The current political discourse is focused pretty heavily on President Trump's most likely choice to fill the Supreme Court seat, Amy Coney Barrett. While large numbers of arguments are bubbling up all over for every possible for and against position, one of the agreed upon main focuses for the mainstream pundits is over her religious faith. She is a Catholic who actually believes in Catholic tenants, which of course is bad according to liberals and progressives. It's not that she's Catholic persay, it's that she actually believes in and practices her Catholic faith. This results in the argument that she intends to legislate through her religious beliefs.
Many have pointed out that the problem is certainly not simply that she is religious - while there is a large number of atheists and anti-theists who claim that having religious beliefs at all is a crime against humanity, anyone who is honest is able to recognize that it's the active practice of the actual beliefs behind what it means to be Catholic that is the "problem". People who are looking only to score "debate points" ignore the obvious, well understood concept here that people are against anyone who actually believes in what they say they believe, and attempt to proclaim that, "no! of course we are not against Catholics! How absurd, clearly, honestly, how could you be so obtuse as to say we don't like Catholics!"
Anyone intellectually sincere understands that the thing that causes the disagreement is when the faithful person in question goes forward with applying their beliefs actively to their life. See, that's the "bad thing" that religious people do - when people believe there is an all powerful, all knowing, merciful but just God who created all things, who created existence itself, and has given us directions on how to navigate through the universe He created, and then apply this knowledge to their everyday existence in a way which is entirely consistent and obviously understandable when you give it more than a passing thought, that's a problem. You can have your "religious beliefs" - that is, that God has given us distinct instructions on what is good and what is bad and that these things apply to all existence at every second of every day - but don't you dare actually believe that.
So, how does this weird inconsistency happen in the first place? Amy Coney Barrett is Catholic, just like Joe Biden, even Nancy Pelosi. All of these people self-identify as Catholic. Amy Coney Barrett is the only one who causes issues, because she actually practices Catholic beliefs. But as far as intellectually dishonest left-wing pundits are concerned, all three are fully and equally Catholic. The American left doesn't have a problem with Catholics, and the followup argument that is either thinly veiled or outright proclaimed is that right-leaning pundits are making up strawmen and being insincere when they say that an anti-Catholic bias exists. Because, you see, Joe and Nancy are Catholic! So, obviously, we see there's nothing wrong with Catholics. This should seem absurd if you are capable of honest analysis - because it is. But how do people get here, to this obviously cognitive dissonant position, without seeing the issue?
The actual root problem lies in what the general public understands about what it means to have a religious belief, and especially Catholic beliefs. To understand how this inconsistent belief persists, we have to look at how people understand what it means to be both Catholic and religious. The problem is quite clear when we first realize that the common American fundamentally misunderstands what religious beliefs even are. The problem is exacerbated by the idea of the Catholic identity, which somehow manages to exist in this peculiar state as almost a separate idea from actual faithful religious beliefs. Let me explain.
America was a Christian nation at its founding. People often talk about how the colonists were seeking "religious freedom" when they came to North America, but sneakily discard the obvious fact that this religious freedom was Protestantism and not, say, Judaism or Buddhism. They didn't seek "religious freedom" so they could practice pagan tree-worship and become Wiccans - England was Catholic and the colonists wanted to be Protestant. Still explicitly Jesus worshippers - the religious freedom they sought was away from the Pope and the theocratic legal atmosphere therein. The purpose of explaining all this is to stress that Americans from their very foundation, and thus American culture from its very beginning, was Christian. This means that the every day person believed in God, spoke of God, prayed to God, and the culture was directly influenced by religious beliefs - what is basically "socially right-wing" today. A cohesive and coherent understanding of who God is was explained to children and adults every day through media, every day conversations, cultural phenomenon, and of course in church, where people actually went very often. The general cultural understanding of God and religious reality was Christian and was much more correctly understood than it is today.
This culture persisted for the next couple centuries of America's history. It has only recently begun to be dismantled, the culture only recently - within the lifetimes of people alive right now - has become abjectly secular. This means that the common man no longer genuinely believes in God as described by the bible, as this information must be sought out individually. It takes a person with intentional desire for faith-focus education to find out the reality of who God is and what it means to believe in Him. These days, it's not taught or explained to the average person without their effort. People come to understand what God is and what faith and religion are via infostreams that do not explain these concepts properly. The Christian understanding of the world is a faded echo in our culture - people use "Jesus Christ" as an expletive without even consciously realizing they're invoking the name of the savior of the world. People believe nebulously in the concept of God without believing anything consistent about Him - not even that they would believe other religion's concepts of God, but that they simply believe in God as a secular, cultural concept - a brand new concept of God that is not reflected in any formal religious understanding. These people have not engaged with religion as an important aspect of their lives and believe very generally things like "good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell" without ever reflecting any further on this idea. Absolutely no recognized religion actually believes in Heaven and Hell this way, these concepts are best described as "secular spiritualism". These people falsely identify as Christian or Catholic due to their upbringing because their parents said "we're Catholic" and then they never actually learned what any of that meant. Or, perhaps, they did learn it, but it became unlearned as they aged within our aggressively secular culture.
