Sunday, December 12, 2004
Don't confuse separation of church and state with the interaction of politics and religion
From the RoundTable blog
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with the interaction of politics and religion Robert Benne
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Benne is director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society.
Far too many people confuse church-state separation with religion-politics interaction.
For example, when John Kerry was pressed as to why he supported unfettered abortion rights, he said that while he personally believed that life begins at conception, he also believed in the separation of church and state. He was mistakenly persuaded that the separation of church and state meant that his religious convictions could not be expressed politically.
Many other examples could be given. Indeed, whenever religious persons or groups - particularly conservative ones - act politically out of their religious convictions, many people who ought to know better claim that they are violating the separation of church and state.
Not only is this confusion a serious mistake; it is a dangerous one. Were religious persons prevented from acting on religious principle, not only would the First Amendment be violated, but, far worse, our country would be moving toward a totalitarian state in which the state tried to prevent inner values and principles from becoming public.
The First Amendment prohibits the federal establishment of a particular institutional religion. The Founders had experience with an established church in England, which was supported by universal taxation, disadvantaged other churches and religions, and demanded a religious test for holding political office.
Besides those injustices, the Founders observed that such establishment made the established church weak and corrupt.
The "nonestablishment" clause of the First Amendment prohibits the exclusive establishment of an institution - a church - as America's preferred religion. It also prohibits churches from directly endorsing political candidates.
Moreover, the First Amendment assures the freedom of religious persons and organizations to act politically. It protects the "free expression of religion," which obviously means the expression of religion not only within churches, which even the communists allowed, but also in the public sectors of life, including politics.
So, religious groups and persons have acted on religious principle publicly and politically by supporting the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages, the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the movement against the war in Vietnam, the efforts to restrain abortion and now the attempts to protect the institution of marriage from radical redefinition.
Those are only the big issues. Religious groups and persons act out of religious principle in many other issues of public life. Are all these examples of the violation of church and state? Hardly. They are examples of religious persons and groups acting politically on religiously based moral convictions.
Judaism and Christianity believe in a God who calls those who believe in him to obedience to his will in public as well as private sectors of life. Serious religion has public consequences, not merely private ones. The interaction of religion and politics is both inevitable and necessary. When Kerry says he cannot mix his religion with his politics, he is simply admitting that he is not a serious Catholic.
Both the protections of the First Amendment and the nature of serious religion assure that religion will interact with politics in American public life. The question is not whether this will happen, but rather how. What is constitutionally allowed may not always be wise for religious persons and churches in fact to do.
It is wise for religious persons and churches to recognize that there are several steps made when one moves from unchanging core religious beliefs and values through the developing social teachings of the churches to highly specific public-policy options.
With each step, persons of good will and intelligence make different judgments and can come out for different policies. For example, Christians of good will and intelligence differ strongly on the moral justification for invading Iraq.
Many other considerations besides fundamental religious principle are involved in making specific judgments. Humility about what public policy God wills should be the order of the day. So, a straight line should not be drawn between core religious values and specific public policies.
Such straight-line thinking tends to religionize politics and politicize religion, both of which are dangerous. The politicization of religion destroys religion's integrity and transcendent value. The religionization of politics raises flawed and ambiguous programs to ultimate status.
Religious persons and groups of both the left and right are guilty of this straight-line thinking. The bureaucracies of the mainline denominations - as well as their "ecumenical" organizations (the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches) - have drawn so many straight lines from their core religious principles to liberal politics for so long that people doubt whether they operate on religious (rather than political) convictions at all.
Recently, conservative Christian persons and political groups have gotten into the act and run some of the same risks. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the Washington office of the Southern Baptist Convention all draw too straight a line from the center of Christian conviction to highly partisan politics.
Recently, they have gotten far more attention from the media and the secularists than the liberal denominations simply because they are more effective and, more significantly, on the other side of the issues.
However, my proposal that religious conviction should be indirectly linked to political policy does operate with limits. If the public policy clearly contradicts the core religious and moral convictions of a religious tradition, religious persons (including seriously religious politicians) and organizations must oppose that policy.
For example, many churches declared the system of racial apartheid incompatible with Christian practice and strongly resisted it. Likewise, a number of Catholic bishops thought that Kerry was so out of sync with Catholic teaching on abortion that they were willing to withhold the Eucharist from him.
Serious religion will always interact with politics, but that interaction should be indirect. This interaction is in no way a violation of the separation of church and state.
The separation of church and state is necessary and wholesome for both the church and the state, and so is the interaction of religion and politics, properly practiced.
