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We Asked; You Said
Feedback From Communitarian Update
Number 64
We asked:
France and the United States have strong laws that uphold the separation of church and state,
while many other nations do not. What model should those who favor democracy and human rights
promote in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet republics? Separation of
church and state (and mosque)? One established "church?" Or some kind of middle road?
TO JOIN THE DISCUSSION, email aeblog@gwu.edu
Here are the responses we received:
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My reading of history and my training in economics leads me to a middle-of-the-road position on the separation of church and state. If we look at the Spanish Inquisition as an example, or at more or less all current nations that have established Islam as the state religion, it is rather clear that the American founding fathers were rightly thinking when they amended the U.S. Constitution so that "Congress" could pass no law respecting the "establishment" of one religion.
From an economic perspective, it seems that what establishment establishes is power in the hands of a few religious leaders who end up using that power for their own benefit, and it keeps people from pursuing a variety of mutually beneficial transactions that greater freedom allows. In addition to a lack of meaningful freedom, this leads to technological, organizational, and economic stagnation.
On the other hand, many now unfortunately interpret what I think the American founders intended to be "freedom of religion" to be "freedom from religion." Social scientists (communitarians in particular) should be the first to recognize the social usefulness of common law, which in the West largely has its roots in Judaism and Christianity. In his farewell address, George Washington said, "Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure--reason & experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle?" George Washington understood that, for free society to work effectively, the moral principles that religion provides are essential because they guide people as to how they should use (and not abuse) their freedom. Contracts, monitoring, and the courts can do the same, but they are too expensive to be applied to the myriad of potential abuses of freedom that arise each day.
By acquiescing to those who want to see religion banished from the public scene, we ensure that religion cannot hurt us, but we also ensure that it cannot help us. The American founding fathers provide us with a good example in that they found a way not to force their particular individual brands of religion on each other and move toward more tolerance for religious differences, while at the same time drawing upon strengths that religious principles tend to offer in terms of constraining opportunism and promoting charity.
Mark Pingle
Professor of Economics
University of Nevada
Reno, Nevada
Turkey is a Muslim nation which has practiced separation of religion and government since Ataturk's day. As a result, the Mosque is uncorrupted by power politics and the state is not the football of competing versions of Islam. Mexico followed a similar policy, after the Spanish Empire with its established Roman Catholic Church had so thoroughly participated in each other's corruption.
When a church seeks to become established, it's religious functions are compromised by power politics, often leading to civil war. Once it is established, that is, given special legal privileges over other religious communities, a churches faithful typically become less engaged.
Note that after many decades of religious war, the established churches of Europe are supported by tax dollars but became mostly empty aside from the tourists and art students. On the other hand, when communities pay for their churches, as they do in America, they are more fully engaged in them, have a higher regard for their (usually underpaid) clergy, and can focus on inward piety, outward service, and creating communities.
Jefferson said something to the effect that when one imposed a creed, it made half the people liars and the other half fools. It certainly stifles free inquiry, and divides people. While Jefferson himself didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus, when he wrote the Virginia Statute which granted freedom of religion, he made it possible for all the Christian sects to serve according to their own consciences in the free marketplace of ideas.
Surely the Holy Spirit is better honored when people choose freely, without governmental constraint!
Rev. Christa Landon
Minnesota
For a true and consolidated democracy to prevail, church and state must always remain separate. Leaders of countries must come from free and fair elections--chosen by the people they intend to serve. What power should a monarch, declaring they lead--without question or opposition, "by the divine grace of God," prevail over any citizen? What power should a cleric prevail?
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesars' and unto God that which is God's.
Wise words from he who first spoke them. The state is a conglomerate of societies, (civil, political, international, etc) which exist to promote self interest and maintain the security of the society as a whole.
Church exists simply to offer hope and understanding beyond all that which is greater than ourselves.
Hence, to combine Church and State is a declaration that something greater than ourselves (or the society as a whole if you will) put a leader in place.
