max@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (Max Southall) (08/16/90)
The phrase "separation of church and state" is somewhat of a misnomer, for those words are not found in the constitutional documents. Rather, the first amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The first amendment was a tacit recognition by a responsible state that there are moral limits to the exercise of power. By refusing civil authorities the regulation of religion, the state conceded that there is a standard beyond itself by which its actions can be judged. That principle was central to the earlier Declaration of Independence. Properly understood, then, "separation" prevents the state from appropriating a church in order to establish its own compulsory civil religion. The state must not have an official church as its handmaiden, putting a religious gloss on its policies, imputing to its decrees an absolute moral authority they may not have. The founding fathers of the American nation were enormously concerned with the free exercise of individual religious conscience in both public and private life. It is no accident that the constitutional framers linked religious liberty with other primary freedoms in their first amendment. Religious conviction had been seen to have remarkable relevance to the conduct of human affairs, and it was their clear intent to protect these codependant liberties in the Bill of Rights. History had shown that civil and religious liberties must always be coexistent, with the abridgement of the one leading inexorably to the extinction of the other. With foresight sharpened by recent experience, the constitutional congress justifiably feared the encroachment of the new state upon these liberties. Many were troubled by memories of religious persecution in European states. Those states had often declared themselves ultimate moral and spiritual arbiters by establishing ersatz state-run churches with the civil authorities at their head. By enshrining a philosophy of religious and political freedom in a primal political document, it was hoped to forestall any such infringement. Thus, the more recent expansion of government authority into areas previously reserved for individual and family responsibility has required a corresponding shift in interpretation of the Bill of Rights. The Bill reserves all powers not explicitly stated to be held by the people, but the trend in both legislature and judiciary has been a mitigating one, in favor of the state. The peculiar connotation that has become attached to Jefferson's phrase in a private letter, "separation of church and state," is thus a more recent, justifying one. It has extended a pragmatic political concept, the separation of powers among the Congress, Executive and Judiciary, into an untravelled moral jurisdiction, demanding recognition of the state as co-equal with God. Under this transitional interpretation, separation still did not imply hostility between civil government and religion, but cooperation under a framework similar to the division of political institutions. But it created a weakened understanding of the protections envisioned in the first amendment, with the consequence of lack of effective restraint on any of the state's future ambitions. That made it perhaps inevitable that "separation" should eventually come to mean the supremacy of the state over religion, and then the abolition of religion altogether from every area where the state desires to extend its power. In an era when a great threat to individual liberty is the pervasive growth of state control over every aspect of life, it is not surprising that the idea of "separation of church and state" is distorted in the service of releasing the state from the last restraint on its exercise of absolute power. If we insist upon using the phrase, we should bear in mind that it never means that individuals in public or private life are to be barred from acting according to Christian conscience. -- Max Southall - mthvax!mamia!max - max@mamia.UUCP M/A Technologies, Miami FL