Jon Jones

Religion and Social Issues

October 8, 2001

Belief vs. Action

All of the reading essentially covered the Supreme Court trying to figure out what types of actions they would allow religious groups to perform. Their decision is basically to allow actions that do not endanger the community too much. What I find disturbing, however, is the Reynolds case, in which the Mormons’ polygamy is not allowed because it violates “morals”. It was almost like they couldn’t come up with a very good reason why it would hurt the community. First they tried to say that the family structure is what holds the nation together, and therefore any disruption in the family structure would disrupt the nation. This is obviously, at the least, outdated; we allow divorces in this country. Doesn’t that affect the family structure? It would seem, really, that a single parent family would be more disrupting than a family with more than one wife, but the Court didn’t see it that way.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t just that their reasoning is bad; it’s that they seem to be saying that the purpose of law is to enforce morals. For the majority of people, morals come directly from their religion…and so, of course, the morals they are enforcing are Christian ones. Why is the single father / single mother family so important? Because it is against Christian morals to have more than one wife. Strikingly, the Supreme Court even used the word “morals” in their ruling of the case. If nothing else, this ruling is quite outdated, and it’s too bad that there are no other religious groups to challenge this again.