Church and state

An interesting thing happened to me yesterday. In my Classics of Social and Political Thought class the professor asked everyone to name a book that has shaped or impacted their worldview or the way they view things. I was very surprised how prominent the bible was in answers. Now I was not surprised that people would view the bible as something so prominent. Every election cycle we are inundated with numbers that show the importance that religion, faith, and morals plays in how people make their decision. Yet this largely a silent majority (Nixon was right maybe once or twice).

Religion has an odd place in American politics. It dominates from beneath the covers. In his fantastic overview of church and state relations, Noah Feldman explains how much of this is to be attributed to two sources: the gains of legal secularism and Justice O'Connor's unique perspective (and clinching vote) in cases of church and state.

I could paraphrase the entirety of Divided By God but the keys is one Supreme Court case. In 1971 the Supreme Court established the "Lemon Test" in Lemon v. Kurtzman. This decision required government action to have a "secular" purpose (go here for more of an explanation). (Even though O'Connor's endorsement test adapted this, it remains largely intact.)

Now the problem with this is that it largely removes religiously inspired morality from the purpose of any government action. It presupposes that the church and the state are in someway separable (which as Jefferson dreamed, they clearly are not). Many of the most contentious area of modern politics revolve around these issues. Most prominent are voting matters like abortion, the death penalty, vouchers for religious schools etc. The problem with the Lemon test is that it requires the goal of any legislation on morally complex matters to be entirely separate from any religious morality.

It essentially forces those who happen to not be secular humanists (which is a tiny percentage) to make their arguments tangential to the real reasoning. This is turn causes religiously secular individuals to start debating the tangential arguments. In total, the most contentious debates become about entirely different issues.

Now the typical response to what I have thus far said is that if the State could begin using religious justification to pass legislation it could result in a tyranny of the majority. I think this is flawed for a couple of reasons. First, on moral issues there is no tangible difference between the morality a Christian espouses and that of a secularist. The only thing that separates the morality of the two is that the former consults the bible or priest, while the latter may reflect on a host of books, friends, or experiences. Why should one be admissible for legislation while the other not, especially when the public debate stands to gain so much from it.

-Mr. Alec