ON CHURCH AND STATE
15th September 2003
The Church and State question is very difficult.
There is an ongoing contest in the USA over the display of the Decalogue in a public court house in Alabama. The US constitution requires the separation of Church and State and so the contest has taken the form of a constitutional law case. Secularists wish the Decalogue to be not displayed while the more militant sorts of Christians want it to be there for all to see.
The matter will in reality be a clash of public opinions while being, notionally, a dispute about what the authors of the Constitution intended when they wrote it over two hundred years ago. None of these authors was, so far as I know, an anarchist believing that there should be no state; none was, so far as I know, a committed religious unbeliever. So the Church/State problem was real enough to them. The constitutional approach finally adopted is a very orderly, if arcane, procedure - even though (to return to the Decalogue display) everyone, in practice, chooses which of the ten commandments to heed and which to flout and when to flout them.
On Church and State the Bible offers vague and seemingly contradictory ideas (as on many subjects). We have the famous remark, attributed to Jesus, about rendering to Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which is God's. This can be interpreted as drawing a clear distinction between duties to Church and to State - duty to God, properly taking precedence when the two duties are in conflict. (In the UK it is lawful to be exempted from compulsory military service on religious grounds). On the other hand, Paul (in Romans 13 verses 1-6) actually identifies government as being by God appointed and asserts that to go against "the powers that be" is to go against God. Interestingly, an English civil war was fought on the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings; the then (Christian) King was beheaded by his (Christian) Parliamentary opponents in 1649.
In the UK we have, most of us, long since ceased to be moved very much by religion. We had our fill of religious politics - often mercilessly bloody - in the sixteenth century and so we invented the Church of England with bland doctrines designed to be enforceable and which have kept an almost non-religious (almost) peace in England ever since. We have looked over the Irish Sea and we have noticed the disastrous results, for both Irish and English, of not enforcing the Anglican fudge on the Irish when it was so brutally enforced in England under Elizabeth the First.
If the US problems are worked out by competing interpretations of constitutional law then we in the UK - who have no constitution other than a ragbag of precedents and rarely challenged habits - fight it out in Alice in Wonderland mode.
The British Prime Minister is a dictator, for most practical public purposes, elected by means of an unfair voting system. We have a Sovereign who in fact does what the Prime Minister of the day dictates; the Sovereign is a pretend Head of State. The Church of England - which is adhered to actively by a meagre minority of the people of England (never mind the UK as a whole) is operationally under the Archbishop of Canterbury - who is appointed by the (non) Sovereign on the 'advice' of the Prime Minister; the (non) Sovereign is the pretend Head of a minority church - The Church of England (which is "by law established").
The Sovereign is customarily thought of as The Defender of the Faith. The problem would be complex enough if there were only one Faith on offer. In fact there are many ........."Which faith to defend?" ..... one may well ask; there are many and, necessarily, there must be many because they are mutually incompatible. Were they mutually compatible they could coalesce into one Faith.
Prince Charles, characteristically, has floated a non-solution to what most people pass over as a non-problem; he has suggested that when he comes to the throne he should be deemed Defender of the Faiths (in the plural). He does not seem to acknowlege that the several faiths are incompatible; you might defend one of them but you cannot, with integrity, defend all of them - as the following faith-statements show:
1) Christian: Jesus was not simply a human being; he was God Incarnate and is reported as having said "There is no way to the Father but by me".
2) Judaic: Jesus was simply human - at best one of a long line of prophets or, at worst, a false Messiah.
3) Islamic: Jesus was the last but one of a long line of simply human prophets. The Prophet (Mahomet) was simply human but was, uniquely, the channel whereby God made his final and sufficient truth known to the human race.
There are many other faith statements but the three mentioned are sufficient to demonstrate the basic fact of the Incompatibility of the various Faiths. It is not possible coherently to defend faiths in the plural.
The secularist view is attractive - until you begin to examine it closely. That view is that the state should be strictly secular and should, among its many functions, guard the rights of individuals to adhere to any faith they choose .....so long as a faith does not offend the ordinary common decencies that most of us tend to live by whichever of the several religions we may happen to profess.
This is a tolerant attitude but it has to be said that the very idea of tolerance presupposes that some things are intolerable. "There's the rub". When it comes to the point what exactly are "the common decencies".
Looking at religions and bits of religion in total, we see that there are many that could well be regarded as intolerable. And what is more, this proper intolerance is often shared by secularists and liberal believers alike. But some things are more intolerable than others.
An open secular society would not tolerate religions based upon human sacrifice and this intolerance would be shared by liberal religious believers.
An open secular society would not tolerate religions based upon forcibly arranged marriages and this intolerance would be shared by liberal religious believers although some liberals would plead cultural diversity.
An open secular society would not tolerate religions based upon female subjugation - the wifely obedience of the traditional marriage vows - and this intolerance would be shared by liberal religious believers although some liberals appear to think that the problem has disappeared; husbands, it is thought, have given up on wifely obedience.
An open secular society would not tolerate homophobia - religions based on the notion that homosexuality is an "abomination" - and this intolerance would be shared by many liberal religious believers.
An open secular society would not tolerate religions based upon the absolute prohibition of abortion (let alone the physical, perhaps lethal, ill treatment of its lawful practitioners) and this intolerance would be shared by many liberal religious believers.
An open secular society would not tolerate religions based upon rigid ostracism of people 'living in sin' and this intolerance would be shared by many liberal religious believers.
An open secular society would not tolerate a religion based upon the corporal punishment of children ..... "spare the rod and spoil the child" ..... although this intolerance would not be shared by many otherwise liberal religious believers.
And so on .... examples of possible intolerables can be postulated in abundance - racism for one. It is easier to claim to be tolerant than to define precisely a consensus as to what is intolerable.
There are illiberal versions of the various religions (and all religions have at least some illiberal adherents) and illiberal secularists (stalinists for example) might find any of these intolerables perfectly tolerable after all).
The real divide is epistemological. Do you you think that truth is that which is proclaimed by presumed superior persons or do you claim that truth is simply the best we can actually discover, about the way things are, within the limits - the often unsuspected limits - of our ability to observe the world and draw inferences about it and to derive knowhow from those inferences.
Perhaps it is fair to say that the religious person seeks to identify authority in matters of belief and the more liberal the believer the more elusive is the authoritative certainty that is sought.
It is also fair to say that many secularists fall into the 'certainty trap'. To hear some secularists you might think that, to them, The Big Bang and Evolution are articles of faith rather than what truly they are - the best models we can construct currently from the incomplete data we (think) we have.
To think that we really know is presumptuous; we can only know that we think. How open can The Open Society really be and remain reasonably stable? Or even remain open?
E.S.