Separation of Church and State - Essay Example

Separation of Church and State Introduction American attitudes concerning church-state relations are subject to two conflicting forces. First, Americans are very religious. In comparison with citizens of other industrialized nations, Americans report an extraordinarily high degree of religious belief, association, and practice. This means that, at times, there is a strong enticement on the part of some citizens to transform their religious principles into public policy. Specifically, if religion is a significant influence in a citizen's life, that citizen seems more probable to seek government support of religiously based values. Second, and perhaps on the contrary, the notion of a constitutional "separation of church and state" (a phrase that appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution) is an influential symbol in American political discourse. Though there is little agreement relating to the precise meaning of such separation, the principle itself is not normally challenged in American politics (Jelen, 2000). Thus, Separation of church and state was definitely not an invention of the Enlightenment political theory that might have prompted similar thoughts in the mind of the respected Thomas Jefferson. Certainly it misleads to analyze the lively experiment in political terms at all, for the Providence regime was just as certainly and decisively rooted in Protestant theologies as was the Puritans' city on a hill. The encompassing description of liberty of conscience was the systematizing principle of society, and it produced a kind of severance of church and state. It is thus significant to keep in mind that the cleavage was meant to protect the church and the soul from the debasing influence of the magistrate, to protect the garden of church from corruption in the boondocks of the world. The quest for spiritual purity quite factually led into the political realm, where he was basically traditional, if not authoritarian. This priority of the religious is clearly evident in the legislative explanation for the revised 1798 Act Relative to Religious Freedom, and the Maintenance of Ministers: Whereas Almighty, God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitation, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and is a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his almighty power to do that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry these temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an appropriation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labors for the instruction of mankind. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_vsrf.html Main Body Presently a culture that is not only spinning unrestrained but also evolving in ways that many of them consider actually argumentatively to their religious vision. The hostility matters because that culture particularly through its media and public schools tends to send messages at odds with what numerous faithful parents want to teach their children. Could it be that we tend to ask the question backward? Presume that the culture and its creature, the states, are making it harder to practice a particular vision of God's will or to raise children to practice it. If so, then debatably it is the state that presses, not the religion that resists, that is breaching the separation of church and state. Concerning concrete applications of the First Amendment clauses on religion, public attitudes are more difficult (Cohen, 1998). Regarding questions of religious founding, numerous Americans emerge to distinguish among public displays of religious symbols such as Christmas embellishments on public property, financial support for religious institutions, and religious socialization in public schools. Free Exercise attitudes were in the same way structured, with respondents making differences among the Free Exercise rights of groups they measured dangerous (e.g., "cultists," Satanists, and the like); groups they believed strange but undisruptive (e.g., students who sought to wear religious attire in public schools); and immigrant groups. Attitudes concerning real issues of religious concern were organized around an activity-based heuristic, whereas attitudes on the way to free exercise of religion seemed planned around a group-based belief system: In other words, with respect to questions of religious establishment, respondents cared most about what it was that religiously provoked people were doing. In the area of free exercise, what seemed to matter most was who was exercising religious freedom. This obvious inconsistency is not imputable to a lack of complexity among mass publics (Converse 1964), because the attitude structures of various elite populations (leaders in politics, business, religion, and communications) are related to those of ordinary citizens. Attitudes expressed toward church-state relations are not essentially constant in either group. I do not mean to suggest that there is no room for legitimate controversy on the tax code and the role of religion. But I am not sure there is room for very much. Our jurisprudence of church and state has turns almost silly, a spoof on itself, struggling to enforce a historical fantasy that it was the power of religion, not the power of the state, that the Founders so feared that they wrote a passage about religion into the First Amendment. The contemporary way is to treat the figurative separation of church and state as a protection for a secular public space against religion's incursions, although the idea of a worldly public space is a late-twentieth-century invention, and