When I posted Professor Bruce Ledewitz's description of his proposal for a "New Progressive Vision of Church and State," it received an (understandably) poor reception.

I held back from offering my own views at the time except to say that I disagreed, but would state my objections at the panel discussion of his proposal at Netroots Nation.  My prepared remarks are posted here -- so while Ledewitz has not, to my knowledge, posted his full proposal as presented at Netroots Nation, the video is available at the Netroots Nation web site.

(I was feeling a bit ill at the time of the panel, but managed to muddle on through. As it turns out, it was a harbinger of things to come.)

There was a fair amount of blogging about it at the time, notably at The Wall of Separation, Friendly Atheist, and Professor Ledewitz later wrote a report on the panel, which served as a jumping-off point for further "round-table" discussion hosted by the prominent webzine Religion Dispatches. Meanwhile that sound... you can still hear it...that sound that sounds like footsteps in the distance -- is the sound of strawman arguments, marching, marching.   Fellow church state separationists, light your torches!

The Pittsburgh City Paper ran a preview story about our panel in which I stated that Ledewitz's idea of getting the Supreme Court to define God (yes, he really wants to do that) to accommodate his particular notions of secular values was a poor idea, insulting to religious liberals and conservatives, as well as non-believers.  A week after our panel strawmen started to appear on the horizon at Ledewitz's blog Hallowed Secularism.

The first strawman marched into view right in the opening sentence of his blog post -- in which he goes on to talk about me. "

"I have run into a problem I did not expect: secularists accepting religious fundamentalism's definition of God."

Now of course, he did not define secularist, so I let that pass, but he did not explain how my definition of God is in anyway fundamentalist.  As a matter of fact, I did not define God at all.  As he knew from my panel presentation, I emphasize that we all have the right to define and understand God as we will (or not) thanks to the Constitution's unambiguous support for the right of individual conscience as expressed in Article 6, and clarified and amplified in the First Amendment.  The strawman here is the false characterization of my views as that of religious fundamentalism in an effort to invalidate my argument.

Torch that strawman!

The next squad of strawmen to march around the bend was this:

"Frederick Clarkson even quoted Chris Hedges in his own book denying that God means a supernatural being:  "God is a human concept.  God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world's chaos, randomness and cruelty. ...The question is not whether God exists.  The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence."

Why accept definitions of God propounded by people you don't agree with? Maybe to kill any possibility of rational religion."

The book Ledewitz is referring to is Dispatches from the Religious Left:  The Future of Faith and Politics in America, an anthology I edited last year, featuring 19 essays by 22 writers, including one by Chris.  I did not "quote" Chris.  I reprinted one of his essays; and not for the purpose of expressing agreement or disagreement with his ideas about God.  As I made clear in my introduction:

"participation in Dispatches does not necessarily imply agreement among the writers."

Ledewitz's insinuation that I want to "kill any possibility of rational religion" has no basis in fact.  And while I support his right to act on his fervent desire to evangelize atheists -- I disagree with his idea of enlisting the government to facilitate his campaign.

Torch those strawmen!!

But here is a quote from Hedges' essay that helps illuminate what is wrong with Ledewitz's approach.

"The problem is not religion, but religious orthodoxy. Most moral thinkers - from Socrates to Christ to Francis of Assisi--eschewed the written word because they knew, I suspect, that once things were written down they became, in the wrong hands, codified and used not to promote morality but conformity, subservience and repression.  Writing freezes speech.  George Steiner calls this "the decay into writing."  Language is turned from a living and fluid form of moral inquiry into a tool of bondage."

And that is the problem with Ledewitz.  He wants the Supreme Court to codify the definition of God.  Our fellow panelist Vic Walczak who heads the Pittsburgh ACLU described Ledewitz's idea as something that could open the door to "religious tyranny" or "theocracy."  And I agree.

As the wind wafts the smoke from these black piles of burnt straw back to their source, for the record, here is the entirety of my quote in the Pittsburgh City Paper article:

"If he was making a baloney sandwich, he used the whole package," says Clarkson, a Massachusetts-based independent journalist who specializes in politics and religion. "[Ledewitz's theory] is piled high with false premises."

Clarkson argues that Ledewitz's proposal is an "insult" to both liberals and conservatives. "Who is he to tell religious believers and non-religious believers what to believe about God?" he says.

Specifically, Clarkson takes umbrage with the Duquesne professor's desire to interpret religious language and symbols in universal terms, calling it "false religious universalism."

"I appreciate that [Ledewitz] is trying to solve a problem, but he's going about it the wrong way," says Clarkson. "He's saying, 'Hey, folks, let's have an interpretation that's convenient, so that we don't have to get mad about it.

"It's preposterous," he continues. "God means God. It doesn't mean 'universal values.'"