Defending Church-State Separation in Difficult Times

By Rob Boston
Asst. Director of Communications
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
Oct. 9, 2005, Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church, Adelphi, MD

NOTE: The sermon at Paint Branch was based on this longer speech delivered about a month earlier at Amherst College. Rob shortened the text below to fit into the Sunday service format.

There are certain things in life that simply must be endured: root canal surgery, long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, bad muzak when you’re placed on hold.

Personally, I find some of these things easier to deal with than others, and keeping a long-range perspective helps. Root canal surgery can be painful, but if it heads off a more serious dental problem down the line, it’s worth it.

Other annoying things don’t seem to offer any payoff in the end, they simply must be endured – say, for example, being lectured about morality by Newt Gingrich.

Here’s a guy, three-times married, who’s not even in government any more but would probably like to be, who never hesitates to take the rest of us to task for our moral failings and lack of knowledge about American history.

During a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Gingrich took the time to patiently explain to the American people that they do not live in a secular nation.

It has also been my special joy to be lectured on morality by the recently indicted Tom DeLay. At a gathering of the Religious Right in Texas I attended a few years ago, Mr. DeLay patiently explained to the crowd that a secular ethic could never guarantee morality. Only Christianity, the kind he practices, he said, could do that.

Mind you, our Constitution contains no references to Christianity, Jesus Christ or God for that matter. Article VI bans religious qualifications for federal office. The First Amendment forbids laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Yet according to Gingrich, we are not a secular nation. “You can’t find a single line in the Constitution on secularism,” he said. “There’s no place in the Constitution that says you should not allow religion to make people feel uncomfortable.”

Notice the rhetorical device here. The question of whether the Constitution says religion should not be allowed to make people feel uncomfortable is debatable; the secular nature of our government is not. Gingrich seeks to equate the two and thus bring a core value of the Constitution into question.

He’s not the only one playing that game these days. Recently, it has become fashionable among some members of the far-right intelligentsia to lob bombs at the concept of secularism. Secularism, we are told, is a corrosive force that stands in opposition to religion. It leads to a sterile world devoid of religious values where morality is non-existent and standards of right and wrong gradually melt away.

I take a different view: Secularism is the platform from which springs true religious freedom. Secularism, as a legal principle, means government neutrality toward religion, not hostility. As reflected in our First Amendment, the principle means that the state neither advances religion nor inhibits it.

The alternatives to secularism as a legal principle, I would submit, are few and unsatisfying. One is the legal establishment of a single religion. This exists in many parts of the world today. In the West, perhaps the example that most readily springs to mind is the Church of England.

The question becomes then, how satisfying is this arrangement for both church and state? I do not believe the arrangement can be seriously argued as good for the Anglican Church. Attendance rates in England are anemic, and polls show more and more people expressing indifference to the church. These days, the church seems to be relegated to a mostly ceremonial role. If there is a royal wedding or a state funeral, church bishops all dressed up in their embroidered robes issue forth bearing incense and shepherd’s crooks. Their subservience to the state seems obvious. Their political voice is muted. Their impact on larger society is nil. They seem content to accept the appearance of power over real influence. Their old cathedrals are impressive – but they sit nearly empty on Sundays, and they pay the bills by offering tours during the week.

The state may find this arrangement satisfying – after all, a house-trained official church rarely criticizes its master – but it can hardly be seen as positive for the church.

The single establishment model grew out of the Middle Ages, which borrowed it from the late fourth century Roman Empire and later the Byzantines. It has outlived its usefulness. Some savvy church leaders recognize this. In the year 2000, Sweden ended 800 years of official religious establishment. The drive was led by the country’s Lutheran clergy, who were distraught over church attendance rates in the single digits. A free church, they argued, might be just the shot in the arm they needed. Of course it may also be too late.

A second Western model is what some call “multiple establishment.” Instead of a single established church, several are favored with government largess. Germany is the most prominent example here. In that country, workers pay a tax that is then forwarded on to either the Roman Catholic Church or one of several mainline Protestant denominations. It makes the churches quite well off, but once again nothing in the system fosters belief or brings people to services. Germany, like much of the rest of Western Europe, has unimpressive church attendance rates.