I am at peace with my God, and I have no doubt I perceive my God different from millions of my fellow human beings on this earth. But I care not who they pray to at the end of the day, for we can all agree, our Gods are beyond our human understanding, and simply exist with our faith.
Within a true democracy, resplendent with strong human rights, one cannot afford a leader considered beyond human understanding, nor should one be tolerated. Separation of church and state must be a global goal. By day, every global state must operate within established and acceptable international societal rules and regulations. By night, we can all pray to whatever, or whomever, offers us the strength and courage to open our eyes every morning, and carry on.
Judith M. Sheehan
Lieutenant Colonel
United States Army
This is a reply to the Church-State question posed in Update 64. As for identifying myself, I am a retired University Professor, Georgetown University Law Center (as social scientist). The first thing to be said is that most of the peoples of the world would be not worse off, and many better off, if the U.S. could cure itself of the obsessive belief that God or some other cosmic entity has formed this nation for the benefit of others, entitling us to mix in their affairs for their alleged betterment. Apart from encouraging every sort of ethnocentrism, chauvinism, and provincialism
of which our culture is capable--a very large amount--this belief is the rationalization for the emergence of a large group of moral and professional parasites, usually devoid of experience or knowledge of the parts of the world they write about, who function as ideologues of our moral empire.
Our own tangled problems of church and state relationship are quite enough for us to deal with (witness the worldwide derision to which we are subjected on account of the activities of figures like Dr. Dobson). Any serious study of the Constitutional history of the separation of church and state will show that no exceedingly sharp lines of demarcation or prohibition exist, matters were always local and porous. No doubt, the ideal in a society largely religious has been a religiously neutral state--but the very assignment of tax-free status to churches and their educational institutions shows the limits of neutrality.
What is interesting and has been for a long time is the influence of conceptions of morality derived from religion on political and social judgements not of the rightness or wrongness of religious doctrine, but of profane behavior in community and family. If the nation devoted a third of the attention it gives to theological claims on homosexuality to a discussion of the morality of our economic institutions, our economic and social policies would be much different. Is there a different way to phrase our problems, then, than arguments about church and state? That is, a vocabulary in which we could deal with the relationship of religious belief to the actual functioning of our political and social institutions?
Norman Birnbaum
University Professor
Georgetown University Law Center
Washington, DC
As a short answer to your question about what model for religion and state should be promoted in places like Iraq, I would like to suggest some kind of middle road. In Turkey, the "French system" was once copied formally, but the result has been a strong informal religious--that is Moslem--influence on culture and politics. I believe that it is much better to have these relations formalized in an open way, than to cut all formal relations and leave them open to different forms of "underground" developments. In my own country--Sweden--public openness is much respected as a guarantee of individual liberty in many areas, not least the religious one. This must not lead to public control or lack of religious freedom, but to a certain protection of the rights of individuals.
Anders Jarlert
Professor of Church History
Lund University
Sweden
Regarding separation of church or mosque from state, I believe it is a huge issue that lurks below the surface of our governance in the United States. Given that, how we don't handle it well may inform what might be a better model in other countries where religion is a more integral part of
daily life. To ignore the church or mosque is to send it underground.
Now, we see the results of such lack of open acknowledgment and misunderstanding of the first amendment in the United States by the blurring of religion and science creeping up from the underground into our public life. How we think about and teach or don't teach science is becoming a serious detriment to our future leadership in technology and economic/social well-being. We see the blurring in other ways such as funneling more public money to faith-based initiatives. However, on the other hand, we cannot even say "Christmas Break" or sing "Silent Night" in the public school system without raising someone's hackles. We are heading down the road towards a serious disconnect with our culture and history without a proper perspective of how religion and more importantly how spirituality fits into our daily lives.
