With All Due Respect

Before asking whether religious belief deserves respect, we should ask what respect is. At minimum, it is a recognition of another person’s dignity and agency. It is not an obligation to treat their ideas as correct, immune, or wise. It behooves us to grant respect to a person—at least by default, in the lingering hope they don’t squander it. But the notion that a belief should enjoy immunity from scrutiny is one of the great swindles of polite society.

The trouble begins when respect for persons is treated as indistinguishable from respect for the beliefs they hold. Respect pertains to persons; evaluation pertains to ideas. Religious discourse often conflates the two, implying that to examine a doctrine is to injure the believer. This collapses human dignity into doctrinal protection—a tidy arrangement for those who prefer their certainties unmolested.

Once the trick is accepted, “respect” becomes a shield. The slightest inquiry is waved away as rudeness. Beliefs are pre-wrapped in sanctity like fragile relics, and we are told that to unwrap them—to examine the contents—is bad manners. Worse, criticism of religion is now regularly smuggled under the heading of “hate speech,” a category that should apply to attacks on people, not on propositions. To object to a miracle claim or to notice that a sacred text is poorly written is not bigotry. It is literacy.

Indeed, in certain quarters this conflation is so inflated that the critic is accused of threatening an entire demographic. It would be comic if it were not occasionally lethal: there are people who believe that their god’s feelings are so delicate that your skepticism justifies their violence.

I have a long history of being anti-religious—accused more than once of being devoid of spirituality, as though the capacity for awe resides solely in the gullible. I have no crusade to wage, merely a low tolerance for the ridiculous. Consider the stock of things I am expected to keep a straight face about: an oddly Nordic-looking man rising from the dead; young-earth creationism—geology performed with crayons; revelations delivered by angels, always conveniently when no one else is around. If these tales came from a neighbor rather than a pulpit, we would edge away politely and perhaps alert a professional. They may be meaningful to someone, but they are not, by any stretch, owed my respect.

The same pattern extends to claims of land and destiny: territories justified by divine promise, national expansion framed as providential mandate, even civilizing missions wrapped in pious language. Without the religious varnish, these are naked assertions of power. With it, we are told to revere them. And then there are those who claim to know the will of the Almighty with such specificity that they feel entitled to legislate your most intimate decisions. The deity, it seems, is never so talkative as when someone wishes to control someone else.

You may believe anything you wish. This is America, after all, where you can claim private audience with the divine and publish the minutes. But believing something fervently does not entitle you to impose it on others. Faith may move mountains, but it does not confer jurisdiction. You may cherish your convictions, but they do not grant you authority over what I read, whom I love, or what medical decisions anyone else makes.

I make no special pleading for my own views. I see through a narrow peephole, like everyone else. Any proposal I advance for how we should live together must be judged by a single criterion: whether it improves life for the people who must actually live it. My passion for a view does not oblige you to take it seriously; only its consequences do.

And so it should be with religion. Respect people, by all means. But their beliefs—your beliefs—must earn their place in public life the same way any other idea does: by being tested, weighed, and judged according to how well they help us inhabit a shared world. To decline automatic respect for religious belief is not hostility. It is an insistence that ideas, however cherished, are not beyond question.

In short: we owe each other dignity. Your beliefs can fend for themselves.