East Valley Tribune, AZ
September 20, 2008 – 7:04PM

The need to separate religion, politics

Sam Coppersmith, Commentary

While visiting a small Franciscan college last week, I toured a nearby
historic chapel with the college priest, who learned that I was headed
to a family funeral. While knowing I wasn’t a Catholic, he offered to
say a prayer for the rest of my relative’s soul.

I appreciated his gesture and took comfort. I also figured, what the
heck, it couldn’t hurt. But not everybody feels warm and fuzzy about
receiving a proffered benefit of another’s religious belief,
especially when you’re not asked first.

Take the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practice of
posthumous baptism, where LDS believers represent deceased non-Mormons
in a symbolic baptism (hence it’s also called vicarious or proxy
baptism).

Baptism is required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but under LDS
doctrine, the deceased have free agency, the power to accept or reject
the proxy baptism. From that perspective, posthumous baptism "couldn’t
hurt." Current LDS Church members can grant their ancestors and
relatives entrance to heaven. Yet each person, even after death, may
accept or reject the proxy baptism, so the ceremony isn’t binding in
any way.

But not everybody feels "it couldn’t hurt," and controversy erupted in
the 1990s with the discovery that LDS proxy baptisms included many
Jewish victims of the Holocaust, with some 380,000 Jews killed by the
Nazis appearing in LDS genealogical records. In 1995, the LDS Church
agreed to stop the practice for Holocaust victims where descendants
did not consent.

Jewish groups strongly objected, partly from the sad Jewish historical
experience with forced conversions, and partly from the special regard
that Jews have for Holocaust victims and survivors. If the victims
were killed solely for their religion, a posthumous conversion – even
one grounded in doctrinal free agency, to be accepted or rejected
voluntarily – could appear to rewrite the historical record.

Jewish groups aren’t alone in qualms about posthumous
baptism. Armenian Christian and Russian Orthodox leaders denounced the
practice, and earlier this year, the Vatican Congregation for Clergy
directed Catholic dioceses not to allow the LDS International
Genealogical Index to microfilm and digitize information in parish
registers. The Vatican wants to stop posthumous baptism of Catholics,
which spokesmen called "detrimental" and "unacceptable."

So sometimes when you think it couldn’t hurt, it actually does. I had
some readers who believe differently than I do offer to pray for me
because of last week’s column. One guy even seemed pretty sincere. But
it points out one pretty big difference between religion and politics,
and a problem for those who want more religion in politics: The whole
point of politics in a democracy is to argue about what’s best, but
with religion, you just can’t do that.

We can argue about whether the problem with health care is caused
because people aren’t faced with the economic consequences of their
choices, or if health care isn’t like other consumer goods because
people don’t respond that way to their own health and their
physicians. We can argue about whether we should bail out AIG and not
Lehman Brothers. But it’s hard to argue in any productive way about
whether my view of the non-divinity of Jesus is better than
yours. After all, listing certain dead people on a secret baptismal
list makes some who believe differently absolutely furious.

Religion is all about fundamental belief – and even bringing it up in
any discussion is an invitation for everybody to take offense. One
man’s pithy comment another man finds politically, and religiously,
incorrect. And why would we want more of that in politics?

So maybe the separation of church and state makes sense after
all. Those who took such umbrage at religious discussion, stated more
in terms of my beliefs than theirs, or of the precise religious
content of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, should think
long and hard about my overall argument against putting more religion
into politics.

And thanks to Prof. Mark Kleiman at UCLA, I now have a non-religious
way to make the same initial point: Martin Luther King was a community
organizer. George Wallace was a governor. Now pick your side of that
argument.

Sam Coppersmith, Democratic party activist and former member of the
U.S. House, can be reached at scoppersmith@cgsblaw.com.