What model? I have given this thought over the years and do not have one to offer. How do you respect all functions of human existence without letting one dominate the other? However, I know that it is probably going to be different in Iraq than in the United States, and we need to respect that. The commonalities across the nations that I see are: (1) to acknowledge that we are spiritual beings with varying faiths and histories; (2) we need to respect and acknowledge the variety of faiths and sects within our national boundaries and our public institutions; and (3) maintain regulatory safeguards that prevents a state religion arising from any one of these faiths or sects.
Sandy Wassilie
Seward, Alaska
I favor an intermediate rule that permits a much wider array of religious observances in the public sphere than is currently permitted but stops short of permitting the sanctioning of an official state religion in the traditional European sense. This, I believe, is entirely consistent with democratic principles and the understanding of freedom of religion in the United States from the colonial period until the middle of the twentieth century. The American tradition was one of religious toleration and not one of absolute state neutrality toward religion.
Incidentally, I find the way this question is phrased, i.e., the contrast between France and the United States on one hand and Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet Republics on the other, somewhat insulting to the intelligence of those receiving the email. I would have thought that the Legal Communitarian would be above the use of such blatantly biased questions. Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom have never embraced the "separation of church and state" principle, and they are hardly hot beds of religious tyranny.
Moreover, given the very interesting relationship that is developing between organized religion and the state in the Baltics and Ukraine, I doubt that the writer of this question understands much at all about the situation with religion in the former Soviet states.
Joseph Gordon Hylton
Visiting Professor of History and Law
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
Iraq's Christian communities have been there for much longer than Islam and one of the strongest opponents of the U.S.-Iraq war was the Pope. To attack Christians and churches there is total nonsense, unless Islam is claiming religious territoriality, i.e. an intolerant theocracy. Minority rights and freedom of conscience are musts unless Islam-oriented societies are to descend into new forms of dictatorship. The same would apply a fortiori to Palestine.
Henry Frendo
University of Malta
Malta
I am of the opinion (based on observation) that in all countries, even in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are those who advocate interfaith harmony and respect for a plurality of faiths. They belong to various religions: Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, etc. These are the sectors or forces who should be supported by those who favor or promote democracy and human rights.
Malaysia is a case in point. While Islam is THE official religion, they allow much room for interfaith practices and the proliferation of other religions under certain parameters. In fact, they are now toying with the idea of establishing a Ministry of Interfaith Affairs or something to that effect.
Bonifacio Amado M. Quirog, Jr.
Bohol, Philippines
Although my own kids have suffered from it, one could try a variation on the British (not UK) model.
Here the "established church," the Church of England, lacks superior status but does get state support to run its own schools provided these are run according to the state's national curriculum and there is no discrimination on religious grounds with respect to entry qualifications.
In most of these C of E schools there is conventional act of worship in the daily assemblies, but parents can have their kids excused from this ritual if they have religious or moral objections.
This "live and let live" arrangement has run within the main state schooling system fairly satisfactorily for 60 years.
However, it has recently become afflicted by more fundamentalist approaches in some schools and the so-called "communitarian" Tony Blair's government has started to authorize special "faith" schools for all religious groups which could end up "Ulsterizing" the rest of Britain if not modified and diluted.
More generally, however, one would hope that Islamic societies could be left to work through their present phase of religious preoccupation for themselves, rather than have external models prescribed for them. After all, that is what North America and Western Europe did 100- 200 years ago.
Bryn Jones
Director, Business & Community Programme
University of Bath
England
The separation of Church and State is an achievement of the Age of Enlightenment. Great philosopher/politicians prepared the ground and the population in general accepted their tenets through revolution against a monarchy that embodied the unity of church and state as their rule was based on the Grace of God which did not allow the separation of secular and spiritual legitimation.
The countries where the United States, and less so Europe, propose democratic rule based on separation, and you name Iraq, Afghanistan to which can be added Syria, Iran, and the Muslim-based countries of the ex-Soviet Union, have not developed a philosopher/politician class of the Montesquieu caliber nor have they had a "French Revolution," thus they have not experienced an Age of Enlightenment as France and the United States have. This is not only true for Muslim countries but also for European countries ruled by monarchies, the less secular of which are found from Germany eastward.