the idea that there exist some sphere of life into which religion must not incur would have surprised the authors of the Constitution. As Wald asserts, “Religion and anti-religion appear to be important enough to assure their places on the public agenda, but not strong enough to dictate public policy on issues of major concern” (Kenneth D. Wald, 1992). "Separation of church and state," walled or other wide, is an idea possible only in societies that (1) have evidently differentiated the sacred from the irreligious, where God's due and Caesar's are distinguished, (2) have a state in the Western sense that is evidently illustrious from society and culture, an idea of state that begins only with the sixteenth century, and (3) that organize religion into some real institution properly denoted a church. These factors unite only in modern, chiefly Western, societies. That such a separation, where comprehensible, must be thought desirable is quite likely simply a product of a twentieth-century Western secularism. In other cultures, such as the theater state explained by Clifford Gertz in his Negara, separation of church and state is as fathomable as a lecture to a blind person on color. The point is that there are such limits on conjecture in every social circumstance, and speculation about the purposive ordering of social norms that are lawmaking is equally bounded. Getting to that border line is a matter of unpacking the widespread sentiment noted. Lieven writes that “America is home to by far the largest and most powerful forces of conservative religion in the developed world. . . . Its origins are pre-enlightenment, and its mentality to a very great extent is anti-enlightenment.”(2004) Andrew Murphy asserts in a magazine article that a possibility seriously would suggest that we worry less about whether our political discourse fits the purported intentions of our Founders, and more about whether our political or legal practices accord with an evolving notion of the requirements of religious liberty. This possibility may lie close to the reason why Jefferson comes in for such criticism from Hamburger: if anyone in early American history embodies an unwillingness to defer to the past, and embodies the notion that a constitution needs to serve the living rather than remaining bound by the intentions of the dead, it is Jefferson (Andrew R. Murphy, 2002). It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken of constitutional history, but unfortunately the establishment clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years. Thomas Jefferson was of course in France at the time the constitutional amendments known as the Bills of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the amendments were passed by Congress . . . There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build the "wall of separation" that was constitutionalized in Everson (Andrew R. Murphy, 2002). The negations and discrepancies in the Court's religion clause doctrine are not just a challenge for academics (Stephen L. Carter, 1993). As the majority of Americans sustain the general principle of separation of church and state, most strongly differ with the strictness and vigor with which the Supreme Court has situated and policed the boundary (Herbert McCloskey & Aida Brill, 1983). The incapability of most of the American populace to understand why the Constitution needs the doctrine that the Court has formulated has made its religion clause decisions among the most fervently disputed and widely ignored in grassroots America (Philip B. Kurland, 1984). As criticism of Supreme Court decisions is only just a new phenomenon, attacks on the Court's religion clause jurisprudence stand out as a special case. Since the Court deserted close review of economic due process rights in 1937, few areas of constitutional doctrine have thrived like religion clause jurisprudence in concurrently maintaining internal discrepancy, deride by commentators and lack of popular support over such a long period of time. Several of the most respected Justices to serve on the Court Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, John Harlan, William Brennan, and Lewis Powell, among others served throughout this period, and as a group the Justices have always represented several of the most competent practitioners and judges in the profession. In the Supreme Court's religion clause decisions, the public religious dissertation of the nineteenth century is not so much dislocated as erased; it is as if the American nineteenth century had never happened. The decisions present the discussion of secular neutrality as the modern termination of a historically constant process of secularization and privatization that began with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment before being exported to the colonies (Donald A. Giannella, 1967). The universal absence in the majority opinions of any gratitude of the long and vivacious tradition of religious discourse in American public life, and the legal and social practices that engendered it, marks the violence that is always present where one account of the world overcomes and overwhelms another. As Walter Benjamin observed, history is written by the winners of these conflicts (1968). Putnam (2000: 19) introduces the idea: The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a sense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital. However, the trailing discourse, while distinctly defeated, was not wholly bested. It is as if public religious discourse were determined into the mountains by public secularism, which then determined that it was not worth the