The third alternative to secularism was at one time common in Western societies but is more often found in the Muslim world today. That is theocracy, a complete merger of religion and state. Under this model, the established faith does not play merely a ceremonial role; instead, clerics actually run or greatly influence the government. I take it as a given that few in America would seriously advocate such a system today. Its faults are numerous, most prominent among them that holy books are notoriously open to different interpretations, meaning that when conflicts and difference of opinion arise, as they do constantly among religious believers, some person somewhere must serve as the final authority on what the book says and how its commands are to be enforced. In hard-line Muslim nations, narrow interpretations of sacred writings have led to the subjugation of women, absolute control of the media and the arts, public beheadings and state-sponsored mutilations in sports stadiums, a crackdown on all forms of political dissent and an absence of free elections. Pardon me for not being enthusiastic.

America’s Founding Fathers were familiar with all of these models. The European nations retained established churches. The fledgling United States had several encounters, some of them violent, with the Muslim world as well.

But the founders did not need to look beyond our own shores for examples. Colonial America included all three models. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a Puritan theocracy. Connecticut, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia had established churches, either Puritan/Congregationalism or Anglicanism. New York had a system of multiple establishment of several Protestant denominations. Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island had no official religious establishments.

The only system the founders could not see in action was the wholly secular state. Rhode Island, founded by the iconoclastic preacher Roger Williams, came perhaps the closest. But the more common experience was some type of merger between religion and government, and even those colonies that lacked an official church often had laws on the books that reflected a commingling of church and state. Pennsylvania, for example, was founded as a haven for all Christians, yet toleration was not extended toward Jews and the colony barred atheists from holding public office.

Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were the first to recognize the dangers of state-established religion. Jefferson and Madison’s work to establish the separation of church and state and the great degree of religious liberty it brings has been recounted many times, and I won’t go into that in detail today.

It is fair, however, to ask to what degree Jefferson and Madison supported the idea of a secular state. Clearly Jefferson and Madison opposed religious control of government. In Virginia, both worked to disestablish the Anglican Church and pass the groundbreaking Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty.

In the view of the Religious Right, America’s founders supported the idea of a “Christian nation.” Curiously, the founders neglected to mention this in the text of the Constitution. I am certain there were people during the founding period who supported the “Christian nation” concept. There have always been such people in America. They remain with us today.

But Jefferson and Madison cannot be counted among them. To read Jefferson and Madison on religious liberty is to read a steady stream of denunciations of the mixture of church and state. Jefferson once called them a “loathsome combination.” He was firmly convinced that government had no say in religious matters.

In one of his most famous observations, Jefferson opined, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

In an 1824 letter to John Cartwright, Jefferson refuted arguments that the common law grew out of Christianity. He criticized judges who had declared that it had, writing, “The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed.”

Madison was more reticent to speak publicly on religious matters, but in a series of essays that were not published until after his death, Madison opposed chaplains in Congress and even concluded that presidential proclamations for days and prayer and fasting were unconstitutional. Jefferson, of course, never issued such proclamations to begin with.

I am not aware of any writing in which Jefferson and Madison used the term “secular” to describe our form of government. But they clearly believed that government should be neutral on religious matters and should refrain from advancing religion.

This is the essence of secularism. Webster’s defines the term thus: of or relating to the worldly or temporal; not overtly or specifically religious.

In fact, this is what Jefferson, Madison, other founders and even many of the clergy who supported them wanted for our government. They wanted a non- religious government. They did not want a government hostile to religion, in other words a government that was anti-religion.

A non-religious government is not the same as an anti-religious government. In fact, there is a world of difference between the two. Jefferson and Madison understood the distinction. Too many in public life today do not, and as a result secularism is becoming a dirty word.

This, in turn, leads to great resistance to the idea of cultural secularism in the United States. Ironically, European nations, many of which do not have a tradition of legal secularism, have accepted secularism as a cultural fact.

