Religion and Government: A New Model Needed?

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Religion and Government: A New Model Needed?
By David Sapp, Senior Pastor
Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia

Note: This article is based on a speech delivered on July 6, 2004, at the Oxford Roundtable Conference at Oxford University.

When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on religion and politics thirty years ago, there was in the United States no Moral Majority, no Christian Coalition, no Religious Right, and no sense that Christians could vote only for one particular political party and remain true to their faith. I am not really sure what I wrote about.

Today, the landscape is greatly altered, and there is much to write about. Tensions between religion, government, and education have risen to a fevered pitch.

The tension between the government and the religious establishment, for example, has reached such a point that the Supreme Court of the United States has found its docket filled with church-state matters year after year after year. The issues have been myriad: Is prayer permitted in the schools? Is a display of the Ten Commandments permissible in public buildings? May public funds to be used to for private, religious schools? May public funds be used to provide scholarships for students preparing for the clergy? Are prayers at school events such as ballgames or graduations permissible? How far can churches go in their efforts to influence government decisions and still maintain their tax exemption? The list goes on and on.

Or, examine the tensions between religious establishments and the schools. Those tensions also have been on the increase. They have arisen over such issues as evolution, creationism, censorship, the wearing of religious symbols, and race, to name just a few. This very summer there was a serious effort at the Southern Baptist Convention to pass a resolution urging families to remove their children from the public schools.

Tensions between the state and the schools have been high as well. Paranoid U.S. school administrators have often misunderstood and over-administered government policies about religion. Private schools have often been at odds with the government over civil rights issues. A host of constituencies have been rankled by issues relating to government funding of religious education.

The issues have been many; the tensions have been high; and the results have been dramatic. Reactions such as the private school movement and the home-school movement have literally changed the face of American education. Differences of opinion about these matters have sharply divided the population.

What is threatened, of course, is cultural unity. The importance of cultural unity is easily dismissed by many who believe that they are pursuing truth that is so important that it the unity of the culture is a secondary concern, and certainly we must remember that there are times when unity must be sacrificed for the sake of truth, and certainly for the sake of justice.

At the same time, it is true that cultural unity is itself a spiritual value. Even when that unity must be shattered for the reign of justice, it must be re-established after the crisis subsides. Otherwise, there can be no stable society and no ongoing free exercise of religion.

Society of course must resolve these issues that threaten its unity, but before any more attempts are made at resolution, it would be well to make an attempt at understanding. Why have the tensions risen so high in recent years? What has prompted so many in my own Baptist tradition to switch sides in the church-state debate? I believe that a part of the answer lies in the rapid increase in our lifetimes of the interaction between cultures. A bit of historical reflection might help to clarify what I mean.

History

Throughout history, there have been only two basic models for the relationship between religious and governmental establishments. These are theocracy and church-state separation. These two models define the parameters of possible church-state relations. Either church and state operate in a unity or they operate separately. A given model may fall between these two extremes, but as long as church and state exist, no model can logically fall outside them.

Theocracy. Theocracy has been the dominant model for homogenous, tribal, and insulated societies. It developed in these cultures for a variety of reasons.

First, in homogenous cultures, most people shared a common religious faith. This shared faith provided a strong level of social cohesion and provided a natural foundation on which the earliest governments could be built. Theocracies were logical outgrowths of this arrangement.

Second, governments needed the kind of validation that could only be given by religion. Early on, brute force proved inadequate to sustain a government over time. When Moses descended from a mountain holding commandments from God in his hands, however, he had in his hands the power to establish a government. How could such a government have been anything other than a theocracy?

Third, religion was a key factor that established the social boundaries of groups and made them governable. Remember that we commonly speak of "the Roman gods, the Greek gods, the Hebrew God, the Egyptian gods," and so on. Early religions belonged to places. From the beginning, religion has been a defining factor for cultures. Religion provided a sense of "us-ness" that differentiated one culture or society from another to form governable units. This was another factor that made theocracy the logical way to organize a society.

Fourth, government and religion had overlapping areas of concern. This made it only natural for them to grow in the same pot. Both religion and government conveyed values, and in homogeneous societies, there was little conflict about what those values were. Normally, they were defined by the dominant religion and implemented by the government. The union, or near union, of religious and governmental establishments developed easily.

