From the Forums: Church and State
Last week's Magazine article Is Nothing Secular?, examined identity politics and the crumbling barrier between church and state. This week, author Jeffrey Rosen responded to reader comments from our online forum on the topic. Selections from that exchange follow.
Forum: "Is Nothing Secular?"
In the 1970s, the division between church and state was a religion unto itself. Even after-school prayer and other religious displays in school, once acceptable, disappeared under the pressure of court orders.
Now, with presidential candidates from both political parties invoking God in their speeches, and school vouchers becoming a mainstream solution to education woes, the separation between church and state has never seemed more in danger.
Are the barriers really going down? Does it matter? Or, as Jeffrey Rosen suggests in his article, is it simply an inevitable, even healthy, consequence of identity politics?
specman3 - 02:46pm Jan 29, 2000 EST (#7 of 118)
The prospect of rational, fair and genuinely inclusive government - of, by and for ALL of the people - fades in proportion to our admittance of religious motives, codes and symbols into governmental affairs. Our freedom to exercise personal religious beliefs carries with it the responsibility to approach our civic duties with a willingness to suspend our personal, religious concerns and to operate government within its firmly established secular parameters, much in the way that jurors must consider only the evidence presented and draw no inferences that are not supported by facts. When we permit ourselves any slippage from fact to assumption, we fail critical tests of fairness and objectivity.
We are correct to question the intrusion of religious concerns into our civil lives through government. We can forget all too easily that others' rights are guaranteed by law and view them as expendable when the exercise of those rights conflicts with our own religious and moral views. The willingness of some candidates to win votes by traveling the low road of unprincipled manipulation and line-blurring - and the presence of an overwhelmingly dominant religion within our nation - mandate that we draw lines of separation clearly and maintain them flawlessly.
Jeffrey Rosen: I agree, as I wrote in the piece, that the explosion of God talk among candidates represents an abandonment of the liberal faith that, before entering the public sphere, all of us should set aside aspects of our identity that are not subject to debate. But surely it would violate the First Amendment to bar from public discourse any arguments that appealed to faith rather than reason. Indeed, the collapse in support for strict separationism among secular liberals as well as conservatives may have something to do with the postmodern debunking of the idea that there is a single, objective, and secular truth that can be discovered by rational investigation. In an era that still had faith that the public sphere could be reserved for common values and rational debate, as Frederick Gedick of Bingham Young University has noted, religion could be viewed as a subjective and irrational ideology that should be confined to the private sphere. But in the wake of O.J. Simpson and Tawana Brawley, as feminists and critical race theorists insisted that we are all prisoners of our racially and sexually contingent perspectives, liberals and conservatives began to treat religious theories of truth as one more equally valid perspective, to be respected rather than challenged in the multicultural din. Last fall, after the Kansas Board of Education told each school district in the state to decide for itself what balance of creationism and evolution it wished to teach, George W. Bush and Al Gore both endorsed the decision on multiculturalist grounds. (Bush said that "children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started"; Gore, through an aide, said that "matters of curriculum should be decided by local school boards.") Neither candidate was moved to make the argument that the Supreme Court accepted in 1987 when it struck down a Louisiana law requiring school districts to give equal time to "creation science": that evolution is a matter of objective fact while creationism is a matter of subjective belief. In the new era of infinite tolerance, not even presidential candidates have the confidence to say that some theories of how the world began are more valid than others.
thomas_more1 - 03:22pm Jan 29, 2000 EST (#9 of 112)
Jeff Rosen's article was silly. The Church is an institution, and it is governed by bishops. There has been no breaking down the wall of separation between Church and State.
The problem is that he's using the term "Church" is a very broad, thinned out, very loose sense to include the making of all decisions in light of moral convictions that can be supported religiously. Separation of Church and State hardly means that America must be a purely secular society in which public decisions are made within a purely secular humanistic and individualistic mindframe.
It's not that the wall is crumbling, it's that people are recovering their ability to make distinctions.