These secular-focused and non-Christian ideas have invaded the current culture so that much older people - say maybe 65 and older - were the last generation to experience an actual cohesive religious reality portrayed through media. As the 1970s came and went, the culture became exponentially more secular, and this ever-present general understanding of actual religious reality experienced by the average, every day person has gone away. What this means is that well meaning parents of baby boomers who experienced a constant every day culture of religious reality simply expected their children to grow up the same way, not believing they needed to put actual individual effort forth into ensuring that their children grew up with a coherent religious understanding of God and Christianity. Even people who had strong religious backgrounds growing up may quite easily, and without intending to, fall away from their faith simply because there is such a deficit in the culture of mentioning God. They simply "forget to remember" God in their day to day lives because there is nothing around them reminding them.
This overall failure to understand the importance of our existential spiritual reality that is encompassed by religious faith is the root cause of this strange phenomenon where "Catholics" like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are A-OK by democrats, in a very real and sincere belief by the general public, but Amy Coney Barrett's actual Catholic faith that she actively applies to her life, is not. To the general common man, these three people are all genuinely Catholic. It is a unique aspect to Amy Coney Barrett that she actually applies her beliefs - a concept that, to the general public, is something "people who are religious" can simply choose to turn on and off at will without their underlying spiritual commitment being affected. They in all sincerity do not understand the problem here.
The reason for this is that they don't understand what "makes" someone Catholic. The general layman understanding is, in all actuality, that someone is Catholic by way of the performance of rituals in their upbringing, by way of their parent's faith. They have a confirmation name, and thus they are Catholic. It is understood - very incorrectly - as an aspect of someone's identity in the same way that you graduated from a particular college or, to some, similar to how someone can be Jewish, but not religious. People are for example "Irish Catholic" by birth - despite the fact that Catholic identity is not connected to any race in the way that Jewish identity is, severing the importance behind the actual application of religious beliefs to their lives. "Being Catholic" is a nebulous identity with no actual important underlying aspects to the majority of Americans.
Biden is Catholic because, well, he just is. He was "raised Catholic" and thus, despite not believing anything even vaguely resembling Catholicism, he simply is Catholic as a matter of identity. Barrett is equally as Catholic as Joe Biden, but she is also religious, where Biden is not. People understand this issue subconsciously but fail to fully apprehend it, thus they believe something as ridiculous as "we have nothing against Catholics don't be silly" without seeing any inconsistencies in their beliefs. Someone being Catholic is effectively meaningless, just a box you check on the census indicating a particular series of rituals performed as a child, and nothing more.
Both the people who believe they are Catholic and the secular, existential-reality denying faithless general public do not understand what someone is saying when they say they are Catholic. The concept exists of a "lapsed Catholic" which, at its base, means someone who is simultaneously Catholic and not Catholic - they were Catholic, but do not practice Catholicism anymore, yet in a subtle way they somehow remain Catholic by way of immutable identity. The very existence of the phrase "lapsed Catholic" underlines the issue here - people believe you simply are or are not Catholic by way of circumstance, not by way of genuine committed faithful adherence to a set of religious beliefs. If you've ever attended Mass or been confirmed, you're now always Catholic, allegedly.
But that is not how religion - any religion - works. In fact, we simultaneously seem to believe it's possible to choose your religion due to your preferences while believing someone who was raised Catholic is simply always Catholic. You can choose to convert - religion is just a meaningless preference, like preferring Coke over Pepsi, and yet they are simultaneously concrete indicators of identity of a person. These conflicting ideas exist in the consciousness of society without reflection and people fail to recognize the issue with these inconsistencies. Religious affiliation, in fact, is so meaningless, that we take at face value every claim of religious identity. This should not be the case - if someone says they are Christian, they cannot deny all of Christianity's dogma.
I am not even referring to, here, on matters of popular disagreements like gay marriages or women pastors - there is an unbelievably high number of people who identify themselves as Christians and do not even believe Jesus was a real person. There are people who claim to be pastors who genuinely believe you can actually just believe whatever you want and still go to Heaven if you are "good" - this is not a belief congruent with Christianity. There are bare basic claims Christianity makes that, if you don't believe in them, you cannot in any good conscious claim to be Christian. It would be like saying that you are a vegan, but still eat fish. There is a different name for that classification of identity, and it is not "vegan". When we allow definitions of words to exist in the general conscious that conflict directly with the understood definition of that word, the result is that we communicate nothing. In this day and age, saying that you are a Christian has effectively been made meaningless because it carries with it no consistent outline of expectation - if you can say you're a Christian and simultaneously believe that everyone goes to Heaven, then what does "Christian" even mean?
