COLUMN: Church and state not a winning combo
I’ve tried to stay away from this morass of a debate on the separation of church and state, but recent letters to the editor seem to holler for a comeback.
So, to all my conservative neighbors possessed with that special kind of arrogance, a few words: The Constitution’s most sacred principle demands careful scrutiny, not simplistic interpretation grounded in Bible thumping.
Before you throw the (holy) book at me, consider this: Where I come from, Hindus and Muslims have slaughtered each other in blood-soaked streets in the name of a benevolent and compassionate God, while fundamentalist politicians in national government winked at the violence. Seems a little ironic, doesn’t it?
Or think about Bosnia in the 1990s, where nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins observed that Muslim virgins were raped as a matter of policy by their Christian neighbors.
The point is as emphatic as it is unambiguous: Church and state are best kept separate. The two institutions don’t mix.
Metaphorically speaking, one could argue that the coming together of the two would produce almost the same outcome as driving after a few nightcaps. When the mind is inebriated with religious parochialism, judgment is most likely to be impaired. The consequences are disastrous.
And the Founding Fathers knew this.
To suggest that they intended otherwise by pointing to religious references in prominent national symbols, is to overlook the distinction between the Framers’ acknowledgment of the deity and an all-out marriage of church and state that right wing zealots seem to be advocating.
The Founding Fathers would never have wished for anything other than complete separation of church and state.
As University of Texas legal scholar Douglas Laycock explains: “From the time of the Emperor Constantine … to nearly the time of the American Constitution, the assumption in European society was everybody in the country had to have the same religion, and the religion they had to have was the king’s religion. The king got to choose and everybody got to follow him.”
With the Protestant Reformation, that practice was called into question, and for two centuries Europe faced civil and international war between Protestants and Catholics.
“The risk of a Catholic king was a constant issue in English politics, which broke out into warfare repeatedly, and many of the American colonies were founded by people who fled that conflict in Europe,” Laycock notes.
Why, then, would these religious refugees institutionalize in the New World the very system that caused them to flee their homeland? The notion is absurd.
In fact, James Madison was clear in his disapproval of the entwinement of church and state. Writing in 1785, he argued in his famous “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessment” that, “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.”
Translated, that could mean give the atheists their due.
Madison took his opposition a step further: “Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation … What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
Contrary to popular opinion, “decadence and destruction” doesn’t begin with the separation of church and state. The truth, as Madison states masterfully, is precisely the opposite.
Now I know I’ll be bludgeoned for my ungodly pronouncements. But before you dismiss this as standard fare from a bitter leftist who keeps speaking for those cacophonous minorities, remember the one thing the Founding Fathers feared most was that the majority would project its intolerance on minorities by seeing itself as somehow victimized.
They had a name for this fear. They called it the tyranny of the majority.
Leon D’Souza is a senior in print journalism. Comments can be sent to leon@cc.usu.edu.