Jeffrey Rosen: This post is silly, since it restates the thesis of my article: that separation, properly understood, should not require the faithful to set aside their religious identities before entering the public square. I used church in the conventional sense, as a metaphor for organized religion, and said little about the complicated question of whether religiously motivated arguments should be excluded from public debate. But surely this would violate the First Amendment.
goodold_lucifer - 08:36pm Jan 29, 2000 EST (#12 of 112)
From Rosen's article:
"Four justices -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- announced that the First Amendment forbids public institutions to exclude religious groups from benefits that are offered to a broad class of participants. Four justices -- David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- made a last-ditch defense of the old separationist principle that the First Amendment prohibits direct government financing of religious activity, even if the funds are distributed as part of a neutral scheme."
So long as the government hands out "public benefits", the first four Justices made the correct evaluation of the Consititution: the government is forbidden to discriminate either for or against people on account of their beliefs. Properly speaking, religious activity is simply private activity which the government should neither subsidize nor penalize.
But isn't the whole notion of the welfare state (of handing out "public benefits") a form of establishing religious beliefs (like being a "brother's keeper") as official government doctrine -- and thus contrary to the Constitution?
Jeffrey Rosen: If one took the view, raised in a previous post, that any religiously motivated law is an establishment of religion, this creative suggestion might indeed form the basis for a constitutional challenge to the welfare state. (Take it away, ACLU). But the Supreme Court has rejected this argument, and in light of the difficulties that arise when courts try to read the minds of legislators, and to disentangle religious from secular motives (who can say whether Franklin Roosevelt was motivated by christian charity or by noblesse oblige), it's easy to see why.
bkort - 12:51pm Jan 30, 2000 EST (#31 of 112) The Orenda Project
The discussion begs the question of what constitutes a religion.
To my mind, a religion centers on a faith-based system of beliefs.
By that definition, science is a religion.
But more importantly, so is our system of government.
The belief that society can be well-regulated by a system of rules and laws enforced by sanctions and punishments dates back at least 4000 years to the Hammurabic Code of Babylonia.
And yet there is compelling evidence that this belief is unfounded. There is compelling evidence that rule-based systems are too weak to achieve their goal. Moreover, there is strong evidence that our adoption of rule-based governence, enforced by state-sponsored sanctions and punishments produces an increasingly violent culture.
See, for example, René Girard's systems theoretic model of conflict and violence. Or see the research of Harvard's James Gilligan regarding the cultural practice of shaming and blaming and its effect on downstream violence.
The problem with rule-based systems is that they are too weak to compute the inverse of a system model, which is a necessary step to calculate the optimal policy to drive a system to a desired goal state. That's why medicine and engineering have moved beyond rule-based systems to model-based reasoning in order to craft solutions that really work.
It is time for government to evolve, too. It's time to evolve beyond the failed religious belief upon which government is founded.
Jeffrey Rosen: Some of the most interesting work in the legal academy right now is focusing on the question of when, and how, informal social norms can control behavior more effectively than formal legal rules. But religious belief can form the foundation for norm-based (or, as you put it, systemic) regulation as well as legal regulation. So, for example, a legal system that preferred shaming to incarceration might well draw on religious traditions of shame.
greenpagan - 10:23pm Jan 30, 2000 EST (#55 of 112)
Excerpts from American Constitutional Law (2nd ed.) by Lawrence Tribe.
Re: Rights of Religious Autonomy, p.1159.
"Roger Williams saw separation largely as a vehicle for protecting churches against the state. To the extent that it was possible to accept state aid without state control, he urged cooperation; indeed, he argued that the state must "countenance, encourage and supply" those in religious service. Thus, his view has been called one of positive toleration, imposing on the state the burden of fostering a climate conducive to all religion.
Thomas Jefferson, in contrast, saw separation as a means of protecting the state from the church. As early as 1779, he presented a bill to the Virginia Legislature to disestablish the tax-supported Anglican church. He also urged that the clergy be barred from public office. That view would today strike most people as clearly violative of free exercise, but it was Jefferson's conviction that only the complete separation of religion from politics would eliminate the formal influence of religious institutions and provide for a free choice among political; views; he therefore urged a "wall of separation between Church and State."
