Reintroducing Religious Faith into Government

One of the major issues of this presidential campaign, we are told by conservatives, is the need to reintroduce Christian religious beliefs into public life. Born-again Christians like George W. Bush and his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, claim to be fighting back against a liberal secular tradition that seeks to cleanse American society of any public profession of spirituality.

There is something suspicious about this claim about the threat of an anti-religious secular tradition foisted off on us by godless liberals. After all, a larger percentage of Americans attend church and proudly proclaim themselves to be believers than the citizenry of any other affluent democracy. The last two Democratic presidents were lifelong Southern Baptists, and proud of it. We probably have not had a non-Christian as president since our founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson and probably Lincoln, who were more accurately labeled Deist rather than Christian.

If there is an ongoing attack on Christian religious belief in the United States, it clearly has been a failure. We are still a nation of believers and active church members. So why is this a political issue?

The answer to this is pretty straightforward. Some of our religious brethren believe that the constitutional separation of church and state is an affront to their religion. That is not surprising. Religious faith, after all, involves, as the word “faith” makes clear, a strong emotional and intellectual commitment to a particular way of looking at life and how we should live our lives. The strength of that commitment is tied to the belief that God has revealed to us certain truths that cannot be disputed by any human being. In the face of that divine revelation, it is incumbent on all believers to mobilize whatever tools are available, including the tools of government and law, to implement God’s desires on earth.

The logic of this is indisputable. What could be more important than implementing the word of God?

That logic is also frightening, which is why the framers of our Constitution emphatically declared that government and law could never be used in the pursuit of a particular religious belief. We have the example of the Ayatollahs of Iran and other Islamic states to warn us about where the blurring of the line between church and state leads. Our founding fathers had the example of the Catholic Inquisition and the bloody battles between Catholics and Protestants, and the attacks of one Protestant sect on another. When one group, with unbendable faith, is certain that they know what God wants them to do and they are armed with the police powers of the state, all barriers to savage butchery disappear.

The annihilation of European Jews by Christians, the mutual slaughter of Hindus and Muslims in India, the ongoing battles between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, the recent ethnic cleansing carried out by Christians and Muslims in Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo, and the bloody sectarian battles between Shia and Suni Muslims, which we are probably going to see repeated in Iraq, are all sickening examples. In fact, there is no end to the examples of the hell on earth to which deep religious faith armed with the police powers of the state can carry us.

But the separation of church and state is not just a prohibition aimed at preventing such negative consequences. By strictly prohibiting the government from favoring one religion over another or acting to discourage minority religious organizations, our Constitution laid the basis for an incredible flowering and growth of diverse religious sentiment. In most of the nations of the world, one religion was endorsed and enforced by the government and other religions penalized. The net result was the opposite of a more religious population. Religious atrophy, cynicism, church corruption, and a decline in religious observance were the result.

It was that recognition that led most religions in the United States to support the constitutional separation of church and state. Religious organizations saw that such a separation protected believers and their churches. For instance, most Baptists remained strict separationists for most America’s 200-year history. It was only in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan allied himself with Christian conservatives that Baptists, tempted like other dominant religions in the past, succumbed to the temptation of the power of law and moved to have the government enforce their beliefs.

America is an unusually religious nation. It is as religious as it is partially because we have had the wisdom to maintain a strict separation of church and state. Undoing that now in the naive belief that government can make people live more religious lives would be catastrophic for both religion and the nation.