Governments do not simply encounter religious beliefs and teachings, they also do and seek (without always admitting it) to shape and manage them, their content, and their development. A recent reminder: Hillary Clinton was in the news recently when she said, in a speech, that “deeply seated religious beliefs” “will have to be changed” in order to secure broader abortion rights and access to reproductive health care and contraception.
Another: this story (“China orders Muslim shopkeepers to sell alcohol, cigarettes, to ‘weaken’ Islam”) shows a modern government seeking, for its own purposes, to weaken the hold of religious beliefs on its subjects by, in part, undermining those beliefs. Here’s a bit:
Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.
Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.
Both stories, it seems to me, are reminders that claims about government “neutrality” with respect to religion are as much aspirational as historical or descriptive. Governments care about religious beliefs and always have. Our constitutionally expressed hope is that we can meaningfully constrain our authorities from doing what, as authorities, they could be expected to do, i.e., manage the content of religion for their own purposes (which might, of course, be entirely good purposes).
It’s worth remembering, I think, that governments are not limited to heavy-handed tactics like China’s — licensing requirements, accreditation standards, spending conditions, and (as we have been reminded recently) tax exemptions are also available to good, liberal, constitutional governments. I explored this idea, a decade or so ago,