Sermon for 14 March 2004, 1st Unitarian Church of Alton,, Illinois
ON SEPARATING RELIGION AND POLITICS
Ronald J. Glossop
I. Introduction
A. The issue of the relation between religion and politics can be addressed in at least two different contexts, within the individual and within the institutions of society.
B. It is the latter context of the institutions in society where this relation becomes an issue for public discussion, and there the issue is usually stated in terms of the relation between Church and State.
1. Because the word "Church" refers to a Christian type of religious institution, in order to make the issue more general, we may want to say that the problem is the relation between "Religion and State."
2. In fact, enclosed in your bulletin this morning you will find a sheet labelled "Religion and State," the title of a resolution adopted by the Unitarian-Universalist Association at its 1985 General Assembly.
3. As you read through that resolution, you will see that it is addressed to the issue of the relation between religion and government within the United States and the policies which should be adopted by the U.S. government.
4. If you read the fourth paragraph, you'll see that this resolution is a response to "recent efforts by some individuals and religious organizations to identify this country and its government with [particular] religious doctrines."
5. I want to address this issue of the relation of Church and State within the United States, but after that I also want to briefly discuss the relation between religion and politics in society generally, at the global level, and within the thinking of individuals.
II. Let me turn first to the issue of the relation between religion and politics within the United States.
A. In this discussion, I will be relying heavily on information from a booklet titled CHURCH-STATE SEPARATION: A KEY TO PEACE by Clark Moeller, published by the Pennsylvania Alliance for Democracy in 2003. A second edition of this booklet is available on the internet at <www.padnet.org/CSSmoeller2.pdf>.
B. Mr. Moeller's booklet explores three questions.
(1) What benefits has church-state separation added to society?
(2) What benefits has that separation added to democracy?
(3) What benefits has that separation added to institutional religions in the U. S.?
C. In the first paragraph of this booklet, Mr. Moeller notes, "Of the 195 countries in the world in 2001, only six had full religious freedom, according to ratings of Freedom House. These six were Estonia, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States." He then notes that the United States, unlike the others, is not a small, fairly homogeneous nation but rather a large, heterogeneous country of almost 300 million persons, 35-40 % of whom attend religious services provided by more than 2,000 different religious denominations. It seems that the diversity and extent of religious freedom in this country are the result of the more than 200 years of church-state separation as defined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet some persons seem to want to end that separation between religion and government guaranteed by the Constitution.
D. Some of the particular questions being debated are:
(1) At any level should government (which always derives its money from taxes) be allowed to fund religious activities such as paying for private, parochial schools?
(2) Should collective prayer be permitted in public schools?
(3) Should creationism be taught in public schools?
(4) Should the phrase "under God" be included in the Pledge of Allegiance when it is recited in public schools?
(5) Does the government have any compelling state interest in deciding whether homosexuals can get married, and if so, what is it?
(6) Should the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings?
E. The differences among these particular examples of relevant questions should not be ignored. One need not answer all of them in the same way or for exactly the same reasons, but they all do raise the question of government support for religion.
F. The first part of the First Amendment, which is the basis of the separation between religion and government, says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The first part is called the Establishment Clause while the second part is called the Free Exercise Clause. The idea is that in order to achieve "the free exercise of religion" no religion or religions should be established, promoted, or assisted by the government, and at the same time no exercise of religion should be prohibited.
G. To determine whether any particular law is consistent with the Establishment Clause, in 1971 the Supreme Court in the case of Lemon vs. Kurtzman (403 U.S. 602) adopted a three-part test:
(1) Does the law have a secular (rather than religious) purpose?
(2) Does the law intend to prohibit or promote religion or a particular religion?
(3) Does the law cause the government to become entangled with religion?
H. At present religious liberty in the U.S. is being eroded. There are several contributing factors.
(1) There is a decreasing awareness of what religious liberty means and how it is related to hot-button issues such as freedom to choose with regard to abortion, protection of gay rights, homosexual marriage, and teaching creationism in public schools. People fail to see that allowing some particular religious institutions to impose their theologically-based views on everyone else in the society with regard to these issues is in fact undermining the principle of freedom of religious belief.
(2) There is a lot of activism on the part of those who oppose the separation of church and state, who argue that the Establishment Clause does not require separation of church and state or, in some cases, that the First Amendment should be amended to recognize that this country is and always has been a Christian country. Particular examples of those who reject the notion of separation of church and state are Tim LaHaye (author of the left-behind books), Cardinal Bevalacqua of Philadelphia, Tom DeLay (majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives), and Pat Robertson (founder of the Christian Coalition). These Christian fundamentalist evangelicals and leaders of the Roman Catholic Church and neo-conservative political leaders and influential right-wing media moguls are leading a deliberate movement to undermine the separation of church and state.
