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Some of our more astute readers may notice that this week’s subject bears some similarity to last week’s. Do not be alarmed. As always, my insights will be fresh, original, enlightening and humble. The reason I continue my thoughts on the same subject for another week is that any discussion of God and government immediately brings to mind the issue of church and state.
Americans have a difficult time carrying on an intelligent discussion regarding the separation of church and state because we don’t have any experience in a country where there is no such separation. All we have ever known is a very strict legal separation of the two institutions, and we don’t know what the alternative looks like.
Before describing the alternative, let’s back up to a word I just used: institutions. When we talk about the separation of church and state we are talking about the separation of two official institutions — a specific church organization and a specific state organization. This is completely different from the idea that religious thought cannot be applied in the public sphere and in the shaping of public policy. The United States has always enforced this separation very strongly; your taxes don’t go to some church and your priest is not a government employee.
What does the alternative look like, then? Many modern European countries provide excellent examples. In Germany, for example, there is no separation of church and state. Each citizen pays a church tax and the clergy are on the government payroll. Can we imagine that in the United States? Our quibbles over the separation of church and state are generally about what one can or cannot say in a certain place, and usually come nowhere near a situation where the separation is truly in question. This brings me to what the separation of church and state is not.
The separation of church and state is not the separation of religion and government. When most Americans refer to keeping church and state separate they are actually referring to keeping religion out of government. What they demand is an ideological separation. “It’s fine that you have your own religious beliefs, as long as you keep them to yourself and set them aside when we discuss public policy.” The problem is that that sort of demand is even more oppressive and restrictive than a state church might be.
If we demand that religious thought be kept out of government then we are demanding that either our public officials be areligious or that they pretend to be when serving in their official roles. Either way, any conscientious religious person is prohibited from holding office and acting on their beliefs. If we make such demands about the removal of religion then what we are actually doing is creating a mandatory national religious philosophy. Even though its mandates would be secularist mandates, we would have created an establishment of religion — what as we were trying to avoid in the first place.
I fully support the separation of church and state, but there is a huge difference between saying that the government does not officially support any religious group and saying that we are not allowed to talk about religion at all. Sure, if we allow people to tell us what they actually believe and take positions based on those beliefs then we will have some intense and difficult discussions ahead of us. We won’t agree on a lot of things as we voice our opinions — we may even have to get to the heart of some issues. But isn’t that what democracy is about?
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