Martin Marty on the Naked Public Square

Tikkun Magazine has published an interview with Martin Marty that talks about the boundary between religion and politics. Marty provides a number of insightful comments about how the Religious Right steps over the boundary. Here's one:

Paul Ricoeur once said that history's dirty secret is violence. The best instrument you have against it is the human invention of politics, which assures that nobody gets everything. But through give and take, through rhetoric, through lobbying, and through fundraising, you get some measure of human good. This gets complex in our republic when some group aspires to run the whole show, which is what we're seeing right now.

The current danger is that they're not trying to get their share of politics, they're trying to dominate by using the sacred book, which changes the rules of the game and goes beyond the Constitution.

My favorite quote references the infamous allegation made by Richard John Neuhaus about America's Naked Public Square. Marty says,

Our public square is not naked; it's festooned with religion. It's just that there are about fifty square yards in this city that shouldn't have a privileged religious symbol on them. You have 30,000 lawns in a town where you can put Mary and Jesus and a Menorah and all the rest. We're not a secular society.