All these countries have not developed a political class based on the achievements of the Age of Enlightenment, but have developed their political class either out of the military or the clergy. In simplistic terms, Prussia is an example for militarism as the basis of her statehood with obedience rather than free thinking as communitarian goals. Russia is an example of a monarchy based on the military and the clergy. The revolutions by which these monarchies were swept away were not in the least similar to the French Revolution; Weimar has been called a "democracy without democrats" which produced a dictatorship with the SS as the dominant political class and Russia developed into a dictatorship under Lenin right away.
The Muslim states where a separation between the mosque and government is envisioned by the ruling foreign powers have not gone through the process of secularization as France and the United States did, nor have they developed a dominant secular political class, with to some extent the exception of Turkey and Egypt. It is the clergy that have brought about revolutions and their aim was certainly anti-monarchist as the kings of Egypt, Libya, Syria, and the Shah of Iran were considered too Westernized for the good of their respective countries. Their population at large is not as yet used to assuming political responsibility. Thus, the grounds for the separation of Mosque and State are not prepared.
Much as we Westerners may regret this, I feel very strongly that if we try to introduce secular statehood in those countries, we shall fail. Only a long process of education of a secular political class may bring about a change and even that is not guaranteed given the advances made by the local clergy in the opposite direction.
H. Detlef Lührsen
Munich
Regarding democracy in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other countries, I think that separation of church and state is better in order to promote a pacific life together. But the installation of democracy will take a long time because it means a cultural change, for this reason the first time it may be more possible to take some kind of middle road.
Esther Martínez
Sociologist
Argentina
I think that there will be a complete separation between State and Church. The State Schools will teach the history of religions as a cultural subject only. This is a great debate in Spain now.
Angela López
Sociology Department
Universidad de Zaragoza
Zaragoza, Spain
The question always is: What is possible in a given situation, what do we regard as beyond the pale, and what possibilities should we try to avoid like the plague.
It was not exactly a painless struggle in Europe when the Reformation in a sense consolidated the struggle against the monolithic control by the Roman Church, yet it helped to develop a kind of religious pluralism, first by establishing "Toleranz," which meant that Protestants in Catholic villages were given a third alternative, besides being killed or converting--they cold also move out. And Catholics in Protestant villages were given the same, tolerant, third alternative. Over the centuries a higher degree of tolerance developed, and while it took some centuries for Jews to be able to hold offices in civil government, even that happened in the 19th century. Monarchs that were the heads of state churches still gave those churches some powers that we would consider secular, raising problems such as we have just witnessed with the planned wedding of the heir apparent of the British Crown.
In Iraq, the possibility of a nation having representatives of at least three major religious groups competing in a national legislature would surely be an advance over a theocracy, a system which is well worth avoiding, as the Founding Fathers of the American system knew and brilliantly made explicit. Even a government that consists of two or three theocratically-oriented political parties is much less desirable than a political pluralism, in which different political and social interests have their representation. Yet it may be a step in the right direction, especially if, as in Israel, the government is increasingly secular, and the theocratically oriented are a minority.
Religious communities are, I think, important communities, and, no doubt, they exert a political influence over their members and through them can have an important influence on government. As long as there is some balance between opposing interests, there can be a hope for each side to win some and to lose some.
Arnold Simmel
Sociologist
New York City
In response to your question, I haven't heard any good reason for abandoning the separation of church and state as an ideal, and so I see no reason to do so now. Policies that cannot be justified in terms that any reasonable person can accept have no place in a free society.
Peter Stone
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Stanford University
California
Some argue that Islamic-majority nations will not endorse thoroughly secular governments. I don't know if this is true. But I doubt that most Muslims would elect regimes that would enforce sharia as extremely and brutally as did the Taliban. People can want religious governance and basic human rights.
