{"id":2361,"date":"2012-02-16T07:19:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-16T07:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/02\/tea-with-simon-critchley-the-separation-of-church-and-state-is-impossible.html"},"modified":"2012-02-16T07:19:00","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T07:19:00","slug":"tea-with-simon-critchley-the-separation-of-church-and-state-is-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/02\/tea-with-simon-critchley-the-separation-of-church-and-state-is-impossible.html","title":{"rendered":"Tea with Simon Critchley: The Separation of Church and State Is Impossible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

by Rollo Romig
The New Yorker<\/p>\n

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\u201cReligion is the basis and Foundation of Government.\u201d That\u2019s something James Madison wrote, in 1785. Except he didn\u2019t\u00a0really\u00a0<\/i>write it\u2014or, rather, he did write those words, but with a bunch of other words before and after \u201creligion,\u201d and the point he was getting at had to do with individual rights, not God in government. It\u2019s the kind of out-of-context quotation that gets passed around the blogosphere by people who want to assert that the Founding Fathers were stateside apostles, who\u2019d been guided to the idea of America by the light of a deep religious faith. Fortunately, for secularists,\u00a0the quote is a sham<\/a>.<\/div>\n
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But what if the religious conservatives are right? What if the secularist dream\u2014a true separation of church and state\u2014is actually impossible? What if politics requires religion in order to function? These are among the questions that the philosopher Simon Critchley works over in his new book, \u201cThe Faith of the Faithless<\/a>,\u201d which takes as its starting point a line that Oscar Wilde actually did write, from the depths of prison: \u201cEverything to be true must become a religion.\u201d For readers of Critchley\u2019s earlier works, this avenue of inquiry may come as surprise. Critchley, after all, has written that philosophy begins in \u201creligious disappointment\u201d\u2014or, more bluntly, \u201cthe death of God\u201d\u2014and believes that \u201cthe heart of the horror of the present\u201d is the deep entanglement of religion into politics. Nonetheless, he\u2019s concluded, \u201cwith no particular joy,\u201d that the two are not meant to become untangled. All political forms, he writes, are best understood as sacred ideas in secular dress.<\/div>\n
Read more here<\/a><\/div>\n

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by Rollo RomigThe New Yorker \u201cReligion is the basis and Foundation of Government.\u201d That\u2019s something James Madison wrote, in 1785. Except he didn\u2019t\u00a0really\u00a0write it\u2014or, rather, he did write those words, but with a bunch of other words before and after \u201creligion,\u201d and the point he was getting at had to do with individual rights, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nTea with Simon Critchley: The Separation of Church and State Is Impossible<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"by Rollo RomigThe New Yorker\u201cReligion is the basis and Foundation of Government.\u201d That\u2019s something James Madison wrote, in 1785. 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