The Temptation of Theocracy

By Thomas Coffin

We are in the midst of an election cycle, and once again are witnessing the spectacle of politicians and Church officials forming an unholy alliance to sway Christians with promises that Church-endorsed candidates will make religious doctrine the law of the land. This is a Faustian bargain that clashes both with the Constitution and the Church’s own religious principles

The religious doctrine that is the centerpiece of this alliance concerns the moral question of when an embryo in the womb becomes a human life. The Church teaches that human life begins at the moment of conception. This doctrine emanates from thousands of years of philosophical/religious discussions reaching back to the time of Aristotle. Much of the conversation has revolved around the concept of “ensoulment”, or when the fetus became “animated” with a human soul. Theories varied from the moment of conception to progressive stages described as vegetative soul, animal soul, and finally a rational (human) soul. Despite its inability to pinpoint the stage at which ensoulment occurs, the Church has consistently maintained that the fetus should be considered a human life from the moment of conception.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2nd ed. sets forth its doctrine as follows:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his(sic)existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person—among which is the inalienable right of every being to life.

The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation...

As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child’s rights.

A Jesuit scholar, Thomas Rausch has written:

Although the Church has not determined officially when human lif actually begins, it has taken the course of maintaining that human life is present from the moment of conception or fertilization.

Catholicism in the Third Millenium (2003)

The New Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes Church teaching this way:

The doctrine acknowledges that we do not know when the embryo, which is a human being, becomes a human person, [but] probabilism may not be used where the life of a human person may be involved and so the human being must be treated as a person from conception.

The point is this: the Church itself acknowledges that the stage at which the embryo or being becomes a person is unknown, but that nonetheless moral principles mandate protecting the embryonic life form from the moment of conception.

I have briefly set forth this doctrinal backdrop because it is in this context that one must analyze the agenda of incorporating this religious precept into secular law.

The 1st Amendment of our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but also prohibits the establishment of religion by the government. Thomas Jefferson described the anti-establishment clause as “a wall of separation between Church and State.” We enjoy the right to choose and practice our religion but have no right to compel others to adhere to our religious tenets through the mechanism of secular or State law.

During the more than two centuries since the Constitution was adopted, there has been much litigation over the tension between the freedom of religion and anti-establishment clauses. Erection of crosses on public land and the denial of medical care to children by parents who believe in faith-healing are two examples of the myriad issues to come before the courts. It is not my intent in this article to plumb deeply into the jurisprudence spawned by Jefferson’s “wall”. Nor is it my intent to debate the merits of moral or religious doctrines. Freedom of religion clearly allows the Church to promulgate its tenets and hold its followers to its doctrine. But when the Church engages in a political movement advocating that the government adopt and enact those tenets into State law enforcing them on all of the people, that agenda clearly implicates the anti-establishment clause.

Here, the political agenda of the Church includes passage of laws criminalizing actions which conflict with the religious doctrine that “life begins at conception.” Indeed, its Catechism holds that civil law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of this doctrine. Women undergoing procedures and doctors performing procedures which are not in conformity with this doctrine would be expressly subject to imprisonment and other sanctions. Yet no one under our Constitutional system of governance should be incarcerated or otherwise punished for refusing to believe in or adhere to a religious doctrine that is not universally accepted by society. Especially is this so where that doctrine is premised on a theorem that is incapable of objective certitude. The doctrine that an embryo must be regarded as a human person from the moment of conception is based on faith, not science, as I have previously noted. The Church essentially concedes as much. To make such a precept the law of the land and to prosecute those who do not share that belief and act in ways contrary to it breaches the wall separating Church and State. It would represent the rebirth of the theocratic model of governance that featured persecutions and religious wars among nations throughout the Middle Ages and the periods preceding the birth of our country. The Founders inserted the anti-establishment clause into the Bill of Rights to bar exactly such commingling of religion and government. By teaching that civil law must conform to its doctrine in this regard the Church is failing to recognize the limits imposed on its authority by the anti-establishment clause. Ironically, the purported reach of its doctrine into mandatory enactment of legislation enforcing it by the State leads to the issue being raised of whether a Catholic judge could be conflicted from presiding over cases challenging the constitutionality of the legislation.