For the Enlightenment-minded United States and Western Europe, any religious mandates are non-starters. But if the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere evince a desire for religious governments, we will have to accept that prerogative anyway. Trying to force secular governance might alienate people and cause them to spite the West by joining the fundamentalists whom they would otherwise oppose.
Thus, whether or not Islamic democracy is bound to produce theocracy might be a futile question for the West in any case. Those Muslims who choose secular governments will do so because they want religious freedom and perhaps because they admire the religious freedom of the west. It will not be because another country made them ban religion from government.
I support armed intervention against brutal oppression. But now is the time for restraint; if Muslims should choose Islamic governments, we have to let them, because it isn't up to us anyway. As long as the elected governments do not forcibly make theirs the first and last election, and as long as they do not brutally oppress their people, we have to tolerate the prerogatives of those who do not share our belief in the separation of religion and government.
Dylan Valente
Substitute Teacher and Communitarian Platform Endorser
Baltimore, Maryland
This is difficult issue and the question, as posed, emphasizes the difficulty. Personally and as an American, I am deeply committed to the separation of church and state. It was enunciated very early in the history of the United States, and has generally stood us in good stead. France has its own historical reasons for the separation. On the other hand, whatever my personal beliefs, I also believe and support the rights of peoples and cultures and nations to self-determination. Are there limits to these rights? Of course. We need international limits to prevent racist slaughters, inhuman tyrants, and marauding mobs from having full sway.
The problem, then, is to find the dividing line between two insanities: One, deriving from doctrines of the past, such as Manifest Destiny, says that we (the United States, supported by our allies, when we have them) have the right to decide governments, policies, and philosophies of any country in the world that happens to catch our attention. The other is that we have no right even to express an opinion, or try to influence, other countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, or Iran.
As so often happens in our complex and multivariate world, either extreme seems to me like madness, and we are left only with the imperfect answer that we, and our fellow humans, need to do a skilled job of muddling through as best we can.
Finally, I think one of the major lessons of the past two centuries is that an attempt to achieve purity of outcome--to carry out an idea or a philosophy to its logical extreme--has generated a lot of blood, mostly of innocent people, while mixed approaches, often characterized as "muddling through" have resulted in better lives for more people. Following this principle, then, the approach to issues of church/state needs to be tailored to a particular nation and its culture(s), with the criterion being what works best, not what is ideologically the purest.
Paul H. Ephross
Professor
University of Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland
Religion must be studiously separated from affairs of the state. Religious people must be welcome and no prejudice or discrimination against them should be allowed, but no official notice of their affiliations and religiosity should seep into any place, writings, or time of governmental establishment. The ultimate wrong road in government is theocracy and the smallest misstep begins this disastrous path; any organizing at the onset of new governmental life must be so constantly careful to keep religion totally removed from the creation of a state. Wherever people come together to live fulfilling lives, they have to think of work and family and happiness as a grand mixture that is the enterprise not preparation for heaven.
I have taught Community Sociology (and Geography) in the Bible belt for a quarter century.
W. Allen Martin
Texas
It is arrogant to think that it is desirable, or possible, to have one blueprint, American or otherwise, that fits every country in the world. The U.S. government is already guilty of such arrogance in imposing its international trade and investment blueprint on other nations. Trying to do so with our pattern of separation of church and state is also an exercise in imperialistic futility. What is the wise policy? Letting countries have the freedom to choose their own ways, though setting (or trying to set) limits against violating the human rights of minorities (or majorities).
Robert A. Senser, Reston, Va. I am a retired U.S. Foreign Service labor attache. I have a Website, Human Rights for Workers, at http://www.senser.com. I am a Catholic, a strong believer in the Pope's teaching on globalizing human solidarity. Without making the stupid mistake of holding that the American Way is the only way, especially considering that our way has its own faults and worse.
