One side (dubbed "Pilgrims" in the book) wants to legally coerce any religious conscience with which they disagree while the other side (called "Park Rangers") thinks that all religion must be purely private. Both seem prepared to battle to the death over these issues. The rest of us, that vast majority in the middle, duck and cover as best we can while wondering why we must always fight every detail of anything to do with religion. After all, it didn't used to be this way. Did it?
Actually, it used to be much worse, as Kevin Hasson tells us in The Right to Be Wrong. He is a constitutional lawyer who now heads up a non-partisan, public-interest law firm that specializes in defending free religious expression for all faiths. Hasson asserts, "We defend all faiths but we are not relativists. On any given day, I think most of my clients are wrong. But I firmly believe that, in an important sense, they have the right to be wrong." This is not a very long book and it is written in a conversational and easy style, but it packs a heavy punch.
Hasson cuts to the heart of the issue by turning our focus to conscience, that interior voice that won't be still until we do the right thing. The core of any discussion about religion, according to Hasson, is that we recognize the inherent right of each person to follow his or her conscience just as we would wish them to allow us to follow ours.
Conscience won't let us be satisfied with resting on the truth we already know, the good we already embrace. There is an unease we experience, an unease that pushes us on to seek ever-deeper truths and choose ever-better goods. Sometimes we ignore it; sometimes we try to suppress it. Conscience, however, demands that we attend to it and miss no opportunity to try to satisfy it. Conscience is forever insisting that we look here, or search there, or try this or that in our quest for the true and the good.
And then conscience still isn't content. It won't stand for the argument that searching alone should suffice. Conscience demands not only that we seek but that we embrace the truth we believe we've found. It insists that, at whatever cost, our convictions follow through into action. And it's famously stubborn about this, sending generation after generation of dissidents to all sorts of deprivations in the name of integrity...
In the process of proving this point, Hasson takes the reader on a journey through the history of American religious liberty. We soon discover that there was precious little to be had before modern times. The Pilgrims, whose vaunted quest for tolerance landed them on American shores, quite knowingly practiced a double standard and forcefully suppressed any opposing opinions. We are shown why Roger William's founded Maryland in order to practice true religious tolerance only to have the laws changed after he died. Similarly William Penn's vision of religious liberty was soon practiced in quite a different way after his influence waned. James Madison emerges as a man who had a surprisingly accurate vision of religious liberty and, possibly, the influence to get the proper laws passed. It is all the more disappointing, then, to learn that he let Thomas Jefferson influence him to weaken them. As a result, Qu
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