Education posed few problems in such a culture. Normally, it was carried out by the religious establishment. There was no distinction between religious and secular education because there was no distinction between sacred and secular in any realm of life.

Over time, of course, theocracies have tended to go out of style. There are still theocracies in the world, of course, but they are clearly on the wane. The ones that remain tend to exist either in form only (as in the state churches of Europe), or in homogenous and insulated cultures where they serve the very important function of reinforcing efforts to ward off intruding cultures and maintain historic identities (as in much of the Muslim world). The long sweep of history, which breaks down cultural boundaries, would seem to indicate that theocracy has a limited future.

Separation of Church and State. Theocracies began to fail when multiple religions came to exist under one government. In other words, increasing cultural diversity rendered theocracy obsolete.

The logical first effort at solving the problem of diversity was syncretism, the effort to blend religions. Often, however, syncretism had disastrous results. The infamous case of Ahab and Jezebel serves well to illustrate. With their own inter-cultural marriage in place in the palace, and with a blended culture emerging in the nation, Ahab and Jezebel sought to unite the disparate groups by incorporating elements of Baal worship into the religious practices of Israel. The result, as we all know, was the ignominious end of their reign.

While one would not normally want to hazard a defense of Jezebel, it is probable that her intention was not evil in her own mind. Most likely, she and her husband were seeking to establish cultural unity and bolster social cohesion. The experiment, however, did not work. It did not work because religion was not merely a cultural force. Religion represents something larger than culture, something that opens the door to an eternal dimension. People do not compromise this for the sake of social unity. For this reason, if for no other, engineering religious change has always been a dangerous and often futile undertaking.

Ultimately, the solution to these problems was found in the separation of church and state. This model for the first time accommodated diverse religions living together under a single government. My own Baptist forebears, as members of a persecuted minority, were among its early champions in both England and the United States. As a matter of fact, church-state separation has frequently been called the single most significant Baptist contribution to Western civilization.

The advantages of church-state separation were obvious to the first societies that adopted them. Religious groups did not compete to dominate the government, and so a much higher degree of social harmony became possible. And when government ceased subjugating religion for its own purposes, then faith was set free to grow and to thrive. Church-state separation at last provided a model in which religion and government could coexist amicably without constant wars over religion.

Still, there was a major problem. The societies that adopted church-state separation continued to need the social cohesion that had previously been provided by religion, and they continued to need the validation of their authority that had been provided by religion. The solution to this problem was found in the establishment of what has come to be called "civil religion."

Civil Religion. Largely unrecognized until recent decades, civil religion is a loose amalgamation of the commonly agreed upon religious tenets of a given culture. In the United States, civil religion has provided a measure of social cohesion and had to a degree validated the authority of the government.

This is why many Americans desire a strong patriotic element in their Independence Day worship services. They long for the affirmation that their religion can give to their government. Many clergy, on the other hand, are resistant to these patriotic displays. They believe that a religion that endorses government is nothing more than civil religion, and is less than the full Christian faith, which can never be reduced to nationalism.

Many people refer to civil religion disparagingly as a "lowest common denominator faith." Civil religion is expressed through such means as public prayers, generic references to the divine, and the devotional thoughts offered at public ceremonies. While it certainly has its difficulties, chief among them the tendency to identify faith with nationalism, civil religion does enable many religiously diverse people to share a basic level of religious expression.

The practice of civil religion has become increasingly difficult in our time. Many, if not most, of our church-state tensions revolve around civil religion. The obvious solution to some is to strip culture of every vestige of civil religion. The obvious solution to others is to protect it. This is a highly charged debate because it is about the very nature of who we are as a culture. For many, their very world is at stake in debates about school prayer and displays of the Ten Commandments.

The magnitude of the issue is dramatically illustrated by Southern Baptists (and others like them), who have in a single generation changed sides in the church-state debate. All of a sudden, the time-honored, sacred principle of church-state separation, preached with fervor and frequency in the fundamentalist church of my adolescence, has become anathema. History has now been re-written to claim that separation is a new idea, created and espoused by infidel forces whose sole intention is to destroy the Christian faith.

