ought to be able to have a common ground and consensus as to do that.
Joe Biden does not like abortion, but he also believes that it’s not his place — nor is it the place of any government official — to ban it. He views it as the woman’s choice, he also views it as a bad choice on the part of the woman. Even if you disagree with his position on abortion — maybe you believe abortion should be legally prohibited, for example — it is still dishonest to classify him as not “pro-life.”
Mind you, Biden has done a number of things to expand abortion access at home and abroad — one of the first things he did was re-repeal the Mexico City policy which Trump put back in place, for example. However, once again, that’s because Joe Biden believes that it’s not his place to stop a woman from getting an abortion — especially through tactics like law. Joe Biden views having an abortion as a horrible choice, but he also thinks that women have the right to make that horrible choice.
This is because, despite the many first-hand accounts of Joe Biden showing him to be a deeply religious man, Joe Biden wants to govern a free and secular nation. Back in May, Joe Biden got into a minor scandal because of his omission of the word “God” from his speech given to the National Prayer Breakfast. While some could say this is Biden being clueless about what’s going on around him, reading what insiders have written about Joe Biden makes it clear that this is something Biden had to go out of his way too do. Compare the information above to this quote from a recent The Washington Post article about Biden’s faith:
Biden is arguably the most observant president in decades, and his faith is a core part of his identity. He rarely misses Mass. He crosses himself in public. He quotes scripture, he cites hymns, and he clutches rosary beads ahead of key decisions.
Thomas Jefferson once told a story about just how dedicated George Washington was from keeping his religion from the public. In it, you can clearly see the kind of man Joe Biden wants to be:
When the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However [Dr. Rush] observed the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. Rush observes he never did say a word on the subject in any of his public papers except in his valedictory letter to the Governors of the states when he resigned his commission in the army, wherein he speaks of the benign influence of the Christian religion.
The founders of our nation took their decision to keep religion out of politics very seriously. Both Washington and Jefferson (Jefferson being the one who coined the phrase “wall of separation between church and state”) never discussed their specific religious views in public. In fact, in an 1817 letter to John Adams, Jefferson said that he would never talk about such a thing in public, even to a biographer:
One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was “say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.”
Meanwhile, John Adams, who did make his very Christian religious views public, still knew that it was not his job as a statesman to promote them through law. In 1798, Adams signed a treaty specifically stating that the United States is in no way based off of the Christian religion.
In fact, to give you an idea how non-religious a group our founding fathers were, Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense which is considered to be one of the main inspirations for the American Revolution, was an atheist. His book The Age Of Reason, published in 1794, was the first real book promoting atheism of its time. Paine was still friends with many of the founding fathers, George Washington included, because, once again, all of these men understood that their religion should not be the major thing determining their politics, especially in the secular nation they created.
Joe Biden is not interested in making a big show about his religion, just looking at how Biden acts in private compared to how Biden acts in public should prove that. Truth be told, the only reason we even know what Biden’s religious views are is because the media seems so dedicated to reminding us he has them. It took until 1/23/2021 — not even a week after Biden entered office — for The New York Times to write an article telling us that:
President Biden is perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century. A different, more liberal Christianity grounds his life and his policies.
Why the media is so obsessed with reminding us that President Biden is Catholic is a mystery I still have not solved. Obviously, The New York Times would never run such a fawning piece about the religions of a hypothetical President Mike Huckabee (who went so far as to say that we should change the Constitution to match the Bible during his 2008 Presidential Campaign), Rick Santorum, or Ted Cruz. Back when George W. Bush was President, any mention of his religion was always in reference to his mild theocratic tendencies (or in mockery of his repeated claim that it was God himself who told Bush to invade Iraq), and never once did The New York Times print a profile showing Bush’s religion in a positive light. When Mike Pence was Vice President, we were told his religion (he’s also a Catholic) was evidence that, if he got the chance, he’d turn America into a theocracy not unlike what was written about in The Handmaid’s Tale. (A common form of protest against any religious-right policy during the Trump administration quickly became women dressing up in the red bonnets they would be forced to wear assuming they lived in that fictional world.) In October 2020, we were told that Amy Coney Barrett’s political views being based on her Catholicism was evidence she should be disqualified from holding office, now we’re being told that it’s wonderful that President Biden’s Catholicism is the basis for his politics.
Joe Biden should really start asking the media — specifically The New York Times, although they’re far from the only ones — why they care so much about his religion. In a secular country — which the United States is supposed to be — what Joe Biden’s religious views are is supposed to matter as much as the type of dog he owns. Joe Biden promised in his Inaugural Address that he was going to govern for everyone — not just Republican or Democrat, but also Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Scientologist, or Atheist.
If Joe Biden does not stand up for secularism, regardless of if it’s under attack from religious Catholics or liberal media, theocracy could very well take over the United States. Joe Biden may be a Catholic, but if he has proven one thing over his first half-year in office, that does not mean that he cannot be the person who stands up to those who wish to force their religion on the American public.
