Religious Freedom Vs. Terrorism

Ever since it happened, I've gone back in my mind to a debate round I had a couple years back. It included me explaining to my opponents and my judge that the reason for the separation of church and state in the First Amendment was not just to protect the government from religion. It was also to protect religion from the government. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island as a colony of complete religious freedom. Church of England, Catholic, whatever deviant Puritanism the next guy wanted was allowed in that tiny speck of land. (Pardon the lack of citation past "AP US History class, 11th grade".) Whenever this section of the BoR comes up, I remember the round. The opponents refused to believe me. They were wrong.

So now the NYTimes tells us that books on faith are being removed from prisons, because of fears of terrorism.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Let's ignore the blatant and horribly bigoted conflation of Islam and terrorism. Its so audacious that these two sentences are enough to explicitly condemn that level of hatred and b.s.

Instead, lets enjoy a Bush administration that spent its first term so keen on faith based initiatives, an administration that then failed to give any money to any non-Christian groups in its first years, is now removing religion from prisons. Taking away faith and all its positive attributes from men and women who need those beliefs more than most is like claiming that those faith based programs could work too well. If its all or nothing in prisons, I think it should be all or nothing with other programs.

Please also note that our prisons already have safe guards:

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

This is more filtering than where our public money goes when the Faith Based Initiative people decide how to allocate cash to churches.

And for a last note, lets enjoy the politics influencing the religious options of people. The lists in question are the permitted books:

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists belie their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.”

Heaven forfend some prisoner, fighting addiction to alcohol or a drug or something else, tries to learn more about where the serenity prayer comes from. Niebuhr: most likely theologian to inspire violence ever.

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