Any of you who have traveled in Europe or observe politics there know what I mean. The idea of religion playing the type of political role it does in America is thought absurd by Europeans. Television preachers do not clog their airwaves on Sunday mornings. It’s not because they aren’t allowed; it’s because no one wants to watch them. European Bishops and religious leaders occasionally make pronouncements and issue demands of the state, but they are largely ignored or seen as quaint and amusing for trying.

Compare that to the United States. In this country, religious pressure groups earlier this year demanded that Congress, the governor of Florida and the president to intervene in a personal family matter and insist that a woman in a persistent vegetative state be kept alive against her husband’s wishes. Congress, the governor and the president did not tell them to go jump in a lake or to mind their own business. Rather, they passed special laws designed to keep the woman alive. Only intervention by the courts brought a stop to this travesty.

The prime minister of Belgium does not routinely end his speeches with, “God bless Belgium.” Politicians aspiring to higher office in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and so on would feel comfortable saying something other than the Bible when asked to name a favorite book. A European politician would not answer “Jesus Christ” when asked to name his favorite political philosopher.

And therein lies a conundrum. Many nations that lack legal secularism have embraced cultural secularism. The United States, which has legal secularism, has resisted cultural secularism. What does this mean? Should we be concerned?

I believe we should, for several reasons:

First, the rejection of cultural secularism results in a de facto religious test for public office. As I mentioned, Article VI bars religious qualifications for public office at the federal level, and the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down at the state level in the 1961 case Torcaso v. Watkins.

Yet there can be no doubt that a type of religious test persists in America. Those who hold to secular ethic, those who reject the tenets of traditional religion, are excluded from political life not by law but by common prejudice.

There was a time in America when voters would not support a non- Protestant candidate. They rejected Roman Catholics, Jews and other members of minority religions. These prejudices have fallen. Public opinion polls repeatedly indicate that most Americans now say they would vote for members of these faith groups. But the one minority they will not vote for is the non-believer, that is, those who hold to a secular personal ethic or even those who profess a form of skepticism of the claims of revealed religion.

What do we lose by rejecting such candidates out of hand? Perhaps quite a lot of talent. Consider again the case of Thomas Jefferson. In an 1819 letter to William Short, Jefferson discoursed at length upon the dogma of conventional Christianity. It is a remarkable document because Jefferson lists specifically what he does not accept from that faith.

These include, in Jefferson’s own words: “The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders or Hierarchy, etc.”

It’s the “etc.” that really fascinates me. Here is Jefferson rejecting all of the core tenets of traditional Christianity yet implying there is even more to turn down. Yet we know Jefferson admired the moral teachings of Jesus. In fact, he took the New Testament, removed all of the material he did not believe in – any passages with miraculous overtones – and titled it “The Life and Morals of Jesus Christ.” You can still buy it today.

Jefferson also advised his nephew, Peter Carr to “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

Pretend for a moment you are a political consultant. It’s 2005, and you have a candidate on your hands who claims to be a follower of Jesus but who has written a letter stating his disbelief in standard Christian dogma. This same candidate took an exacto knife to the New Testament and cut out all of the stories of miracles and the references to Christ’s divinity. He advised his nephew not to be afraid to doubt the existence of God.

Let’s face it, this guy is unelectable. I mean, when this gets out, there go the Red States, right? To be historically accurate, I should point out that only Jefferson’s letter to Peter Carr was written while he was active in public life. He was in retirement when he hacked and slashed the Bible and corresponded with William Short.

But there were suspicions about Jefferson when he was seeking high office. During the 1800 campaign, Jefferson’s enemies called him an infidel and warned that if elected he would order that all Bibles be collected and burned.

I submit to you that Jefferson, if he ran for office today, could not be elected dog-catcher. He placed great emphasis on human reason and science. His outlook was fundamentally secular. Ironically, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence might today be seen as somehow un-American.