This opposition to church-state separation is, in my view, sadly misinformed and tragically ill-founded. But advocates of separationism must come to recognize that their opposition is driven by a very real sense of desperation and fear, and that this sense of desperation and fear is rooted in the absolutely correct intuition that the survival of civilization depends upon a basic level of cultural unity. The air that sustains a culture is shared meaning, shared motivation, shared purpose, and shared destiny. Any failure to recognize this will become the Achilles` heel of the separationist movement.

One of the strongest factors influencing the tension over church-state issues in our time is the unprecedented inter-cultural mix of the 21st century world. Oddly perhaps, it was the mix of cultures that first gave rise to church-state separation, and it is the mix of cultures that is placing stress on it today. Many of us experience this intermingling of cultures most markedly in the presence of heretofore un-experienced religions.

What has changed in the debate about civil religion and church-state separation is that the world has reached a new level of cultural diversity. To this point, the terms society and culture have been used inter-changeably in this paper. Here, let us make a distinction. Church-state separation developed as a reaction to merging societies. Today, the world is moving rapidly toward merging cultures, i.e., East and West, Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere, Third World and First World. Globalization can be seen in economics, in politics, in education, and in every field of human endeavor.

Still, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington contends that we have relatively little inter-religious mix, at least in the Unites States. He cites statistics showing that the percentage of Christians in our society has changed very little.[1] Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam still represent miniscule percentages of the U.S. population; Judaism is declining; and, on the other side of the ledger, the huge in-migration of Latin American Christians more than offsets the growth of non-Christian religions.

Yet it is obvious to anyone who is awake that cultural reality, both in the U.S. and beyond, has been dramatically altered in some significant way in just a few years. The numbers represented by non-Christian faiths may be small, but their very presence is a dramatic change. In my personal experience, the erection of a Mosque on I-75 just south of Toledo, Ohio, and the effort of a Hindu group to buy a church I served as pastor a few years ago were dramatic and jolting events. Huntington`s observation is obviously true, but it is also true that in much of the West today a Buddhist is no longer a heathen in a faraway, mysterious land. She is a neighbor living in the house next door. A Muslim is not a pagan in "far-off Araby," but a co-worker in the next office. A Hindu is not an emaciated man behind an emaciated cow in a picture from India. He is my classmate. The very perception created by the new presence of these religions is a dramatic new element in our culture.

Furthermore, anyone who is awake has noticed that, in addition to many more religious groups living in proximity to one another, many more cultural groups do as well. When the first Cuban moved into my neighborhood when I was a child, I knew no one else who spoke Spanish. Now, in the city where I live, we have Spanish grocery stores, television stations, ATM machines, and taxis. When I graduated from college, I was impressed that one could hear a vast number of languages spoken on New York City subways. By 1990, the church I served in Atlanta had students from 52 different nations studying in its English as a Second Language program.

This increasing cultural diversity offers many great, enriching advantages, but it is a challenge to social cohesion. Many consider it a challenge to their religion as well.

In this environment, civil religion is breaking down as a unifying and authoritative force. Consensus on church-state matters is no longer easy to attain. The fabric of society is being stretched to the breaking point in some cases. Increased cultural diversity has helped to lead us toward a very unclear future.

Future

As this unclear future unfolds, there are several developments, or potential developments, that offer clues for cultural unity. Here are a few, offered with no sense of finality, but with a hope that they might be a catalyst that leads to more creative reflection.

A New Religion. Could a major new religion be born that would give unity to a world culture? The idea strikes me as profoundly bizarre. The only religions I have known are the ones that are centuries old. Most people have never seriously contemplated the possibility of a significant new religion. Yet, to be fair, no new religion has ever been anticipated. The fact that the idea sounds strange is not a sufficient argument for dismissing it.

Famed historian Arnold Toynbee observed that new religions sometimes arise out of the clash of cultures,[2] and also that the major event of our time well could be the clash of East and West.[3] If he were correct on both counts, then it would be at least logical to ask whether a new religion could be born.

If a new religion were born and did succeed, it would almost certainly incorporate elements of existing religions, and would serve as a unifying force in the new world it inhabits. Interestingly, this has been the nature of the successful new religions of the past. Nevertheless, in a world where secularism is growing, a major new religion seems unlikely.

