LISA ASKS:<\/p>\n
Do all religions teach separation between church and state? If not, which ones, and why?<\/p>\n
THE RELIGION GUY ANSWERS:<\/p>\n
Separation of church and state (the usual phrasing though \u201cof religion and state\u201d is often more accurate) is an achievement of modern politics and\u00a0by no means a universal one. Among world religions, after long struggle Christianity helped create the concept and\u00a0broadly favors aspects of\u00a0it in most countries.\u00a0 Islam stands at the opposite end of the spectrum,\u00a0often considering it alien if not abhorrent. Interactions between religions and governments through history are too complex to summarize but The Guy will sketch some high points.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s latest church-and-state fuss (analyzed May 10 in \u201cReligion Q and A\u201d) involves Supreme Court allowance of prayers before local council meetings, even in a town where most of them were explicitly Christian. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is alarmed, asking in a headline whether this ruling is \u201cputting the country on the path to church-state union.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, no. There\u2019s a vast gap between brief civic invocations and any \u201cunion,\u201d and America to a remarkable degree has avoided\u00a0situations common elsewhere, for instance:<\/p>\n
Many European states, whether\u00a0in Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant countries, subsidize churches or Christian education. Clergy are tax-supported civil servants in such religiously diverse lands as Egypt (Muslim), Germany (Protestant and Catholic), Greece (Orthodox) and Israel (Jewish). Britain\u2019s prime minister chooses all bishops for pro forma appointment by the monarch who heads the Church of England, and 26 bishops sit in parliament\u2019s upper house. India\u2019s national government is officially non-sectarian but at the state level Hindus use anti-conversion laws to hobble competing faiths. Clergy are sometimes heads of state, including\u00a0 two\u00a0who were revered as divinities not long ago, Tibetan Buddhism\u2019s Dalai Lama and Japan\u2019s Shinto emperor.<\/p>\n
With Islam, the founding Prophet Muhammad was a political and military ruler and his faith has been closely intertwined with civil affairs ever since. Although the Quran says \u201cthere is no compulsion in religion\u201d (2:256), some Muslim nations force religious law (Sharia) upon non-Muslims and in extreme cases threaten converts to other faiths with the death penalty. Iran is a dramatic example of \u201cchurch-state union\u201d that is oppressively theocratic.<\/p>\n
In Jewish tradition, God deemed rule by autocrats to be problematic (see 1 Samuel 8) but biblical kings arose and combined religious with civil functions. Jews had no nation-state of their own through much of their history. Modern Israel\u2019s successful democracy practices religious freedom with certain privileges for Orthodox Judaism.<\/p>\n
Christianity starts from Jesus\u2019s clever and cryptic saying \u201crender to Caesar the things that are Caesar\u2019s, and to God the things that are God\u2019s\u201d (included in three of the four Gospels). Scholars say that rather that spelling out which \u201cthings\u201d are which, Jesus left it to individuals to apply the principle. But he did imply a certain distinction, if not \u201cseparation,\u201d between the two realms. That concept was later developed in St. Augustine\u2019s masterwork \u201cThe City of God\u201d and Martin Luther\u2019s idea of the \u201ctwo kingdoms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though born as an oppressed minority under Roman rule, Christianity eventually became heavily\u00a0involved with government, often to its detriment. Matters changed fundamentally during the 17th Century. The Thirty Years\u2019 War between Catholic and Protestant regimes (1618-1648) devastated Europe and roused cynicism toward the church. The English Civil War (1642-1651) had similar effects. While the Enlightenment fostered individualism and religious skepticism, demands for free conscience\u00a0emanated from Protestant dissenters in Britain and its American colonies.<\/p>\n
James Madison\u2019s 1785 \u201cMemorial and Remonstrance\u201d attacked tax assessments for Virginia clergy\u00a0and by 1791 he shaped\u00a0the broader separation in the Bill of Rights.\u00a0 This separation has two aspects, forbidding both government interference in citizens\u2019 \u201cfree exercise\u201d of religion and government \u201cestablishment of religion.\u201d There are, of course, continual disputes about exactly what that second phrase outlaws.<\/p>\n
For Madison and the other Founders, the devoutly Protestant English philosophers John Milton (1608-1674) and John Locke (1632-1704)\u00a0were crucial. Milton\u2019s \u201cA Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes\u201d (1659) said \u201cit is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion.\u201d Locke\u2019s three \u201cLetters Concerning Toleration\u201d (1689-1692) advocated freedom of conscience because the state is not qualified to evaluate religious truth-claims and because authentic belief cannot be compelled.<\/p>\n
Locke did not extend toleration to atheists or to Catholics. The latter view reflected long hostilities building from a 1570 papal decree that directed Catholics to be disloyal to the realm. England did not have regular Catholic bishops and dioceses again\u00a0till 1850.<\/p>\n
The pope who managed that restoration, Pius IX, denounced the idea that \u201cthe church ought to be separated from the state, and the state from the church\u201d in his 1864 \u201cSyllabus of Errors.\u201d Pius and his predecessors were absolute rulers over a section of Italy. Well into the 20th Century,\u00a0some Catholic nations limited the rights of non-Catholics. But in 1965, under strong American influence, the bishops of the Second Vatican Council proclaimed a turnabout and embraced Protestant-style freedom of religion without government coercion.<\/p>\n
Lisa adds a related question: \u201cDoes the existence of Vatican City mean that Catholics still believe in separation of church and state?\u201d In the Catholic view, certainly yes, though some few Protestants and separationists object. The sovereign Vatican City State is a tiny remnant of the old Papal States that provides church headquarters \u2014 yes \u2014 separation from political regimes.<\/p>\n
A final factual note: When atheists seized governments in the 20th Century they fused their belief in unbelief with state power and enforced it with a cruel vengeance unmatched by the worst cross-and-crown tyrannies during Christendom\u2019s bygone centuries.<\/p>\n
\u2014 James Madison\u2019s \u201cMemorial and Remonstrance\u201d:\u00a0 http:\/\/religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu\/sacred\/madison_m&r_1785.html<\/a><\/p>\n