And what of Madison? After a youthful burst of religious fervor, during which he considered studying for the ministry, Madison’s ardor cooled considerably. His leading biographer, Ralph Ketcham, notes that Madison never seemed very religious and refers to him as a “deist.”

Madison opposed military chaplains, government-issued religious proclamations and federal subsidies for religion. He was so concerned about the separation of church and state that during his presidency, he killed a plan to conduct a national census. The census takers planned to count people by profession, and Madison felt that totaling up the clergy would be problematic.

Madison did these things because he respected the value of secular government, not because he had some vendetta against religion. Today it would be easy for a TV preacher to paint him as an anti-religion fanatic.

The second reason why our rejection of secularism is misguided is that it leads to the elevation of symbolism over substance in religious matters.

American society has become so diverse that some old rules governing the interaction between religion and the larger society no longer apply. In the post Civil War period it was common for people to refer to the United States as a Christian nation with a Christian heritage based on Christian principles.

This type of talk continued well into the 20th century, but somewhere along the line it became problematic. The term “Judeo” was added to Christian, and our nation, its heritage and its principles suddenly became “Judeo-Christian.”

But even that has not solved the problem, especially as members of religions outside those traditions increase in numbers in America. Thus, the religion endorsed publicly by government tends to be of the most generic and watered- down sort.

Things like “In God We Trust” on the currency and “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance do not stretch back to the time of the founders. The use of “In God We Trust” on coinage did not start until the Civil War and was not mandated on paper money until the 1950s. “Under God” was inserted into the Pledge in 1954.

These actions have been challenged in court. With a few controversial exceptions, courts have tended to employ a most curious form of logic to defend them. Thus, a national expression of the country’s faith in God and a national declaration that we are under his rule have been declared not really religious at all. These statements about God, the courts have declared, are forms of “ceremonial deism,” the constant repetition of which drains them of religious significance.

The statement “In Jesus Christ We Trust” on our tens and twenties would obviously be unconstitutional. To compel school children to declare every day that our country is “under Jesus” would never pass muster. Yet a more generic expression of faith survives, supposedly because it is no longer an expression of faith.

This defies all logic. To accept it, we must agree that words do not mean what they plainly do mean. The phrases were added to currency and slipped into the Pledge for very specific reasons – reasons that have nothing to do with the endorsement of an imaginary religion that no one practices called “ceremonial deism.”

No one is willing to ask the hard question: How does any of this help religion? How is the government’s endorsement of the most bland, generic and watered-down expressions of faith (which, we are told, really isn’t about faith at all) good for religion? How many people have been brought to a life-changing encounter with religion because they saw “In God We Trust” on a nickel? Do schoolchildren even think about what it means to say “one nation under god” when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance or do they just view the event as merely a daily ritual to get through so the day can get started?

Too many in the religious community have blithely glossed over these questions. They don’t seem bothered by the rote repetition of religious code words to the point where they have lost all meaning. This attitude is especially surprising coming from fundamentalists, who claim to cherish religion so much. If that is so, why, when a court declares that affirming belief in god is mere “ceremonial deism” that no longer has any meaning, do they applaud instead of taking to the streets?

Thirdly, the acceptance of mere slogans linking church and state lures us into a dangerous place where mere words are exchanged for the heavy lifting of actually creating a better society – as religious people are commanded to do by their very own holy books.

How easy it is to simply assert, over and over again, that we are a religious people. How easy it is to etch it on our coins and put it in our Pledge. Any nation or state can do that. Even Nazis soldiers wore belt buckles embossed with the phrase “God with us.” Yet no one would seriously argue that he was.

The measure of a just society is not found in how it manipulates symbols or terminology. It is found in how it treats its people. Post Civil War America claimed to be a “Christian nation,” yet it disenfranchised an entire class of people, permitted rampant anti-Semitism and encouraged, not just tolerated, a chasm between the haves and have-nots. For many years, the federal government saw maintaining that chasm as its highest duty.

There are those who claim we are a Christian nation today or that at the very least God has a special place in his heart for the United States. I would ask what we have done to deserve that special recognition.

In Matthew’s 25th chapter, Jesus speaks of the hungry, the homeless, the stranger, the prisoner and the sick and challenges his followers with this phrase, “As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.”

In Matthew 13:22 Christ asserts that riches are like thorns that choke up the good seed. In Matthew 8:20 he laments that even the son of God has no place to lay his head. In one of the New Testament’s most famous passages, Matthew 19:16-21, Jesus advises a young man of wealth who wishes to follow him to “sell what thou has and give it to the poor and thou shall have treasure in heaven.”

I’m not aware of any religious tradition that says it’s okay to ignore the poor. One of the five pillars of Islam is zakat ul-fitr, a contribution given to the poor during Ramadan. The Torah commands Jews to provide for those in need and even recommends a figure of ten percent of income. Buddhism places the responsibility for alleviating poverty on all of society – rulers and citizens alike.

How easy is it for us to simply assert that we are religious nation because our quarters and dollars say so rather than deal with the fact that 12.5 percent of all Americans live below the poverty line and that poverty among children is the highest is has been in 10 years? How easy it is to listen to the president call for National Days of Prayer after a horrific hurricane instead of asking why so many poor people were left in the path of the storm to begin with.

Ironically, the nations that have the best-crafted safety nets are also the nations that are de facto secular. In the United States, we allow competing theologies to argue public policy with one another while elected political leaders eagerly take sides. Was Jesus a socialist or a capitalist? Did he advocate a welfare state or bootstrap capitalism? The argument goes on and nothing is done as the state gropes for the proper theological backing to justify its policies.

After 800 years of war, poverty and death, much of it brought about by warring religious factions, European nations simply stopped listening to clerics with political agendas. Then they cleared the decks and started solving social ills.

Finally, the rejection of secularism encourages religion to play a political role in ways that are divisive and unhealthy to the body politic.

Religion has always sought a public voice, and despite the claims of the Religious Right, no systematic effort exists to neuter this voice. In fact, it is often welcomed and encouraged in the public square.

This is not to say that the views of religious groups, when brought into the public square, are immune from criticism. Far from it. Some of the policy objectives sought by religious denominations and their allied pressure groups are quite controversial.

For example, Religious Right groups seek to ban all abortions and roll back rights for gays and lesbians. These are controversial positions. When they announce them and push for them in the public arena of debate, opponents push back. The same thing happens to liberal religious groups. Many ministers who have championed gun control have been attacked by the NRA.

Who expects anything else? The policy initiatives sought by religious groups are often controversial. They must expect spirited opposition because they will get it. Too often, religious groups complain that this opposition is an attempt to shout them down or take away their voice. It’s not. It’s merely an attempt to present another point of view.

Contrary to popular belief, nothing in the Constitution or the IRS Code prohibits houses of worship from addressing political issues. They do it all the time. In fact, the First Amendment protects that right.

IRS rules do state that all non-profit organizations holding the 501 c3 designation may not endorse or oppose candidates for public office. The prohibition is limited to candidates, not issues. It is a condition of accepting the substantial benefit of tax exemption. If a church finds the regulation onerous, it is free to give up its tax exemption.

If the right of religious groups to address political issues is secure, then what problems are presented by the intersection of religion and politics? Why is this intertwining sometimes a threat to secularism?

The American people are ill served by groups that use religion as a cover for partisan politics. Some Religious Right organizations do not hesitate to distribute biased campaign attack material disguised as “voter guides,” accuse faithful church members of being “anti-Christian bigots” and excuse any ethical lapses on the part of favored candidates while attacking a disfavored candidate for the same thing.

Some groups also have a reckless habit of assuming the right to speak for the entirety of Christendom. American Christianity is very diverse and runs the gamut both theologically and politically. Yet some organizations proclaim to be representing the “Christian” position on abortion, gay rights, religion in public schools and a host of other issues.