trouble to complete the muddled task of total eradication. As a consequence, religious discourse now makes periodic, guerilla-like forays into the public area of secular impartiality. Those advocating public religious discourse draw power and support from the fact that the Court's decisions that are conversant by secular neutrality enjoy negligible public support. The ongoing vitality of groups that advocate public religious discourse apparent itself as political pressure for alignments of government and religion not distinct those that were common during the nineteenth century in the United States, such as religion as a matter of study and even adoration in public education, equal access to public facilities and benefits for religious individuals and organizations, public funding of private religious education, public and typically Christian prayer, and the appropriation or backing by government of religious again, usually Christian symbols in public and political life. According to Lieven, “American culture historically has embodied a strong strain of isolationism . . . which should not be understood simply as a desire to escape from the world.” Rather, “[it] forms another face of both American chauvinism and American messianic, in the form of a belief in America as a unique city on a hill.” As such, America feels duty bound to be in absolute control “and must under no circumstances subject itself to foreign control or even advice.”(2004) Several of these alignments have been nullified by the Supreme Court, but a number have been upheld, particularly since the eighties as the growing effect of a generation of Republican appointments to the Court changed its ideological center to the right. Several commentators have detained upon these decisions as substantiation of a weakening to former days when religion clause doctrine vindicated persecution of non-Christians and privileges for Protestants (William Van Alstyne, 1984). Although this criticism is misdirected: such has been the power of the discourse of secular neutrality and, possibly as well, the depth of the social and edifying changes in the United States during the last century those legitimate justifications for alignments of religion and government that are challenging within this discourse have however been grounded almost completely within it. Awful predictions to the differing notwithstanding, the Courts have been incapable or unwilling to reclaim the religious discourse of the nineteenth century to validate modern church-state interactions. One consequence has been a jumble of accommodations decisions that protect close alignments of church and state with arguments drawn from the extreme discourse of secular neutrality that was primarily used to conquer such alignments. Below the circumstances, the phenomenon of contemporary religion clause doctrine is not that it is largely contradictory and illogical, but that any consistency or rationality has survived within it at all. If, in general and all in all, the state of affairs in the free exercise subdivision of the religion guarantees vis-à-vis, state interference is in fact quite clear, safe, and contentedly satisfactory in the civil libertarian viewpoint under our Constitution, we come to a somewhat diverse situation as we turn to the establishment clause, the volatile issue of the separation of church and state. For if that clause, "Congress will make no law respecting an establishment of religion," (Amendment I) is commanding in tone and clear in syntax, it is inevitably unclear in its intention. What does it mean? Just what does it forbid? References to history would seem simply to intensify the riddle, and because the concern and free exercise clauses are closely associated, the complexities of establishment simply cannot be understood if they are treated in segregation from the central problem of religion, of liberty itself. Therefore it is hardly astounding that the establishment clause has established to be a "riddle within an enigma," a Pandora's Box, and an emotion-charged issue of public policy and public law. As a minimum to a degree this is astonishing, for the intent of those American revolutionary and post revolutionary leaders for religious freedom and a non-establishment church, or more specifically churches -headed by that trio of great Virginians, Jefferson, Madison, and Mason, and during an earlier day and on a somewhat diverse level, would seem to be very clear certainly; to wit that there must not be an established church, such as Virginia's Anglican church used to be ante Jefferson's seminal Disestablishment Statute, and that there must never be "the chosen position of a favored Church." One could hardly attribute any doubt, whatsoever, to the intentions of the reigning policy of Jefferson's great Disestablishment Bill of 1786. Bellah et. al. notes that that Americans often justify their morals and values on the basis of their own idiosyncratic preferences. "All we can do is refer to the chains of consequences and ask if our actions prove useful or consistent in light of our own value-systems. All we can appeal to in relationships with others is their self-interest, likewise enlightened, or their intuitive sympathies" (Bellah et. all 76). Yet, as we look about us and reflect on the modern status of the relationship between state and church and churches, something evidently must have happened to alter the tenor and the intention of those noble principles. One would not be awfully far from the mark if one were to sum matters up, rather cynically perhaps, but not really far-fetched, by concluding that once again that ubiquitous and invincible