Robert Senser
Reston, Virginia
To reply to any question about separation of Church and State, one must first define both "State" and "Church." I won't bother with "State" since it is too well known. Were the question "Nation" as opposed to "State," that would be totally different: "State" applies to a territory with frontiers and includes all the people within it, whereas "Nation" applies to a People (itself needing definition) whose territory might be in dispute or lacking altogether. "Church" means different things to different Nations. In a Nation-State, the Church might be the organized form of the Nation's cultural basis, and examples abound: The Armenian Church, the Greek Orthodox, the English Anglican, etc. One is tempted to add Israel's Judaism, but then one is confronted with the question of which stream, and how to accommodate the Islamic and Christian and Druse minorities. The American and French answers to the conflicts inherent in a State that is not a single Nation (i.e. having multitudes of cultures), is to have created this strange beast, a State without an organized unified Culture. The State then goes about creating a multitude of rules, regulations, laws, and "accepted practices," attempting to formulate a new national culture absent a unified "Church."
Were we to trace the origins of the concept "Church," we would quickly see that in historical times extending back to the origins of culture (that's many many years ago, folks), "Church" was no more than the sum total of all laws the nation needed to obey, civil, military, what we'd call religious, and all others. This included things that today we would consider not laws at all, including when to have holidays (formerly Holy Days) and rest days, when and how to recite phrases appropriate to the occasion, and inherent in some (but not all) cultures, traceability of all these things to the ultimate authority (we'd call that God; in modern democracies we call it "the will of the people").
In States with a unitary Nation such as any on the Arabian peninsula, Japan, and a few others, it would be quite appropriate for the State not to legislate a set of replacements to the Nation's culture, however organized. In States where more than one Nation resides (or more than one Church), there it would be far more expedient and proper to separate the two functions, and create a barrier between State and Church, if only to keep society at peace.
In the case of Iraq, there are sufficient differences between the more than three Nations (each with its own variant of "Church") that inhabit the State's territory, to warrant a separation between Church and State. In Iraq, the State needs to construct its own set of Legal and Cultural Imperatives that apply equally to all its citizens. This is a difficult road, where violence from true believers will always rear ugly heads. I do not envy the Iraqis' travails the next few generations.
Harry Shamir
President, R&DA Co.
Plymouth, Massachusetts
The growth of religious influence in the all-powerful United States is far more motivating than an assessment of the future of other countries.
The suggestion that Iraq will be anything but a brutal theocratic cesspit is absurd. The invasion and occupation are about oil contracts and war profits. From that perspective, it appears that "Mission Accomplished" may have been the right banner to decorate the aircraft carrier. Afghanistan will retain its historic government through a criminal partnership of thugs and religious fanatics. Some former Soviet republics will advance and some will not. On the planet earth, 59,054,087 people think otherwise. They voted for George W. Bush and his fear-provoking coat-tail hangers.
Americans are like spectators watching the drift of the United States away from the Age of Enlightenment principals of the Founders. Those who believe that the separation of Church and State is not essential to liberty may have no sense of history but they do have numbers. While France and most old European countries have succeeded in returning State and Church to their respective cages, U.S. citizens seem blind to the growing alliance of clever politicians and religious demagogues. The spirit of the Salem Witch Trials, the religiously and morally justified Institution of American Slavery, and the House Un-American Activities Committee is alive and growing in the hearts of America's true believers.
The fusion of Church and State is, and always will be, the supreme weapon of mass destruction. A massive exchange of votes for faith-based federal money and the promise of legislated "morality" were well documented in the 2004 election. The media abandoned its responsibility to sound the alarm.
While liberty is under attack in America, I find it difficult to care about attention-diverting subjects such as the future of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet republics.
Thomas A. McGoff
Moscow, Pennsylvania
Separation of church and state is absolutely indispensable to decent political community everywhere. Explaining to devout or even fanatical practitioners of some majority religion why imposing their religious beliefs and practices on those of differing religious persuasion is wrong and the enemy of community peace everywhere has to be at the top of any agenda of reform.
