Written by Thomas Jefferson in 1779, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is worth a read. At the time of its writing, the Church of England was Virginia’s official church and there had been a run of violence against Protestant dissenters. It was the hotbed of religious disagreement in the founders’ day. Here’s a clip:
…that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry…
January 3rd, 2009
Noah Feldman in Divided by God: America’s Church State Problem- And What We Should Do About It uses a helpful terminology to describe the two poles in the debate over faith in the public square: Values evangelicals and legal secularists.
Values evangelicals are those who think “the best way to hold the United States together as a nation, not just a country, is for us to know what values we really hold and to stand up for them.” Legal secularists “believe that government should be secular and that the laws should make it so.” Feldman writes:
Both evangelicals and secularists like to claim that our constitutional past and tradition support their approach. Both are wrong.
In short, both [views] are self-contradictory: they fail precisely where they want to succeed, because neither successfully reconciles religious diversity with national Unity.
Feldman makes clear recommendations for a solution:
The core separation of church and state in the American experiment, I argue, has historically been institutional: keeping government and religious entities apart, in sharp contrast to the arrangements of established churches in the framers’ Christian Europe or today’s Islamic world.
The reason for such separation is straightforward: to prevent churches and other religious organizations from entering into the fight for public resources, where taxes would go to support religion.
… Values evangelicals may not like it, but they must recognize that government funding of religion will, in the long run, generate disunity not unity.
… The answer is to allow public religion where it is inclusive, not exclusive, and to allow religious displays and prayers so long as they accommodate and honor religious diversity. No one should ever be coerced into a religious exercise, but so long as no one’s rights are violated, it makes no sense to ban public religion on the theory that someone might be offended or feel excluded.
January 3rd, 2009
Darryl Hart, author of A Secular Faith writes about why America has, on the whole, navigated religious diversity well, particularly in comparison to Europe:
Two explanations may account for America’s tolerance toward religious pluralism. One is a secular liberal rendering of the United States that regards the American founding as a brilliant turning point, when religion became a private affair with no bearing on public life. In effect, this interpretation regards the disestablishment of religion as a domestication of faith, thus denying its capacity to divide the body politic.
The other explanation is one friendly to religion and particularly to the faith that became dominant in the United States, namely, mainline Protestantism. In his national best-seller Habits of the Heart (1985), the sociologist Robert Bellah… wrote positively about the way the largest and oldest Protestant denominations gave coherence to America. “These churches,” Bellah concluded, “have tried to develop a larger picure of what it might mean to live a biblical life in America” by relating faith to “the whole of contemporary life-cultural, social, political, economic-not just to personal and family morality.
He describes Protestant behavior in America as that of a “church,” engaged in the culture, distinguishing it from a “sect” which is wholly withdrawn from the culture. Sects are more likely to experience much greater difficulty with the prevailing culture. Interestingly, this view suggests that it is – in fact – the very political engagement of people of faith which some find divisive that has actually historically kept our level of religious antagonism relatively low.
Counterintuitive, but perhaps he’s got a point?
January 3rd, 2009