Religious unification. Since before the Apostle Paul, Christians have dreamed of a time when "every knee should bow . . . and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. 2:10-11). We still dream of it, and as a serious Christian, I personally pray for it.

At the same time, I am keenly aware that Muslims dream of the world united in the worship of Allah. I am also keenly aware that many others would establish cultural unity by the conversion of the world to their religions. Ironically, this desire for unity has led to great division as the religions of the world have competed with one another.

Even the Bible, however, never maintains that the whole world will be converted. The hymn cited in Philippians ("every knee shall bow") alludes to the dream of the faithful, but the Bible`s apocalyptic visions of the end-time depict massive disbelief until the last days. The religious unification of the world would certainly give us cultural unity, but it is not likely to happen.

A Secular Society. Another potential development is the elimination of religion from society. Many believe that a process in this direction has already begun, and that it will contribute to cultural unity by eliminating one of the main points that divides modern societies.

The evidence that is usually cited for rising secularism includes such occurrences as the decline of religion in Europe and the erosion of the mainline churches in the United States. Even the recent rise of fundamentalisms around the world can be interpreted as nothing more than a last gasp surge of reaction against the tidal wave of oncoming secularism.

Still, there is significant reason to believe that secularism is not the path of the future. Humanity really does seem to be incurably religious. The human race really does seem incapable of divorcing itself from religious faith. The rise of Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism in much of the world may well provide ample evidence that religion has a future that is every bit as strong as its past.

In addition, cultures and governments will continue to need both validation and social cohesion. Religion has been the only effective source for meeting these needs throughout history. A mere belief in the common good has never held a society together.

Soviet Communism was a prime example. Without any religion at its center, the Soviet system did not survive. Spiritual poverty may well have been one of its fatal flaws.

A Redefinition of Civil Religion. Civil religion seems to be undergoing a redefinition that would allow it to accommodate a wider diversity of faiths. Clergy are learning to pronounce public prayers in the name of generic deity. People are learning to exchange generic holiday greetings. Everywhere there are public accommodations to the new "pluralism." Civil religion clearly seems to be straining toward an expression that embrace people of all religions while respecting their cultural and religious differences.

Such a development is already meeting with resistance where it is occurring, but it seems to be overcoming that resistance. No matter how much Christian clergy complain about being asked to pray without invoking the name of Jesus, most continue to do it. Perhaps an expanded civil religion could contribute to the unity of a much more diverse culture than we have known in the past.

My guess, however, is that its contribution to unity would be somewhat weaker than the contribution made by civil religion in the past. Still, since civil religion has shown such a marked durability, we cannot discount the possibility that it will evolve into a form that will suit a new situation.

On the other hand, some would contend that civil religion is dying. The current changes would seem to be stretching some people too far. Only time can really tell us whether civil religion will adapt or die. There are too many questions to allow anyone to speak clearly now, but it is time to begin the conversation.

A Redefinition of Separationism. A fourth possibility for the future is that the separationist model may be redefined to fit an increasingly diverse world. This would seem to be the most likely scenario simply because separationism is the only model so far that has worked effectively in diverse settings. Today`s dilemma is that theocracy no longer works as a means of establishing cultural unity in most societies, and church-state separation is spitting and sputtering in others.

In this environment, a redefinition of separationism is not only likely, but it is necessary. The stresses on church-state separation are too dangerous to be allowed to continue. One of the chief causes of those stresses is increasing cultural diversity, and that cause cannot be eliminated. Therefore, some form of accommodation must be found.

The church-state separation that was adequate in the past is clearly inadequate for a more diverse future. A clue to the changes that are needed lies in the very fact that we refer to this model as "separation of church and state." The church may have been kept separate from the state, but it retained some special privileges. The church was presumed to be the primary religious establishment. The homogeneity that made that possible is rapidly breaking down. Separation of church and state in the world of the future must be applied to the full range of religious establishments, not just the church. This is the only chance the world has for cultural unity.

In truth, this change is already well underway. Most people have not been aware of it, nor have most people been at work trying to make it happen. In fact, just the opposite has been the case. Many Christians have resisted this change powerfully, reacting with visceral hostility, sensing that their faith is being challenged, along with their entire world-view. To some degree they are correct.

