It seems like the rest of the Western world has answered the question of religion. England, Italy, Germany and France, themselves the ancient seats of one brand of Christianity or another, have slaughtered each other under the auspice of religion for nearly 10 centuries. Though an old statistic, it is worth repeating; these same countries have almost no church attendance. They’ve killed each other over it too much. Sure, things like the English Civil War were caused by economic changes like the rising middle class — but it was the Protestant Reformation and religious ideology that moved men to pick up the weapons.
   
 The Anglican church, or Church of England, is still sponsored by the state (yes, completely by tax payer dollars), yet about 2 percent of the population regularly attends. Religion in England is a cultural relic; its sponsorship by the state is written in stone to this day. America has a reported attendance of 43 percent, and the foundation of our country also has something definite to say about religion: Under no circumstances will the state have anything to do with it, aside from assuring the freedom of its pursuit.
    
Yet there looms the de facto political reality that we’re all too aware of: the skewing of religion’s role in politics, due most directly to the exploitation of voter demographics, that’s responsible for the most controversial cultural issue of our time despite the clear role that is written in our Constitution. What causes every “true” Republican to feel justified in not just subverting, but entirely blocking out, the portion of our constitution that demands religious freedom? Maybe one’s own subjective cultural beliefs are thicker than patriotism. Not as catchy as blood is thicker than water, but it’ll do.
    
The open contempt for one clause in the Constitution might seem like a valid stance that doesn’t necessarily reject America’s founding document as a whole. Unfortunately, the clause containing the separation of church and state prevents such convenient selectivity, such a la carte interpretation:
    
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
    
To reject the first clause of this amendment is to undeniably reject it as a whole.
    
England, whose religious intolerance motivated the intellectual founders to yearn for religion to be a political non-issue, has culturally “outgrown” strong religious identity as a culture despite its continued legislative bias. America, intended from day one to be free from religion’s infinitely biasing effect on the functions of government, especially for the purpose of party manipulation, is now far more religiously biased and intolerant than England — a grand irony, and a testament to maddening complexities of culture and the failure of government sponsored religion in the modern day.
    
We can’t ignore the success that is the free market of religion. From the wording in the First Amendment, the founders themselves craved a freedom from religion as much as the freedom to pursue it. But they were the governors, the “elitists” of their time. The colonists that continued to pump into America had a much different perspective; in a way, it was they, in their new, huge environment, who preserved the religious intensity that continues to demand treasonous political inclusion.
    
The Republican Party has transformed its campaigning process to exploit this strong cultural identity: exploit, because it actually does nothing to support Christianity besides claiming a general solidarity with them. It’s all quite rhetorical.  Why? Besides the First Amendment, Christianity operates on a cellular level — there are simply too many brands that don’t have a strong enough bond. There’s nothing monolithic about it.
    
American Christianity itself has no consensus. The Old Testament can only really be understood in the cultural context of ancient Judaism; capitalism itself ignores the fourth commandment — keep sacred the holy Sabbath — by working on Sunday (well, Saturday). What does the Bible demand of people who work on the Sabbath? Death (Exodus 31:15), same as the other commandments, because “thou shalt not kill” meant don’t kill your fellow Jews unprovoked. Without the possibility of one literal translation there can be no consensus. And good luck getting people to focus literally on the New Testament; it takes a real “liberal” interpretation of Jesus’ teachings for them to complement conservative economics. There’s just no excuse for promoting a cultural identity at the scale it’s being done. There is no controversy. It’s a direct attack on the only thing ensuring America’s theoretical moral superiority.


— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.