Now, in regards to the actual theological beliefs that coincide to Christianity, there are certain truth claims that are necessary to say that you believe in Christian dogma. While the cultural problem with the definition of religion in and of itself suffers from this failure to adhere to even the bare basic tenants of a religious affiliation, things like the aforementioned popular disagreements do still come into play in a very real and important way. If you believe in the truth claims made within the Christian religion, then you should, if you are being consistent, thoughtful, and intellectually honest, wind up believing particular claims made within Christianity that are not explicitly existential theological truth claims. Of course I refer to "social issues", and the social issue that is in the forefront here because of this whole current hulabaloo with Barrett is of course the issue of abortion.
Catholics believe in a very specific set of theological truths in regards to God, Jesus, the spiritual world, the value and purpose of human life, salvation, and eternity. When those theological truths are applied thoughtfully, a Catholic should be staunchly against abortion. This is where the issue is coming into play - Biden and Pelosi claim to "be Catholic" in a meaningless, self-identifying sort of way, while Barrett claims to be Catholic in an actual, applied, committed way. Thus, with no actual theological beliefs about truth, the aforementioned duo are in favor of abortion on demand at any time and in any circumstance, while people are "afraid" that Barrett - because they, whether they spell it out for themselves or not, truly do understand the concept that the theological truths put forth by Catholicism ultimately comes to a conclusion where abortion is morally repugnant - will legislate from her religious beliefs against abortion.
The failure of the common man to bring beliefs to coherent conclusions is the root of this problem. The culture will pretend like you can choose a set of religious beliefs that you have, but you never speak about them, you apply them only personally to yourself, and that you should under no circumstance discuss them or apply them to the rest of your beliefs that "aren't about" religion. The very act of having a certain set of beliefs but not applying them to the rest of your thought processes is cognitive dissonance - it is inconsistent and incoherent. When you do not apply your beliefs about one thing to another thing, you wind up with inconsistent beliefs, in regards to anything. It is how hypocrisy occurs. This idea that we should keep our "religion out of politics" or "religion out of ____" is nothing more than social pressure to be hypocrites. If we were to be sincere - intellectually honest, thoughtful, self-reflective people - then we should, absolutely, under every circumstance, apply our religious beliefs to our politics and every other aspect of our lives.
The failure to recognize this comes from a failure to understand what religion is. I'll help - religion is the term we use to describe the mechanisms by which we believe the entire world operates. It would be an aggressive act of intentional mental disconnection to have the beliefs I have about God, how we got here, why we are here, who Jesus was and what He did, and what will happen to each of us when we die, and then proceed to not think about that in regards to everything else that ever happens to me or anyone else on this earth. If I believe God is active in my life, it would be nothing less than pathetically thoughtless for me to not remember that when I think about other aspects of my life. The very idea that religious beliefs, of all possible things, are somehow relegated to only discussing privately in your own head, is the most offensive scam in modern history. The purpose of religion is describing our very existence in the most fundamental possible ways. People have managed to incorrectly define and identify the purpose of religion to the point where people don't even know what it is for.
Indeed, it is more accurate to define our religious beliefs as our "worldview" - especially because there are a good number of people who claim to "not be religious" while simultaneously holding views about the fundamental reality of our existence. That is what religion is, and thus everyone is "religious" - or at least analogous to it. The modern blunder of inaccurately defining religion has led to a fractured social consciousness - it is totally normal and acceptable to simply have beliefs about things, and as long as you don't imply in any way that you believe the way you do due to your "religion" (i.e., the fundamental understanding of the cause and purpose of our existence) then people will debate you based on the merits of your beliefs. As soon as you attribute those beliefs to your religion, then it is the religion that is the problem, and you should have never applied your religion to your beliefs - despite the fact that the root cause of all belief is "religious" in nature, attributed to the worldview we have about the mechanisms through which existence functions. To say you are "not religious" is truly to say you are not self-reflective or thoughtful - you are drifting through life without ever stopping to think on the whys or hows about it.
This is how we have arrived to this nonsensical future, where anyone can say they are a Catholic and democrats can say they don't have anything against Catholicism, while simultaneously being against everything that Catholicism has to say about anything at all. The failure to adhere to a coherent understanding of the words we are using has created an epidemic of communication failures. Do not be fooled by this flimsy argument - this baseless idea that democrats are fully accepting of Catholics because particular prominent democrats "are" Catholics. The definitions they are using are different from the definitions we understand - and thus, it is fully consistent, in their minds, to make these claims. We differ fundamentally not merely on ideas of law and politics, but the very essence of what makes up our reality. This is the reason why there is such immense failure to find common ground with our ideological rivals - they are speaking a completely different language.
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