alliance of lawyers and politicians has done us in. though, such a conclusion depends, of course, upon one's point of view, and, be it predetermined at once, that point of view differs both radically and severely. Since these "reflections" attempt to address themselves to the intrinsic lines and limits of the religion clauses, fairness now consequently dictates at least a brief, if essentially sketchy, examination of what has happened to the separation concept throughout the two centuries since the Virginia statesmen penned their concerns. What has happened beyond any shade of a doubt is that Jefferson's concept of the "wall of separation between Church and State" has been evidently eroded. Whether that is "good" or "bad" depends again, certainly, upon one's point of view, both on philosophical and pragmatic grounds. Be that as it may, in reacting to the ongoing fact of life of continuing demands for association by the state in terms of financial aid to churches, church facilities, and most noticeably, to parochial elementary and secondary schools and church-affiliated institutions of higher learning, the magistrate, in its role as ultimate legitimate interpreter cum an arbiter, has based its sundry decisions on what might be identified as roughly three principal theories of separations that have come to be advanced as more or less attuned with the exhortations of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Though, throughout the past several decades’ new religious movements have mushroomed in the United States, their exceptional growth having become a major feature of contemporary American religious life. Several religions have emerged and departed within the span of a decade, while others have established sustained appeal and remarkably institutional and numerical growth. Typically, the growth of new religions has been convoyed by intense missionary activity and a lifestyle of fundamental separation of converts from the mainstream of American civil and religious life, the latter often resultant in the estrangement of youthful converts from their parents and their family's religious tradition. Extensive social antagonism toward new religions has mainly been borne out or secular interests. Government activities must be combined with religions that require close scrutiny in order to insure that religious liberty operates without discrimination. When government instantly initiates such action against religions, defenders of religious liberty need to heave their voices in concern. Huntington argued that the 21st century will be shaped not by ideology or big-power maneuvering but by the immutable force of culture. "Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together," he wrote. "Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart . . . Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilization." What's more, civilizations clash--which essentially are "tribal conflicts on a global scale"--are likely to be highly intense and very bloody (2005). Yet I believe that the religious must rarely opt for compulsion (which is all that policy is, no matter who creates it) as a means of arousing a cranky and disinclined world to the higher truth that nearly every religion believes it can teach. The biblical custom of a prophetic witness, being vigorous in criticism of the sovereign but doing it from without somewhat than from within, still seems to symbolize religious activism at its best. Religion can inspire people to do great things. It can also motivate them to entrust great crimes. Those who fear religion, like those who love it, have motives for their sentiments which are another reason for religionists who are detained by great ideas to be prayerful in their activism and to ensue with care. Yet, taking care or not, it is vital to proceed. Over the centuries, numerous religions have chosen to draw back from the infectivity of the world. Some of these have thrived, but numerous others have withered. In recent years, numerous evangelical Christian activists have returned to their rebellious roots, calling for disconnection from culture, the (temporary) abandonment of politics, and the expansion of parallel institutions for the raising of their families and the living of their lives. Others have queried this call, determined not to give up a struggle they believe vitally to the nation's future. The abolitionists chose the path of work in God's creation relatively than standing back and concentrating only on personal deliverance. But so did the prohibitionists. What matters, certainly, is that religionists considering public activism spend most of their time in the garden, to be certain of what it is that the Lord requires. If the eventual decision is to enter the wilderness, they should not make the mistake of persistent their too long-not as they might lose a battle, or even a war, but as they might lose themselves, together with any serious sense of a God-given mission. To take on with the culture is to strike a discomfited balance, straddling the wall of separation that keeps the garden without yielding to the temptations of the boondocks. The risks of either course are plain. In the end, a religion that believes in its own truth must move as that truth directs. If God calls the believer to witness, then the believer should go into the backwoods and witness. The simple and obvious message that the religious usually and Christians’ particularly-must does not permit the world to forget is this: God is present. God has not died or gone off on vacation or lost concern in his creation and the human beings he formed. There is no direction in which we can turn, no