Several characteristics of the new order have already become obvious, and they are responsible for producing the reaction of fear that has shown itself so often. First, as was indicated above, Christianity is rapidly losing its special status. No matter how much we may wax nostalgic for that special status, no matter how angrily former Judge Roy Moore and company protest its loss, that special status for Christianity is simply not possible, nor is it morally right, in a religiously diverse culture. We are rapidly moving into a world where that special status will be a detriment, not an advantage to Christians.

Second, other religions are being accorded a larger place in the public forum. Community services of worship are becoming inter-faith services. Clergy organizations are sometimes also becoming inter-faith. Some religious people have reacted to this change by withdrawing from the public arena, but this is counter-productive. Religious withdrawal from the culture ultimately erodes the foundation of social unity on which religion rests.

Third, our version of civil religion is changing. To some extent a redefined civil religion (the third possibility listed above) is a corollary of a redefined separationism. Personally, I believe that civil religion cannot be annihilated. That is because religion, in the final analysis, cannot be extricated from culture. Religion is other than culture, larger than culture, and must never be captured by culture; but a culture cannot live without religion, no matter how diverse it may become. When religions become diverse, their adherents must still find ways to speak of God, and even to God, together. A common bond of faith, no matter how low the common denominator, simply must be found.

Short of one religion converting the adherents of all the others, this common bond can only be some form of civil religion. Civil religion certainly has clear and present dangers: It sometimes offers itself as a false substitute for real saving faith. It can serve to dilute "real" religion. It sometimes leads to very difficult social tensions. But those dangers are the price that we must pay to gain the help of civil religion in moving our culture toward an ever-elusive unity.

Human beings simply are not likely to give up public religious discourse. The challenge, then, is to shape that discourse so it becomes a unifying, and not a dividing, factor.

Conclusion

The urgent task before us, then, is to redefine and safeguard the separation of all religious establishments from the state. While this may be frightening to many, it is important not only to the unity of a diverse world, but also to the health and vitality of religion. Our Baptist forebears were not wrong about this fact.

A host of people fear, understandably, that separation of religion and government will lead to the death of faith. In actuality, however, history has proven just the opposite to be the case. Wherever separation has been practiced, it has provided a fertile environment for religion. This may be even truer in a world where multiple religions are present in a single culture.

From my perspective as a Christian, I am particularly impressed that a more broadly defined separationism may offer unique benefits to Christianity. As the new order challenges religions to un-harness themselves from the cultural restraints of the past, those religions will have the opportunity to find greater relevance in a larger culture. The Christian faith has a historical identity well-suited to such a challenge. Christianity has a long history of successfully transcending cultures. This ability to transcend cultures was seen when Christianity moved from Asia Minor to the Roman world, then when it moved from the Roman world to the European and Eastern Orthodox worlds, again when it moved from Europe to the Americas, and today as it moves from the developed world to both the Third World and to the Asian world. Christianity is well equipped not only to survive, but also to benefit from the changes that are coming.

True, Christianity is losing the validation of its culture. The faith must now prove, and not assume, its relevance to the life of the community. In the long run, this is a benefit to Christianity, a healthy nudge from the nest of its infancy. A faith that cannot prove its relevance to the life of its culture is already on its deathbed.

Obviously, we live in times of incredible tension. My own country is involved in military conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our Congress is bitterly divided. Our population is at odds as well, especially on matters of religion and politics. Our educational system is a key casualty of this strain. Unfortunately, my nation is not alone. Other nations are experiencing similar stresses. A world divided is a world in desperate need of cultural unity, and many are seeking it in a full retreat toward theocracy.

But God is not in that whirlwind. God is in the still small voice that calls us back to the faith of our forebears, back to the lessons we should have learned long ago, back to one of the noblest ideals our Baptist tradition has given the world: the utter separation of the religious establishment from government.

Footnotes:

[1] Samuel Huntington, "One Nation, Under God? Numbers Say Yes," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 20, 2004, B1.

[2] Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial and The World and the West (Oxford University Press, 1948), 193.

[3] Toynbee, 233.