Very long article that?s informative and proposes solution to this ongoing public debate
July 3, 2005
A Church-State Solution
By NOAH FELDMAN
I. THE EXPERIMENT
For roughly 1,400 years, from the time the Roman Empire became Christian to the American Revolution, the question of church and state in the West always began with a simple assumption: the official religion of the state was the religion of its ruler. Sometimes the king fought the church for control of religious institutions; other times, the church claimed power over the state by asserting religious authority over the sovereign himself. But the central idea, formally enshrined at Westphalia in 1648 by the treaty that ended the wars of religion in Europe, was that each region would have its own religion, namely that of the sovereign. The rulers, meanwhile, manipulated religion to serve their own ends. Writing just before the American Revolution, the British historian Edward Gibbon opined that the people believed, the philosophers doubted and the magistrates exploited. Gibbon's nominal subject was ancient Rome, but his readers understood that he was talking about their world too.
All this changed with the radical idea, introduced during the American Revolution, that the people were sovereign. This arrangement profoundly disturbed the old model of church and state. To begin with, America was religiously diverse: how could the state establish the religion of the sovereign when the sovereign people in America belonged to many faiths -- Congregationalist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker? Furthermore, the sovereign people would actively believe in religion instead of cynically manipulating it, and elite skeptics would no longer be whispering in the ears of power. Religion would be a genuinely popular, even thriving, political force.
This model called for a new understanding of church and state, and the framers of the American Constitution rose to the occasion. They designed a national government that, for the first time in Western history, had no established religion at all. The Articles of Confederation, which were drawn up during the Revolutionary War, had been silent on religion -- itself something of an innovation. But the Constitution went further by prohibiting any religious test for holding office. And the first words of the First Amendment stated that ''Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'' If the people were to be sovereign, and belonged to different religions, the state religion would be no religion at all. Otherwise, the reasoning went, too many religious denominations would be in competition to make theirs the official choice, and none could prevail without coercing dissenters to support a church other than their own -- a violation of the liberty of conscience that Americans had come to believe was a God-given right. Establishment of religion at the national level was prohibited. Religious diversity had ensured it. The experiment had begun.
II. OUR PRESENT PREDICAMENT
During the two and a quarter centuries since America's founding, the experiment has progressed fitfully. The nonestablishment of religion, with a simultaneous guarantee of its free exercise, was an elegant solution but not a complete one. Generation after generation, fresh infusions of religious diversity into American life have brought with them original ideas about church and state -- new answers to the challenge of preserving the unity of the sovereign people in the face of their flourishing spiritual variety and often conflicting religious needs.
Consider the influx of Catholic immigrants that followed the Irish potato famine in the 1840's. In the overwhelmingly Protestant world of the framers' America, there was a common belief that taxation for religious purposes violated religious liberty. As a result, when public schools were invented a few decades later, they featured only ''nonsectarian'' Bible reading and prayer. But Catholic immigrants soon protested that the schools' nonsectarianism -- in which the Protestant King James Bible was free to be interpreted by the individual student but not by the teacher (let alone a priest) -- was in fact sectarian Protestantism in disguise. The unsuccessful struggle of Catholic immigrants to have their own schools publicly financed or, failing that, to take the King James Bible out of the public schools, generated half a century of vituperative and sometimes deadly struggle.
In our own era, two camps dominate the church-state debate in American life, corresponding to what are now the two most prominent approaches to the proper relation of religion and government. One school of thought contends that the right answers to questions of government policy must come from the wisdom of religious tradition. You might call those who insist on the direct relevance of religious values to political life ''values evangelicals.'' Not every values evangelical is, technically speaking, an evangelical or a born-again Christian, although many are. Values evangelicals include Jews, Catholics, Muslims and even people who do not focus on a particular religious tradition but care primarily about identifying traditional moral values that can in theory be shared by everyone.
What all values evangelicals have in common is the goal of evangelizing for values: promoting a strong set of ideas about the best way to live your life and urging the government to adopt those values and encourage them wherever possible. To them, 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. As Ralph Reed recently told an audience at Harvard, ''While we are sometimes divided on issues, there remains a broad national consensus on core values and principles.''
On the other side of the debate are those who see religion as a matter of personal belief and choice largely irrelevant to government and who are concerned that values derived from religion will divide us, not unite us. You might call those who hold this view ''legal secularists,'' not because they are necessarily strongly secular in their personal worldviews -- though many are -- but because they argue that government should be secular and that the laws should make it so. To the legal secularists, full citizenship means fully sharing in the legal and political commitments of the nation. If the nation defines itself in terms of values drawn from religion, they worry, then it will inevitably tend to adopt the religious values of the majority, excluding religious minorities and nonreligious people from full citizenship.
Despite the differences, each approach, values evangelicalism and legal secularism, is trying to come to terms with the same fundamental tension in American life. The United States has always been home to striking religious diversity -- diversity that has by fits and starts expanded over the last 230 years. At the same time, we strive to be a nation with a common identity and a common project. Religious division threatens that unity, as we can see today more clearly than at any time in a century in the disputes over stem-cell research, same-sex marriage and end-of-life issues. Yet almost all Americans want to make sure that we do not let our religious diversity pull us apart. Values evangelicals say that the solution lies in finding and embracing traditional values we can all share and without which we will never hold together. Legal secularists counter that we can maintain our national unity only if we treat religion as a personal, private matter, separate from concerns of citizenship. The goal of reconciling national unity and religious diversity is the same, but the methods for doing it are deeply opposed.
Yet neither legal secularism nor values evangelicalism has lived up to its own aspirations. Each promises inclusion, but neither has delivered. To make matters worse, the conflict between these two approaches is becoming a political and constitutional crisis all its own. Talk of secession of blue states from red in the aftermath of the 2004 election was not meant seriously; but this kind of dark musing, with its implicit reference to the Civil War, is also not coincidental. It bespeaks a division deeper than any other in our public life, a division that cannot be healed by the victory of either side. For complete articleclick on link below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/magazine/03CHURCH.html?incamp=article_popular_4