theoretical shield behind which we can cower, no legitimate judgment we can assert, to evade God's demanding gaze. There is no structure we can upright that God cannot topple, no physical law we can determine that God could not change, no ethical argument we can plan that God could not refute. From God's perpetual presence, we must learn modesty. The religious should not retreat before the evangelizing armies of the secular. We must neither settle for reducing our faith to the "God of the gaps" destined by Bonhoeffer, nor accept the weird proposition that religion is completely private, thus not entitled to a place at the democratic dinner table where we squabble over staid matters. We should oppose the pressure to "translate" the teachings of our faith into a less influential and untranscendent secular language that is intended to forestall the radicalism of the outsider's ideas. By persisting on God's presence, the religious can become meticulous objectors to the escalating effort to conscript the entire nation into the service of the bland yet a treacherous ethic of a self-fulfillment, an ethic that longs ago asserted both major political parties. Conclusion The great Western religious traditions call for the denial of the self. Life in God's presence means, basically, life lived in the knowledge that we owe the reality of our existence not to an accident but to Divine Will. The compulsions that knowledge creates we can never fulfill, which is why the religious life is a life of determined. In the United States of the bold new century, few people’s desire to strive, and everyone wants to be fulfilled; we are, in short, ethically lazy. The real reason, I think, that so many are so afraid of the religious voice in our public affairs, yet the voice of a prophetic witness, is that religionists have an obstinate little habit of pointing this out. As the United States grows increasingly complacent, fewer and fewer people want to listen, for the defining ethic of our politics has become a simple rule: We must all get what we want. The ethic of self makes the religious task harder . . . but also more necessary. With a more vibrant religious voice in our politics, we should be able to do better. We could, certainly hardly do any worse. In sum, public opinion on questions of church-state relations is usually coherent but not constant. Symbols of religious freedom and church-state separation obtain high levels of support among mass publics, but many Americans are accommodationist on questions of establishment, and communalist on questions linking religious free exercise. This obvious contradiction across levels of analysis has significant implications for the practice of religious politics in the United States. The truth that Americans generally hold both evocatively accommodationist and separatist values suggests that activists on both sides of the debate have resources with which to struggle, and that such elites can reasonably claim popular support for their positions on church-state issues (Jelen, 2000). As Bellah et. al. note, "The metropolitan world is one in which the demand of work, family, and community are sharply separated, and often contradictory, a world of diverse, often hostile groups, interdependent in ways too complex for any individuals to comprehend" (Bellah et. al., 177). Americans separate the worlds of work, family and community, when in fact, these worlds must be combined. We are hiding in such "lifestyle enclaves," isolationist existence which limits our ability to relate ourselves to a broader community. The virtue of community interaction lies in its ability to provide meaning to the frustrating mechanisms of politics and combat the "inevitable loneliness of the separate self" (Bellah et. al., 190). Reference: A Lieven. America Right or Wrong – An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Harper Collins, 2004. Andrew R. Murphy; Toppling the Wall: Beyond Separation of Church and State, The Christian Century, Vol. 119, July 3, 2002 Available At: www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2657 Cochran, Clarke E. 1990. Religion in Public and Private Life. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Adam. 1998. "Victory for Vouchers." Time, June 22: 38. Converse, Phillip E. 1964. "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." Pp. 206-261 in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter. New York: Free Press. Donald A. Giannella, "Religious Liberty, Nonestablishment, and Doctrinal Development -- Part 1: The Religious Liberty Guarantee," 80 Harv. L. Rev. 1381, 1383 (1967). Herbert McCloskey & Aida Brill Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Think about Civil Liberties (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983), 133-35. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_vsrf.html Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1992) Philip B. Kurland, "The Religion Clauses and the Burger Court," 34 Cath. U. L. Rev. 1, 8-9 (1984) R. Bellah et al. Habits of the Heart: Middle America Observed. University of California Press, Berkley 1985 R.Putnam. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, 2000. S. Huntington. Who are we? America's great Debate. Free Press, 2005 Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 186-87 Ted G. Jelen, To Serve God and Mammon: Church-State Relations in American Politics, Westview Press, 2000 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zahn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256. William Van Alstyne, "Trends in the Supreme Court: Mr. Jefferson's Crumbling Wall -- A Comment on Lynch v. Donnelly," 1984 Read More