(3) Many religious institutions fail to support the principle of separation of church and state. As noted by Moeller, "Of the estimated 2,000 denominations in the U.S., only 69, or 3%, are members of The Interfaith Alliance. Of the estimated 325,000 congregations in the U.S., fewer than 4,000 or 1%, are members of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Nevertheless church-state separation is supported by various other groups such as the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, the American Baptist Churches in the USA, the American Jewish Congress, and the North American Council of Muslim Women. At the same time, efforts to abolish church-state separation are led by the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights, and the Christian Coalition. Furthermore, there have been successful efforts to use state resources to support religious activities such as religion-based Abstinence Only programs funded by the federal government, posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools and government buildings, allowing sectarian prayers in graduation and other events in public schools, blocking the teaching of evolution in public schools, and allowing proselytizing by the Campus Crusade for Christ under the pretense that they are conducting anti-drug education programs.
(4) State legislatures and the U.S. Congress enact measures that intertwine religion in government. For example, the legislature of Pennsylvania has supported efforts to permit collective prayer in school and to indicate that Thanksgiving is a "Christian" holiday. On October 9, 1998 Congress unanimously passed the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA). It provides access to the premises of any U.S. diplomatic mission or consular post by any U.S. citizen "seeking to conduct an activity for religious purposes." If the aim was to protect U.S. citizens from persecution for their religious activities, the law could have focused on the matter of security from persecution rather than positively referring to religious activity.
(5) Executive actions such as the Bush administration's December 2002 Executive Order authorizing the awarding of "charitable-choice" grants to religious ("faith-based") institutions are undermining previous Supreme Court decisions about church-state separation. The hidden issues here are whether some "religious restrictions" will be placed on services provided and on whether certain organizations will be denied the opportunity to participate because they are not "religious" in the eyes of some government official. For example, will Wiccans be refused funding to assist victims of terrorism because they are not "religious"?
A report from the Texas Freedom Network on a program initiated there when Bush was Governor, indicates that these grants resulted in a system of faith-based social services which are "unregulated, prone to favoritism and co-mingling of funds, and even dangerous to the very people it is supposed to serve." "'Charitable Choice' is not a vehicle for the faith community at large, but for fringe religious providers avoiding legitmate state oversight and regulations. ... In Texas, faith-based deregulation has been a refuge for facilities with a history of regulatory violations, a theological objection to state oversight, and a higher rate of abuse and neglect. ...Most of the exempt faith-based programs have no medical component and rely instead on treating drug and alcohol addition as a sin, not a disease."
(6) Over the last 15 years church-state separation has been eroded by some U.S. Supreme Court decisions. A major blow to separation occurred on June 27, 2002 in a 5-4 decision (Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris) upholding a school-voucher program in Cleveland even though ninety-six percent of the students participating in this voucher program attend religious schools. Although the advocates of these voucher programs emphasize the choice of the students, it is also the case that parochial school administrators can choose to accept or reject students based on their parents' religion.
In a January 2002 address to the University of Chicago Divinity School U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said, "It seems to me that the reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible, and the principle way of combatting it, in my view, is constant public reminder that . . . we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being." In commenting on this talk, Sean Wilentz, director of the American Studies Program at Princeton University, wrote, "Justice Scalia seeks to abandon the intent of the Constitutions's framers and impose views about government and divinity that no previous justice, no matter how conservative, has ever embraced."
I. In his booklet on CHURCH-STATE SEPARATION, Clark Moeller provides a great deal of historical evidence to show how the separation of religion and the state is good not only for the protection of religious freedom and other human rights but also for religion itself. When the state takes over religion, interest in religion declines. A good example is that in England attendance at religious services is only 5% of the population, and the only European country where attendance is over 10% is Poland. In the U.S. it is 35-40% of the population. Separation of religion and state seems to be good for religion as well as for the state.
J. An important part of my message today is, Wake up and spread the word about the erosion of religious freedom in this country. The principle of the separation of religion and the state is under attack, and champions of that separation need to react before it is too late.
K. Look again at that 1985 UUA resolution on Religion and State and become familiar with the specific activities it urges individual Unitarian Universalists as well as congregations to oppose in order to preserve the separation of religion and state.
