Madison's Music by Burt Neuborne

Author:Burt Neuborne [Neuborne, Burt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970539
Publisher: New Press, The

THE DARKER SIDE OF DIVINE MADNESS

The two religious conscience clauses function in tandem to ensure both freedom from and freedom of the most powerful psychological force known to Madison and the Founders: the commands of conscience, especially religious conscience. Madison understood that religion has a dark side capable of inciting true believers to inflict unspeakable cruelties on nonbelievers. Europe was a religious bloodbath; Catholics and Protestants took turns killing each other, uniting only to kill Jews. John Rawls, the leading American political philosopher of the twentieth century, reminded us that the West’s vaunted commitment to religious tolerance is really an exhausted truce flowing from the mutual recognition by Europe’s Catholics and Protestants that neither could wipe the other out. The Founders knew from personal experience that true believers often use the state to impose their beliefs on others and to persecute, harass, and even annihilate nonbelievers. Much of the New World had been settled by fugitives from government-enforced religious oppression in Europe. Ironically, many religious refugees were perfectly willing to use their newfound political power on this side of the Atlantic to oppress even weaker minorities, to say nothing of exterminating the “heathens” who were here first. That’s why, even before there was a Bill of Rights, Article VI, clause 3 forbade the political majority from imposing religious tests for public office, one of the few protections of civil liberties in the text of the 1787 Constitution. Two years later, Madison opened the Bill of Rights with an Establishment Clause that takes the idea of separation of church and state one step further by forbidding public officials from using their government power to impose religious beliefs on others.

The tangled tale of Moscow’s Church of Christ the Savior illustrates both sides of Madison’s wisdom. Intended as an act of religious thanksgiving for Russia’s defeat of Napoléon in 1812, the church’s exterior was not completed until 1860 and was not formally consecrated until 1883, although Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture received its first public performance in the church a year earlier. Forty tons of electroplated gold embellished its enormous dome. The bejeweled and marbled interior, among the most lavish in Church history, propelled the Church of Christ the Savior to the center of Russian religious life, drawing Russian Orthodox believers for worship, baptism, and marriage from all parts of the realm. In 1930, Stalin, desperate for cash and in the midst of a purge of Russia’s churches, ordered the Moscow church to be dynamited after the jewels and precious metals, especially the golden dome, had been confiscated by the state. Demolition was finally completed in 1937. In its place, Stalin ordered the construction of a secular Palace of the Soviets, a huge modernistic structure designed to celebrate the triumph of communism over superstition. Excavation for the enormous new building was interrupted by World War II and was only fitfully resumed during the postwar years of Stalin’s waning power. After Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev inherited an enormous hole in the ground, which he promptly turned into the immense Moscow municipal swimming pool.

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