The Breakdown of Long-Held Categories

For those of you who don't know, the project I am working on is related to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty outlining basic rights for children, including the right to life, education, health-care, and other basic rights that are, in the words of the Convention, "in the best interests of the child." The Convention has been ratified by every country in the world with the exception of the United States and Somalia, and as Somalia does not have an internationally recognized government, the United States is the only country in the world capable of ratifying the treaty that has not done so.

When I tell people about the Convention, the first question I am usually asked is, "Why hasn't the US ratified it?" As with everything else in American politics, the answer is complex. Some are reluctant to sign on because they believe it will infringe on United States' sovereignty, others because they fear the Convention will take rights away from parents and give them to the state, and still others have misconceptions that the Convention takes a particular stance on abortion or will allow children to sue their parents. Many of the groups that have worked tirelessly to oppose the Convention are groups of the so-called "Christian Right."

As I've been conducting research for this project, I have tried to sort my research into different categories just to keep it organized, so that I can go back later and find exactly what I need at any given time. At times, however, I find myself having trouble deciding whether to classify a group's comments as religious or political. The John Birch Society, for example, claims that their primary goal is "restoring and preserving freedom under the United States Constitution." Yet their objections to the Convention on the Rights of the Child include the assertion that it will undermine the Constitution as well as the "fact" that it would "also forbid parents to employ biblically mandated physical discipline." They have objected to a "political" treaty on both "political" and "religious" grounds.

As the John Birch Society is only one example of the link between religion and politics on this contentious issue, I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between religion and politics. I have always been fascinated by the connection between the two - which is probably why I am a Religious Studies major with an International Relations minor. Where is the line between religion and politics? Is it the same in all situations? Who decides where the line is?

We casually toss around the phrase "separation of church and state," without bothering to realize that by declaring that the two should be separate implies that there IS in fact a way to link them. If a politician's identity is at least partially determined by his or her religion, how can that religion not be a part of the actions he or she makes within the political arena?

It seems that more and more these days, we see politicians invoking religious phrases and sentiments and basing their decisions on what they classify as religious values. I continue to ask myself why this is more true today than it was twenty years ago. The only answer that I can come up with is that our once-held categories are continuously being broken down. The barriers between the categories of religion, politics, culture, society, and the economy are not nearly as clear as we make them out to be. Alongside these vanishing constructs is the break down of the distinction between the public and the private. Issues like religion, sexual orientation, and the like used to be private topics, only discussed with friends or family and rarely mentioned in public discourse or on the Senate floor. Today, however, all of these issues are brought into the public sphere, and as such are opened up to public and political scrutiny.

I'm not sure what this means, or if it's good or bad, or if it can or should be reversed. What I am sure about, however, is that it is something that needs to be taken into consideration when we throw out the terms "political" and "religious" intending to convey a particular set of meanings.