This movement entangling religion and politics also presents a fair question as to whether such an alliance is even consistent with other moral precepts within the Church itself which are being sacrificed in order to attain the goal of enacting State law to enforce the abortion precept. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a lifelong Catholic with 75 years (and counting) as a Church member. To say the least, I am sorely perplexed at what has all the appearances of a ringing endorsement of Donald Trump and the Republican Party by high-ranking prelates of the Church, most prominently Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. Incredibly, the endorsement touts Trump and his Party as “pro-life” solely because of their political position regarding the cause of legislating Catholic doctrine on abortion and incorporating it as the law of the State. This application of the pro-life label is truly Orwellian in view of the ever-mounting cruel and inhumane actions being taken by the Trump administration, with virtually unanimous support by his Party, against the most vulnerable and needy people in our midst. Refugees seeking asylum from persecution at our borders are vilified as “vermin” and “snakes”. Their children are torn from them and placed in detention camps. Parents are deported without their children, and children are deported without their parents. Volunteers who save lives by placing water jugs and food in harsh, barren deserts at the border are prosecuted for their actions. Social welfare programs that function as safety nets for the poor with food, housing, and health care are slashed in favor of ever more tax cuts for the wealthiest donors and constituents of the Party. Children are murdered in their schools in mass shootings because the Party favors arms industry profits and their political donations over the lives of these children. And perhaps the most callous of all disdain for life is reflected in the administration and Party’s obtuse disregard of science to favor its economic and political policies in its reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic and the threat to all human life presented by climate change. Thus, warnings about the pandemic were ignored to prevent stock losses on Wall Street, and now medical experts and science are ignored and businesses reopened to shore up the economy to enhance Trump’s re-election odds.

As I write this, the country leads the world in deaths from Coronavirus (approaching 100,000 and rising) which the president described as a “badge of honor”. Climate change effects will affect all life on the planet with even greater losses of life, threatening extinction of the human species and condemning our posterity to an increasingly hostile and uninhabitable environment. Yet rather than heed the virtually unanimous consensus of climatologists and other scientists and take measures to reverse climate change, the president and his Party describe it as a hoax, ignore it, and eliminate restrictions on carbon emissions which are the cause of climate change. This is what it means to be “pro-life”? What myopic vision afflicts the Church’s definition of this term?

I recently received a copy of a mailing from the CatholicVote organization, a supposedly non-partisan PAC that purports to speak for the Church and which essentially advocates for Republican candidates. The pamphlet features a photograph of Cardinal Dolan and quotes him as describing the Democrat Party as a “socialist Party of Death that has slammed the door on Catholics, our Faith, and our Church!” I have to question the judgment of a high-ranking prelate of the Church who engages in such hyperbolic political rhetoric and allows his image to be used on the face of the pamphlet, designed to pressure Catholics to think that the Republican Party is an extension of the Catholic Church or that to be a good Catholic one must vote for the Republican candidate. This is nothing less than a blatant mixing of religion with politics—a union that is the essence of theocracy. There is more than a hint within the pamphlet that this alliance is a bad bargain for the Church and a betrayal of its mission to care for the poor among us, as it mentions that among the evils of Democrats is the threat of “Medicare for All that will bankrupt the nation... “. In a transpose of issues that rivals a magic sleight of hand, the abortion issue is somehow linked with universal health care to urge Catholics, with Cardinal Dolan’s blessing, to scuttle the prospect of a Democratic administration securing affordable health coverage for all (funded, of course, by repealing the tax cuts for the wealthiest who most definitely won’t go bankrupt). Ironically, this demonizing of universal health coverage comes at a time when its necessity to preserve lives has been amply demonstrated by the current pandemic crisis. This is Catholic messaging? Did the Cardinal make any attempt to probe the veracity of the contents of this pamphlet before signing off on it? There seems to be little recognition that the Church, at the highest level in the United States, has been coopted and is being used by an administration that in reality has no belief in or commitment to the core values of the social justice values and teachings of the Church.

In closing, I am reminded of the account in the gospel about the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the desert, where he took Jesus atop a mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, offering him rule over them if he would bow down before the Devil. Christ refused and ordered him to depart. What does the Church not grasp from that passage? The bargain it is making is not only in conflict with the Constitution, but with the Gospel. The Church is assenting to oppression of the poor, the weak, the infirm, the refugee, the sick, and the “lepers” of the modern day in exchange for the promise of worldly power to enforce its doctrine. When did Christ ever tell his disciples to bargain with Herod to issue an edict to enforce the Gospel? To the contrary, Christ repeatedly said his kingdom was not of this world. The Church should be calling people to its teachings by preaching and exemplifying the gospel, not succumbing to the temptation of theocracy and trying to codify it through a Devil’s bargain.