III. Having discussed the issue of separating religion and government within the United States, let me now turn my attention briefly to the issue of the relation between religion and politics in society generally.
A. It is important to see that government authority and religious authority are two different ways of regulating the behavior of individuals in society. The government controls physical punishments and rewards while religious authorities rely on the threats and promises of supernatural punishments and rewards.
B. Through most of civilized history the kings and priests have worked together. The priests needed the physical protection and support that the king and his forces could provide while the kings felt that they needed help with supernatural forces which they believed they could not control, especially after their own deaths. The government and the religious authorities usually also worked together on whom to educate, namely the individuals who would subsequently take over the state and the control of religion.
C. Nevertheless there were times when the political authorities and the religious authorities would come into conflict, and often the outcome would depend on other political and religious authorities. One example of this is the Protestant Reformation. Luther was hardly the first thinker to oppose the ideas and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, but he was the first one to get help from political authorities who would resist the political authorities who supported the Pope. Another example would be when Henry VIII of England started his own Anglican Church no longer controlled by the Pope, who would not allow the annulment of Henry's marriage.
D. Wherever there are educated people, there is the danger that some will resist the proper indoctrination and subsequently will raise questions about the political or religious authorities. These free-thinkers/philosphers usually are defeated in the short term, but once in a while they succeed in educating others to think and act for themselves.
E. We can even get periods when, usually as the result of battles among the various politcal and religious authorities, the whole society becomes a little more open to democratic political institutions and freedom of intellectual thought as in ancient Athens and modern Europe during the 18th-century Enlightenment.
F. The great changes which took place during the Revolutionary War in the U.S. and the French Revolution were great victories for freedom of thought, including in the area of religion. The Enlightenment meant replacing the authority of kings and nobles with representative democracy and replacing the traditional religious authorities with scientific philosophy.
G. Protecting the freedom of self-government and the freedom of thought about scientific and religious issues based on philosophy (thinking for oneself) is a constant struggle. There are those authoritarians who would like to control the political power of the society from the top down. They don't much like democracy. There are also those who would like to preserve and even increase the power of religious authorities. They don't much like philosophy and experimental science.
H. Fortunately, as education becomes more widespread, the push for freedom is reinforced. The opponents of freedom tend to rely on relatively uneducated indoctrinated "operatives" try to mesh political authority and religious authority, often through propagandistic efforts associated with some kind of political or religious fundamentalism.
IV. On the global level, the transformation from agrarian, authoritarian societies to industrialized, democratic societies began in northern Europe and North America in the 18th centuries. In the 19th century it spread to the rest of Europe, Japan, and Oceania. In the 20th century that transformation began to spread to the rest of Asia, to Latin America, and finally even to Africa. In the 21st century we are seeing the beginning of a global society where all humans have the chance to think and act as free persons participating in the governance of the global community.
A. But there are enemies of this progress, often because of their commitment to some particular religion or ideology into which they have been indoctrinated while young. Note the existence not only of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious fundamentalists but also Marxist and Nazi ideological fundamentalists. The former are stuck in the 7th century while the latter are stuck in the 19th and 20th century. All oppose open inquiry that might lead to new ideas about what is true and about what is good. Often they fight fiercely because they realize the increasing threat to their narrow view of the Truth as people become more educated and open-minded to change.
B. There are also those in the more educated parts of the world who would like to promote their own "tribal" interests and the present dominance of their own group rather than allow freedom to be expanded to the whole world.
V. On the individual level most of us confront the struggle between the old agrarian ideas (mainly "religious") in which we were indoctrinated and the new ideas (mainly scientific/philosophical) which we develop as we mature. We also become aware of the responsibilities we have to participate in the political (that is, decision-making) part of our society. We realize that in the social context it is necessary to keep the religious institutions and the political institutions separate, but when it comes to our individual existence we realize that our own scientific/philosophical viewpoint (which has replaced our narrower earlier religious views) cannot and should not be kept separate from our personal participation in the political life of our global society.
A. When we talk about the need to keep of religion and politics separate, our concern is the intrusiveness of dogmatic religions that would use their political power to cut off open inquiry in the society generally.
B. Our UU churches provide ministers with a free pulpit to express their views, and this includes their individual views on political issues. There is no expectation that the congregation must agree with them on either religious issues or political issues. Religion and politics are free to mingle in our churches just because there is no expectation that members of the congregation are obliged to accept what some church leaders say (or what anyone else says).