James Madison believed that both religion and government could best achieve their high purposes if each were left free from the other within its respective sphere; he thus urged that the "tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded against by an entire abstinance [sic] of the Government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, & protecting each sect against trespass on its legal rights by others.""
(Copyright © Foundation Press, 1990.)
Jeffrey Rosen: I'm delighted that you included these important quotations, some of which appeared in an earlier draft of the piece. Here is Roger Williams's language, which first introduced the separation metaphor, in all of its spare elegance: "When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world," Williams wrote, "God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness, as at this day."
48180b - 04:31am Feb 1, 2000 EST (#89 of 112)
if you want to practice you're religion and beliefs and you want you're children to do so - thats fine- send them to a private christian school and leave the public schools alone- there are many children from many cultures and other beliefs who manage to control their opinions during school hours- so for the truly democratic process to work in this country- we all need to practice restraint and for those who can't--off to private school please.
Jeffrey Rosen: This is a powerful argument against state sponsored prayer of any kind something that proponents of equal treatment of religion claim to reject. But the boundaries between state sponsored religious speech (bad) and private religious speech (bad) are not always easy to draw, as the forthcoming case involving student-led prayer at a high school football game demonstrates. All the hard questions today are questions of state action.
cdel1 - 02:44pm Feb 1, 2000 EST (#99 of 112)
Mr. Rosen's article is very informative. May we look forward to becoming Northern Ireland as a result of the wall of Separation of Church and State coming down? Yes, I think we should. Christian Fundamentalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, requires the use of force for evangelization. I look forward to a dismal future without Church/State separation.
Jeffrey Rosen: Force, perhaps, is too strong: aren't the pressures exerted by state-sponsored religious speech more subtle than that? But this post usefully warns us about the irreconcilable tensions between fundamentalism and pluralism.
goodold_lucifer - 02:16pm Feb 1, 2000 EST (#97 of 120)
...Unconstrained economic power inexorably leads to unconstrained corruption of that power...
That saying about how "power corrupts" refers to political power, not economic power, which is of an entirely different kind.
...History is replete with examples that prove the truism that unrestrained economic power and the force of that power have serve to beget economic dictators who with their economic power can then purchase mercenaries...
It a truism, no less? I guess so, if you realize that dictators do seize control of all the economic resources they can -- but they are still political dictators, not "economic" ones. The notion of an "economic dictator" is a fantasy construct, not a concept applying to reality (including history).
You cannot point to a single American company that has hired mercenaries to try to overthrow the government and set up a dictatorship. History is devoid of such "examples" proving any "truisms".
...Government, particularly democratic government should have everything it wants to say about economic force...
Mixing the government and the economy is fully as destructive a plan as mixing the government and the church -- it will impose an orthodoxy by force in violation of individual rights, including property rights. The government should have nothing to say about "economic force", as such, except that it belongs to those who earn it.
...as it can be amassed by the quick and slick of mind such as Bill Gates who could, in combination with the "Fortune 500" use his wealth to transform a country into a fifty state "Company town."
That could not be done. Clinton is the one trying to socialize the country, not Bill Gates. The federal government could turn us all into serfs, but the "Fortune 500" couldn't do it if the government was properly protecting our rights. As it happens, Gates and the "Fortune 500" could save us from being turned into "it-takes-the-village-serfs" by opposing the government's growing take-over of the economy -- but they don't have the moral courage to argue against it.
..."line of credit" dictatorships.
That is a fanciful notion, but human nature doesn't work that way. Dictatorships are imposed by physical force. The free market obligation to pay for what you buy does not make you a serf.
samscram - 03:29pm Feb 1, 2000 EST (#102 of 111)
goodold_lucifer 2/1/00 2:16pm
"That saying about how "power corrupts" refers to political power, not economic power, which is of an entirely different kind.
I said nothing about Lord Acton's statement.
Anti Trust laws were not enacted in the abstract. They were enacted as a reaction to the practices that demanded them. That economic power is corruptive and leads the holder to monopolize and having succeeded to subjugate using economic force and fraud is so well established that one need only mention the name "Rockefeller" to hear the Sherman Anti-Trust bells ring.
"I guess so, if you realize that dictators do seize control of all the economic resources they can -- but they are still political dictators, not "economic" ones.
