Religion vs. Liberty

America's war on terrorism is being undercut--by the administration's efforts to inject religion into politics.

Our enemy in that war is the ideology of Islamic totalitarianism--an ideology which holds that one's life is to be lived entirely in service to Allah, that the dictates of the mullahs must be unquestioningly obeyed and that jihad must be waged against all who refuse. Islamic totalitarianism, which pervades Muslim societies, is a sweeping repudiation of reason in favor of faith, and of freedom in favor of force. That is what makes it America's deadly enemy.

When reason is categorically abandoned, people can deal with one another only by force. People who accept reason as their sole means of knowledge can settle differences by persuasion; the one with facts and logic on his side will prevail. But if faith--i.e., the embrace of beliefs contrary to reason--is one's ruling principle, there is no peaceful way to resolve conflicts. There can be no appeal to facts, no logic, no rational arguments--there can be only the insistence that some non-provable belief be accepted. And what could back up that insistence other than fists or guns--or airplanes smashing into buildings?

Politically, if religious faith dominates, freedom will not be permitted. If the basic political goal is the secular one of defending individual rights, then each person has sovereignty over his life and is left free by the state to think for himself and to pursue his own values. But if the basic goal is to implement the will of some unfathomable deity, then the citizen cannot be allowed to exercise his own judgment and to challenge divine authority. The religionist believes there is no difference between the crime of, say, murder and the "crime" of uttering some religious heresy--both acts defy God's commandments and so must be punished. The demand for blind faith does not acknowledge the inviolability of man's rational mind.

This clash between faith and freedom is not confined to Islam. When medieval Christianity ruled the West, allowing no dissent from ecclesiastic doctrine, the Crusades and the Inquisition were part of the Church's "holy war" against its infidels. However, this despotism ended when the Enlightenment--which did not penetrate the Muslim world--demonstrated the power and the glory of the human mind, and entrenched reason over faith.

This philosophy led ultimately to the founding of the first free nation: America. At the time, religion had long been an integral part of government throughout the world, with monarchs reigning by "divine right." America's Founding Fathers, products and admirers of the Enlightenment, realized that a nation based on individual liberty had to remove religion's power. So they established the principle--the secular principle--of separation between church and state.

Obviously, there can be secular forms of unreason, which also lead to tyranny (such as Marxism, with its view that "tools of production" control the content of one's mind). Secularism is not a sufficient condition for freedom--but a necessary one. A proper, rational government is limited by the imperative not to violate individual rights. But the government envisioned by religionists--the one for which the Bush administration is laying the groundwork--has unlimited power, to be exercised whenever officials claim to be following divine orders.

Today's religionists want government to discourage research on embryonic stem cells, to promote the Biblical account of life's origins, to urge schoolchildren to pray. Why? Not because these are logically defensible, but because they supposedly represent God's will. The religionists want us to revert to a pre-Enlightenment age, when faith and force--the twin tools of Osama bin Laden and his fellow-jihadists--ruled.

In America, unlike most of the Muslim world, even the religious retain some respect for reason. They generally understand that religion should be a private matter and that church and state should be divorced. They would oppose, say, making the Bible America's official Constitution--as the Koran is officially Saudi Arabia's; they would oppose sentencing apostates to death--as Iran's criminal code demands. The extent to which reason prevails over faith is the extent to which freedom prevails over tyranny.

The presidential election should be taken as a mandate for defeating Islamic totalitarianism. Which means: destroying its practitioners, eliminating its state sponsors and renouncing its ideology of imposing religion by force. But if the election is taken as a mandate to bring faith into politics, America will be cultivating at home the very evil we are supposed to be fighting abroad.

Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute (ARI). All rights reserved.

Peter Schwartz, author of The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest, is a distinguished fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead