Church and State: Let’s Keep Them Separate

By Alan S. Miller

Marin County, California
July 19, 2005

Although I might have voted for Jesse Jackson if he had ever been nominated as the Democratic candidate for President, I have always been uncomfortable with office seekers who attach the prefix “Reverend” or any other “holy” title to their name.

“ That fresh air blowing through the tradition-bound nation states had begun to close the door on the ancient tyrannies of the church ... ”

With most people, I firmly believe in the idea of the separation of church and state. Although never including those precise words, the Constitution affirms the need to keep the church out of the government’s business and vice versa.

The framers of the Bill of Rights made the matter clear in their First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Although many of our colonial statesmen were nominal Christians, the intellectual focus for most of them was the new enlightenment in Europe. That fresh air blowing through the tradition-bound nation states had begun to close the door on the ancient tyrannies of the church and the established political orders.

The last thing America’s creative statesmen would have wanted was any identification of the state with a particular religious philosophy nor any formal interconnection between the two. The great secular building blocks of democracy would be sufficient to support the new nation.

The framers of our Constitution would have been appalled had they anticipated the attempts in later decades of people within the religious community to dictate policy norms and behavioral standards to the citizenry at large.

Perhaps the tendency is inevitable, but I do not care for religious leaders presuming to have some form of special insight into how to run the larger civil society—whether they be Mullahs in Afghanistan, Ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq, Rabbi’s in Israel or Reverends in the United States. The people in the world have already suffered too much from the consequences of that unholy alliance.

And it seems to me that one of the biggest threats to the health of both American civil society and our religious freedom is the growing overlap between the state and the church and the rise of a new conservative appropriation of the religious dialogue in America.

Although Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams often invoked the name of God, these were essentially people who understood the nation would be strongest when free and separate choice in politics and religion was affirmed.

The problem of state and church overlap has arisen when religious leaders, in their belief that their nation has been specially blessed by God, presume to believe that they also know better than everyone else how the nation and the world should be organized.

Being thankful for the good things that have come to the country is one thing. Strutting about in self-righteous arrogance and trying to impose a particular religious coloration on the rest of us is quite another.

Most Americans are both patriotic and religious. A majority of us have at least a pro forma connection with organized religion. Almost without exception, we are also most often proud of our country.

Patriotism has also caused some of us—today and in the past—to criticize our leadership when it has led us into what we felt to be unwise national policies or unjust wars.

Much of conservative Christianity today seems once again to have confused the religious and civic symbols. The cross and the flag seem to overlap in too many of the pronouncements of evangelical religious folk.

There is plenty of room for believers and non-believers to try to clean up the violence and the ills of inequality that have infected so much of today’s America. It is always appropriate for people of faith to profess their beliefs and values.

But we need be cautious when we attempt to mix the symbols of the cross and the flag and presume that there is a kind of moral equivalence of the two.

Consider some of the judgments being cast at our society by conservative religious activists.

• We are told that we are evil when we allow a woman who has been brain dead for thirteen years to peacefully pass away.
• We are told that a woman should have no right to choose whether or not she should have control over her own body.
• We are told that family planning and birth control are evil and that condoms must never be used in spite of the fact that the use of condoms has saved millions of people from the scourges of AIDS.
• We are told that it is better to let hundreds of thousands of surplus and unwanted frozen embryos be destroyed by fertility clinics rather than used by medical researchers to seek cures for the worst of our human diseases.
• We are criticized when we suggest in our educational programs that the earth is more than six thousand years old, that homo sapiens is the end result of an amazing process of evolutionary selection over more than 13 billion years, and that the earth is really not flat.
• We are told that the text-books of all of our schools should elevate religious mythology to the same place on the intellectual pedestal as universally accepted scientific evidence.

We need to be able to have the freedom to practice our religion as we please so long as that practice does not overly intrude upon the religious or social values of other Americans.

Too many of us have forgotten that central premise of American democracy — that church and state have their own distinct spheres and must be kept separate. The combination of religious and governmental pride and prejudice has always led to trouble in the past for individuals and for the nation.

Copyright © 2005 Alan S. Miller
Last updated: July 30, 2005