At the end of the day, politics and the job of governing the nation are secular matters best left in hands of secular leaders who recognize that they lead a nation of many different religious and philosophical points of view. We have in recent years seen claims that border on the absurd: that there is a “Christian” or biblical position on the repeal of the estate tax or that our system of government is somehow based on the Bible. I once heard a conservative Christian activist explain, with a straight face, that our government’s three branches were inspired by the trinity.

Such claims, are, I believe, a desperate attempt to deny the obvious: that ours is a secular state, that it was meant to be a secular state and it is best that it remain a secular state.

I find the fact that this is controversial statement remarkable. If history teaches us anything, it is that the state is a poor vehicle for the promotion of religion. The development of the secular state was one of the great leaps forward for humankind. It helped end centuries of religious war and bloodshed. It put a stop to government meddling in one of the most intimate and private matters humans experience: how to relate to god or indeed whether to relate to god at all.

True, the secular state brings a measure of freedom that comes with responsibility. Houses of worship are responsible for raising the money for their own upkeep. They have no right to expect the taxpayer to help. Public schools are for secular education. If you want your children to pray, teach them to pray at home or at your church, synagogue or temple. No one should expect the state to promote their religion. Why not? It’s not the government’s job. And if the government tried to do it, they would do it poorly.

This means believers have to go the extra mile to support their houses of worship and make sure the faith is passed on to the next generation. If they fail, no government bailout awaits.

I’d like to conclude by doing something that’s considered religiously incorrect these days and that is to quote Roberts Ingersoll. The self-appointed guardians of our national morality would rather not acknowledge that a man like Ingersoll ever existed, after all, he was a freethinker.

Anyone who aspires to a role in public life knows better than to quote Ingersoll. You can quote the founders all day long, you can cite the Bible. Shakespeare is generally safe, and Alexis de Tocqueville is always a hit. Infidels like Ingersoll are best avoided.

Luckily, I don’t aspire to a role in public life, so here it goes. To set the stage: Ingersoll wrote “God in the Constitution” in 1890, during a time when there really was a move afoot to put God in the Constitution. A group called the National Reform Association had been pushing it for years – and not just God. They wanted to rewrite the preamble to the Constitution to acknowledge both “Almighty God” and “the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations” and state that ours was an officially “Christian government.”

So at the time Ingersoll wrote this essay, the issue was in no way abstract. It was a real threat. Ingersoll observed, with some droll humor:

“It is proposed to acknowledge a God who is the lawful and rightful Governor of nations; the one who ordained the powers that be. If this God is really the Governor of nations, it is not necessary to acknowledge him in the Constitution. This would not add to his power. If he governs all nations now, he has always controlled the affairs of men.

“Having this control, why did he not see to it that he was recognized in the Constitution of the United States? If he had the supreme authority and neglected to put himself in the Constitution, is not this, at least, prima facie evidence that he did not desire to be there?…Is it possible to flatter the Infinite with a constitutional amendment? The Confederate States acknowledged God in their constitution, and yet they were overwhelmed by a people in whose organic law no reference to God is made. All the kings of the earth acknowledge the existence of God, and God is their ally; and this belief in God is used as a means to enslave and rob, to govern and degrade the people whom they call their subjects.”

Ingersoll is obviously not going to carry the Red States either. But the point he makes is one well worth remembering: Religion is not the last refuge of a scoundrel, it’s often the first. Any government can claim the mantle of religion even as it fails to live up the promises inherent in any faith or twists them for its own ends.

The secular state, scorned by fundamentalists, made out to be a bogeyman by the religiously correct, is not a cure-all for every ail of modern society. It is merely the guarantor of the rights of every citizen, religious and non-religious. The secular state does not guarantee any religious group success. Their doctrines may fail to attract. They may be riven by internal factions. They may splinter, fragment and collapse. The secular state defends against none of this.

What the secular state does do is offer the promise of opportunity to all those who seek answers to life’s big questions: How did we get here? Are we here for a reason? How are we to live? It is a framework for the various philosophies and religions to speak out loud and make their best case. It offers none of them subsidy or support, yet it secures the equal rights of all.

We, as a nation, are free to turn our backs on that promise. We do so at our own peril.

Thank you.