Obama’s Policies and Religious Issues
It should be a surprise to no one that I am an opponent of the health care proposals currently floating around Washington. I have not written on them here because I never had a religious angle. While the economics of the proposal are staggeringly bad and the quality of care that will result is equally awful, my personal primary objection has been the levels of social engineering it will enable.
Think about it for a minute. Most acknowledge that it will end up like the Canadian or British systems which are on de facto rationing. On what basis will the rationing decisions be made? I can think of some. How about smoking? You smoke, you forgo treatment for lung disease. Or how about beef consumption? You eat more than 8 ounces of beef a week and you will be denied access to the cholesterol lowering statins. Of course, unprotected sex will not be on the list of forbidden behaviors.
Yep – that’s social engineering. But I failed to realize just how awful it could get until I came upon this article in the BBC:
Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them.
Medics will tell the British Medical Association conference this week that staff should not be disciplined as long as they handle the issue sensitively.
The doctors said recent cases where health workers had got into trouble were making people fearful.
But atheists said it was wrong to mix religion and health care.
There it is, in black and white. The nationalized health care system in Britain is being used to prevent the discussion of religious matter in a medical setting. Look at that last sentence – ponder it – “But atheists said it was wrong to mix religion and health care.” Can you conceive of a time when religion is more important than end of life? I bet all of us of faith have a story somewhere in our lives where faith restored health when medicine could not. Or where it brought comfort to those in pain or even terminal. No place do our lives intersect more with religion than when it comes to our health. I wonder how many of those atheists have prayed, “just in case” when they received their cancer diagnosis?
To say that religion and health care “do not mix,” is not an attempt to keep religion a “private matter,” it is an effort to wipe religion out. And yet, the argument has some merit if the government provides health care. Imagine a Catholic individual denied the Last Rights because priests cannot be allowed in government owned and operated hospitals because “religion and health care, since the areligious government provides it, do not mix.”
Proponents of nationalized health care can call my assertions here preposterous if they want, but are they? But there it is in the British system. Yes, if you read the entire BBC article, you can see there is a chaplaincy system – its just doctors that are not allowed to discuss religion with patients – but how sterile is that? I know many Christian doctors, many of whom pray for each patient, even if quietly and privately, as they see them, and it is effective. Imagine health care robbed of the simple power of prayer.
Obamacare is not nearly as benign as it appears on the surface. Monday morning update: Here’s a piece on the same thing from the conservative leaning London Telegraph.
And while we are looking at Britain…
Here is something to think about. This article appeared in the London Telegraph by the Anglican assistant Bishop of Newcastle.
Britain is no longer a Christian nation
If recent trends are any guide, many Church of England parishes will have been cheered by higher attendances at Easter services. The last published statistics for 2006/7 show rises of 7 and 5 per cent in church going at Christmas and Easter.
But these figures are just about the only signs of hope for the church and certainly not the first green shoots of a revival. Other statistics make for gloomy reading.
Annual decline in Sunday attendance is running at around 1 per cent. At this rate it is hard to see the church surviving for more than 30 years though few of its leaders are prepared to face that possibility.
[...]
The figure rises by a small amount if adult baptism and thanksgiving services are included but it is hard to see the Church of England being able to justify its position as the established church on the basis of these numbers.
Yet, if one looks at the religious identification figures from the UK in 2001 (newest I could find) one sees that over 70% of the population still identifies as “Christian.” So how does the assistant bishop justify his conclusion that it is no longer a “Christian” nation? Well,of course, all his stats are about the official, established church. Will the UK cease to be Christian if the Anglican church indeed becomes so weak that it can no longer justify its status as the established church?
Of course not, it will just become more like America which is the most religious nation on the planet. So why the woe? Well, establishment is a big deal, government money, perks, etc. I wonder how many leaders in the value voters crowd in our nation seek those perks and how many of them are really about the issues they claim to represent? Further, I wonder how their stance on voting for someone of a different religion, even if having the same values, correlates?
Sadly, we’ll never know. Such data could never be reliably gathered. But it is interesting to think about.
A final British note…
This Thursday, July 2, the lovely wife and I are off to cruise around the island of Britain with blogfather Hugh and friends. We will be gone for a couple of weeks If there is news between now and then, I will post, but while gone, unless something super major happens, I will leave you in Lowell’s way too busy hands. Maybe you want to check he and his wife out at True North. I’ll be “going travelogue” at Blogotional if you want to see pics and hear about adventures.
Brief Monday postscript: Gee, this sounds awfully “Christian” to me.
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Doug King on 29 Jun 2009 at 6:31 am #
I’ve been wondering about the mix of religion and nationalized health care as my wife spent this weekend in a Catholic hospital. This hospital provides outstanding care. Many of the employees are not Catholic (our attending nurse wasn’t and some people in my ward work there). They all say the Franciscan Health Network strives to serve their community with conscience (e.g., offering substantial discounts to the uninsured) and treats their employees decently. As far as hospitals go, I think my Catholic hospital is a wonderful place.
The halls and gardens of this hospital has many reminders of its Catholic sponsors — crosses, pictures of Jesus, pictures of nuns, a statue of a monk, etc. I’m sure these are intended to remind the administrators of their mission and offer comfort to patients. I am not Catholic, but these symbols do not bother me in the slightest, and I feel the hospital has every right to display them. Thankfully, my health insurer could care less about the religious overtones of my provider.
But if we had nationalized health care where the government was essentially paying everyone’s medical bills, how long would it be before someone filed a law suit objecting to religious symbols? Would and could the government force Catholic hospitals to remove such symbols? Would it force Catholic health care providers to perform abortions? If so, would the Catholics get out of the health care business?
I see what’s has happened to public schools over the past 50 years and am concerned hospitals like St. Francis may be forced to follow.
coltakashi on 29 Jun 2009 at 1:42 pm #
Doug: I think you have identified one of the reasons why certain people and organizations promote increased government intrusion into all aspects of our lives. Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have expressed the view that parents teaching religion to their own children is a form of child abuse, and should be subject to government intervention, just as social workers would take the children away if they were not being given enough nourishing food to eat.
Thomas Sowell in his book The Vision of the Anointed identified the common threat underlying the left wing’s “progressive” agenda as the belief that it is the duty–and right–of those who believe they have society’s best interests at heart to use coercive means to reform society, regardless of the objections of the less enlightened. I hypothesize that the subset of the Left who are militant atheists (and my guess is that most militant atheists–perhaps with the exception of Christopher Hitchens–are on that side of the political spectrum) believe that part of their duty to society is to immunize all children against the religious belief “meme”, and they see the increased government role in all transactions and services, including medical care, combined with the pernicious doctrine that the only way to avoid government “establishment of religion” is to suppress all religious expression and practice in activities touched by government regulation or funding, as the means to achieve that atheist Nirvana.
In other words, while secularizing all health care may be seen by many Progressives as perhaps an unfortunate, but Constitutionally required, side effect of government control of medical services, there are some among their number who see that secularizing “side effect” as being a high priority target in and of itself.
If that is the case, when we make our arguments against increased government intrusion in health care, and hope to dissuade or moderate its promoters through pointing out the negative effects on religious practice within health care institutions, there will be some in the target audience who will not be persuaded by that concern, but will actually be going off around the corner where they can shove their fists into the air and whisper “YES!”
Indeed, it is quite clear that one of the major reasons why education vouchers are opposed by many Progessives is that they allow more students to be exposed to religious belief in an educational context. Many critics of vouchers see such education as “tainted” by religion, with all sorts of vices like religious prejudice and discrimination, alleged inability to learn modern science, and clinging to traditional Biblical teachings on sexual morality.