04/13/2021
From Corey Miller, Professor Church and State: What separation does and does not mean along with some implications (church closures and the new religion seeking to conflate rather than to separate church and state).
First, religion and politics often don't mix well. But, then again, religion and politics can often mix well. Barring a theocracy and actually hearing from God, there are plenty of examples of abuse. But religion has been inseparable from the foundation of American politics and for good reason. If God exists, then theist ethics is on the table. Politics is a form of ethics, ethics for the public good. No, it is not a science (never has been until scientism became a thing and names changed in order to survive the guillotine of academic fitness. Intelligent religion (e.g., Christian religion) provides the meta foundation for ethics that politics needs otherwise politics becomes the ethics of me or ethics of us, i.e., whatever is culturally popular or "correct" at the moment. Are there normative ethical systems that aren't Christian that could provide the foundation? In theory, yes. In practice, let's debate it and I submit that they turn out inferior (almost all turn on what I'd call principle based relativism even if not radical relativism). That is, most normative systems lack objective moral features even if they supply an algorithm for determining in that system what is considered right from wrong. This is not unimportant since legislation IS, in fact, the legislation of morality, someone's conception of the public good. Legality ought not determine morality; morality ought to determine legality.
Second, as a matter of our history, the infamous "wall" of separation (not located in the founding documents but in a letter from Jefferson in 1802) could never have meant what secular humanists misconstrue it as meaning and whose meaning our country has largely adopted (i.e. religion is utterly privatized unless given permission by the state). Why is such an interpretation false? Three reasons and please note I do not think America was a "Christian nation" even if it was pervasively influenced by Christian thought:
(1) The founders, unlike Europe at the time, were vibrantly religious and the interpretation of the social contract (i.e. Constitution), while not mentioning "Jesus" so as to be Christian, was viewed explicitly from a theistic lens ("endowed by our Creator") yet impregnated with implicit Christian theism. It was secular, in a sense, but not the sense in which secular is juxtaposed to religion. It was secular in juxtaposition to "sectarian" (i.e. it wasn't privileging a particular denomination or sect as in European abusive state-church models). That is, "Congress shall make no law respecting an [sectarian] establishment of religion," AND also, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
(2) While European Enlightenment thinking with regard to the fact/value dichotomy or the faith/reason dichotomy was a thing, that really was a century later and so wouldn't have substantially factored into the founders' minds. So it would be anachronistic to project on the founders this interpretation. Indeed, anecdotally, virtually every university by 1840 (now bastions of secular humanism) had a president that was also a member of the clergy and by 1890 church and chapel attendance were still mandatory at every university more than a century after USA was founded.
(3) The French Revolution (utter failure and destructively so) was anti-God, but the American Revolution was pro-God. Often attributed to (but probably not historical) John Quincy Adams is this alleged statement that is representative: "The highest glory of the American revolution was this. It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of Christianity and the principles of civil government." This didn't mean theocracy. It was "principles." America was never intended to be a Christian theocracy, but it was intended to be guided by natural rights, natural law, as consistent with a Christian morality. The question wasn't whether God and society stay in their own separate domains, but how church and state, both viewed as institutions of God in accordance with Protestant thinking, operate in two different jurisdictions. Remember, it was Christians, not atheists, who argued for the separation. They define what that meant/means. For example, the emperor has the proper juridical authority to raise taxes, raise an army, execute, etc. The ecclesiastical authority has the proper juridical authority to serve communion, excommunicate, baptize, circumcise, etc. Neither should invade the other jurisdiction. But note that neither church nor state is separated from God, not a godless church nor a godless state. From whence comes "inalienable rights"? Darwin didn't exist in 1776 and can't establish them anyhow.
Now, as to the proper roles elaborated upon from a Christian perspective, which is what the founding was connected to even if secular/non-sectarian (NB: even the deists went along and were still a form of theists). The Church is not and never was a theocracy. That was a separate covenant, the Mosaic covenant, which guided the geopolitical nation of Israel (and much of its temporal ethics restricted to that Covenant). The church is not a geopolitical entity, hence not a theocracy. It was Christian thinking that inspired the Constitutional Republic, a social contract. But the New Testament has an extremely narrow view of the state for all Christians. It is denoted as a "minister of justice" (Romans 13:1-4), to maintain law and order. It is not the minister of compassion or "social justice," by whatever interpretation. That, by contrast, belongs to the jurisdiction of the church (or... in our increasingly pluralistic society, religion and/or private charity). There is *little* role for social justice unless it means 'off with the head' as a means of societal justice where someone gets what they deserve in order to maintain law and order. The church, by contrast, is not to be the minister of justice. It is the minister of the Gospel and compassion. Contemporary notions of social justice (Critical Social Justice, whose Marxist understanding even many Christians have naively imbibed) wants to collapse the jurisdictions of church and state into one whereby the state is the arm of compassion and the church is subsumed under the demands of the state and even regulated by it, even while in its closet to where it is increasingly told it belongs.
While Liberals were moving in this big government direction, once the group that taunted conservatives with "don't impose your morality on me," now it has become the group imposing its morality and conservatives are wanting to simply be left alone. And, actually, liberalism has largely succumbed to a more Marxist understanding (to which some liberals are resisting and rightly so). Many progressive Christians aren't quite sure where they belong in that mix asking naively WWJD and applying that to government. Either way, we're certainly ceding much of the jurisdiction of the church to the jurisdiction of the state.
Here is where things are getting a bit dangerous. The Church of Warnock and the Church of Biden. Warnock (pastor and now GA senator) is a "Liberation theologian" which is a Marxist-Christian hybrid in that order. He and many adopting Critical Social Justice want to conflate church and state with a new view of "church" and "Christianity." Biden follows the stoic philosopher, Seneca, who said that "religion is true for the masses, false for the elites, and useful for the politicians." Churches can now be shut down on grounds of something being a "national pandemic." First, Christians ought to obey govt unless govt forbids them from doing that which God requires or requires them to do that which God forbids (Acts 5:29). But Hebrews tells us not to forsake assembling together (Heb 10:25). "Assembling" seems to be more than Zoom, but that is an issue some claim is up for debate. If it is more, then the Constitution's first amendment stands in addition to God's Word, which stands. It's an interesting issue and I can appreciate the tension.
But now Biden has said “No Amendment to the Constitution is absolute.” Huh!? Anti-American or a loop hole? And he says this in the context that now “Gun violence is a public health epidemic." Notice the word public health epidemic, much like national emergency such as a pandemic? So, they can take authoritarian action with the second amendment just as they have with church meetings... and frankly it becomes the future mantra for anything governmental power desires. The First Amendment is first for a reason... and there is a reason that the right to bear arms follows quickly on the first. "Give me liberty or give me death" (Patrick Henry, 1775).
Watch closely and be part of the resistance where necessary and helpful. Liberals and conservatives, secularists and religionists, should together watch carefully as a Marxist power is moving both within secularism and within "Christianity" in America. We are in a soft revolution.
Three good resources: (1) The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty, and (2) The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom, and (3) The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics: God's Name in Vain.