No difference. If an economic dictatorship gives one the money and its power to purchase the political power the powers are co-extensive.
"You cannot point to a single American company that has hired mercenaries to try to overthrow the government and set up a dictatorship. History is devoid of such "examples" proving any "truisms"
Of course not. That's because we have established a Constitutional rule of law which prevents it from happening. All you have to do is look at the history of Italy, France and England to see how usurpers who had the economic power to pay their troops have overthrown and maintained power. Sadaam maintains his power with the economic benefits he disperses on his henchmen. Our own political system is driven and to a great extent corrupted by the economic power of campaign contributions. ...
"Mixing the government and the economy is fully as destructive a plan as mixing the government and the church..."
Not so. I think it was Teddy Roosevelt who said of the Federal Government.; "The business of this country is business." We control religion by requiring that it adhere to laws which prevent it from renewing its atrocities. We control business to prevent it from becoming the master of the people.
"Dictatorships are imposed by physical force.."
Dictatorships are created in many ways. One of the ways is for an economic oligarchy to combine as in say South America, setting low wages, prohibiting strikes, setting prices and buying up the weapons and paying an army to defend it thus converting the rest of the people to their servants.
It won't happen here.
goodold_lucifer - 04:18pm Feb 1, 2000 EST (#103 of 111)
...one need only mention the name "Rockefeller" to hear the Sherman Anti-Trust bells ring.
Like Microsoft, Standard Oil never did anything actually wrong, either. The Sherman Act did not outlaw anything. And it certainly was not necessary, quite the opposite: the Sherman Act is unconstitutional. The Sherman Act's vagueness means that convictions under it violate the ex post facto prohibition.
...All you have to do is look at the history of Italy, France and England to see how usurpers who had the economic power to pay their troops have overthrown and maintained power. Sadaam maintains his power with the economic benefits he disperses on his henchmen.
You are confusing the fact that dictators and usurpers use the resources they steal to wield their power, with a false conclusion that economic resources have no other function than to be politically misused.
Our own political system is driven and to a great extent corrupted by the economic power of campaign contributions.
That assertion is the exact opposite of the truth. The system is corrupt because the politicians have the power to interfere in the economy. If they did not have that power, there would be no power for campaign contributions to buy. ...
...Dictatorships are created in many ways. One of the ways is for an economic oligarchy to combine...
In a constitutional system of limited government, a laissez-faire system with an unbroken wall separating the government from the economy, no such "combination" could arise. That is the whole point of having a limited government for the sole purpose of securing and protecting individual rights. It is the same principle that the wall of separation between church and state implements to prevent a "religious oligarchy" from imposing a dictatorship and seizing control of the country's economic resources.
Jeffrey Rosen: These last two posts focus a theme that had been introduced earlier: at what point does the influence of corporations or organized religion on politics become so powerful that it appears "corrupt." Last week, the Supreme Court announced that states can regulate campaign contributions in the interesting of avoiding the appearance of corruption -- which the Court defined as not limited to the bribery of public officials, but also including "the broader threat of politicians too compliant with the wishes of large contributors." But at what point is corporate or religious influence on politics "too much" influence? In a pluralistic society, some citizens will always have more influence on elected officials than others: some care more passionately, some lobby more intensely, some have greater access because they are old friends. To regulate religious or corporate speech out of fear that it will exercise undue influence on politicians puts the state in the position of favoring one vision of democracy (in which all citizens have equal influence) over another. But isn't this precisely what the First Amendment forbids? It's interesting, isn't it, that so many of the excellent comments on this list have returned to this basic question of free expression.
Jacks80 - 06:32pm Feb 1, 2000 EST (#109 of 112)
Re-reading Jeffrey Rosen's article re-inforced something overlooked - that some maturity does not exist about religion, values, beliefs and behaviors - religion is treated with indifference by many and becomes easily manipulated and easily misrepresented. ...
There are significant benefits in including quality religious education in public schools - the topic depth in this type of approach does not get trapped in fairy tale dialogue or in moralistic positioning. It's about understandings: as in making an effort to understand the history of behaviors and animosities and how they have continued into our modern public space.
It's pleasant to hear economists speak of future social stabilty by improved investment in early child development ( and as a natural extension, training to become a parent..) and it's only a matter of time before the value of quality discussions in public spaces becomes accepted as essential for improved economic and social well-being as well. (Might even be a time when governments see value in suggesting to t.v. networks that peak viewing time might include balanced and in-depth news and topic discussions - the focus being 'balanced'.)
Religion is getting the raw deal by being misrepresented. After all, our world did not start yesterday and there are substantially more thought streams than aggressive protestants, catholics, jews, hindus, moslems, atheists and pantheists and others of no fixed thought.
That's the wonderful thing about including religion in mainstream education - an opportunity to improve understandings and co-existence, and an opportunity to de-fuse those who choose to manipulate specific religions and religious thought so as to justify genocide, rascism and warlike behaviors. ...
Jeffrey Rosen suggests 'the triumph of identity politics'. Maybe, it's just a first step towards feeling comfortable about one's culture in a quality multi-cultural society.
Too hard ? Then go shopping !
Jeffrey Rosen: There is indeed a new maturity about religious difference in an age when sectarian conflicts have subsided. But religious education in public schools is a tricky thing. Teaching the history of religions is one thing; but to ensure that citizens do indeed have the option to "go shopping," as you put it, defenders of religious equality insist that the state must never engage in religious speech; prayer and other public expressions of belief must be left entirely to private choice. This is why, in public schools, after-school prayer groups should be constitutionally protected and classroom religious instruction should be absolutely prohibited. Designing a religious education curriculum to respect this line is, of course, a minefield.
thomas_blair - 10:01am Feb 2, 2000 EST (#116 of 118)
The use of the term "church" in "church and state" is very dissimulative. Certainly Jews (as an identity) have always had a great impact on American foreign policy. Yet this is never mentioned in the context of "church and state" and certainly not as something that should be "separate(d)".
Christians should stop thinking of themselves as a religion and should start thinking of themselves as an ethnic/raicl/religious identity. Identity politics is a winning game in 21st century america. It's time Palestinians, Christians, Eastern Europeans, and Germans stopped acting like liberals - and start playing the identity game.
I predict that when you do, so-called "liberals" will stop talking about multi-culturalism and start talking about how we are all one. :-)
Jeffrey Rosen: Jews and foreign policy? Hmm. But on the broader point of the strategic advantages that organized religions discovered when they reinvented themselves as vessels of identity politics -- yes indeed, this was the thesis of the piece.
meadowslane - 11:57am Feb 2, 2000 EST (#119 of 120)
connatch - 03:15am Feb 2, 2000 EST (#113 of 118)
Universal vouchers that allow students to go various schools, public or private do not violate any borders.
Actually, this has been discussed on the "education" board in the "religion in schools" thread. As I stated there, universal vouchers IMHO, WOULD be unconstitutional. There are large areas of the country where the only private schools within a reasonable driving distance of a child's home are parochial, generally Christian, schools. In these areas, a law granting vouchers would amount to a law respecting the established religion of Christianity. In isolated situations, such as Cincinnati or Milwaukee, there are an abundance of private schools of various faiths as well as secular private schools. While such a community might have to limit their discussion of vouchers to its effects on public schools, I might agree that there is no Constitutional issue there. Again, though, on a national level, I don't think vouchers would pass constitutional muster.
Jeffrey Rosen: An important reminder that the constitutionality of both vouchers and the charitable choice welfare scheme may vary in different areas of the country, based on the availability of genuinely secular alternatives. It's one thing to give people a choice between religious and secular private schools, or welfare providers, in New York City, and quite another in Orange County, California, where there may be far fewer options. This doesn't mean that a federal voucher, of the kind proposed by George W. Bush, would be unconstitutional "on its face," as the lawyers say, but its application in particular areas of the country might indeed be vulernable to challenge.
Jeffrey Rosen is legal affairs editor of The New Republic and teaches law at George Washington University. His book, "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America," will be published in the spring.
Is Nothing Secular? (January 30)
Forum: Is Nothing Secular?
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