It is, however, easy to misstate the effect of this. There are things like public holidays and characteristic public art works, etc., which can reasonably reflect the religion of the majority. Suppose that 90% of the community practices religion R, then of course everyone will, as they go about the town, see R-type churches or temples or mosques, like it or not. But the enjoyment of architecture can be independent of sectarian considerations: We can admire the Blue Mosque of Constantinople as well as the Cathedral at Chartres, while being atheists the while. The same can be true of other things: We can celebrate Christmas, secular style, despite holding no brief with the religion that inspired it in its original form. Non-Muslims can expect food stores to be closed in daytime during Ramadan (I presume); and so on. Such things are a community challenge, but one that can be, and often are, met. Public schools are another matter, as they inevitably are. Inculcation of majority dogma into minority dissenters is not satisfactory and must, again, be worked around.
These challenges must be met if we are to have civil peace. And without civil peace, very little can be accomplished in any community.
Jan Narveson
Professor Emeritus
University of Waterloo
Canada
I think the phrase "separation of church and state" confuses the two-fold nature of the religious clauses in the first amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, (the government can not endorse or oppose particular religions.) or prohibiting the free exercise thereof... (when people express their religious beliefs, the government should not interfere).
The phrase "separation of church and state" makes it appear that the government has to protect itself from the influence of religion. It makes for a great sound byte, but fails miserably to convey the meaning that comes through an actual reading of the two clauses. I think you would get more thoughtful responses by dropping the phrase "separation of church and state" and sticking with what the first amendment actually says.
Nick Hernandez
Lincoln, Nebraska
To "promote" any model in these countries, one needs better qualifications than "favoring democracy and human rights." Some genuine knowledge of the country would be nice. So would some legitimate title to favor some "model" in a country to which one does not belong.
This is not relativism or some absolute commitment to staying out of others' affairs. I have no objection to humanitarian interventions when a genuine humanitarian crisis exists. But there is a huge difference between stopping atrocities and proposing "models."
Stopping atrocities requires no special knowledge of the region in which they occur, and human rights themselves give anyone a title to do this. But for foreign human rights campaigners to propose "models" for a country is the most foolish sort of insolence. Moral beliefs are only the tiniest part of what is required to make such proposals. It is disheartening that respectable intellectuals would ever be so juvenile as to imagine that they can plan for the future of a country about which they know virtually nothing. What would make them think that they could succeed where even the best-informed, best-intentioned and most talented members of a society usually fail?
Michael Neumann
Department of Philosophy
Trent University
Ontario, Canada
Historically, churches have invariably been intolerant when they've had the power. It took centuries to win freedom of speech, opinion, and worship against clerical opposition. Where there is an established church it almost inevitably means lesser rights and status for those who do not share that particular belief. So, in the interests of equal rights, the church and state should be kept separate.
Michael Levin
Department of Politics
Goldsmiths College
University of London
England
Since it is the natural inclination of religion to aspire to total causal (in the end; mental) dominance because that is where its explanatory/ontological power resides, in my eyes it would not do to combine church and state. The claim to onmicausality that resides in the ideological phantasm of religion would gain a direct approach to the state apparatus, which would impede its democratic function, and in the end lead to multiple reinforcing lines of segregation becoming the dominant factor in the political landscape driving both sides to extremes--extremity thus becoming the predominant factor across the board, and it is only in dictatorships that the rule is based on absolute divine right or suppression of the spiritual lives of the people. In theory.
Jesper Laybourn Christensen
Research Assistant
Denmark
I favor the separation of church and state. That is, I do not believe that any church should receive any assistance from the government, nor do I think that the government should be aligned with any church.
Michal R. Belknap
Professor of constitutional law and American legal history
California Western School of Law
San Diego, California
The U.S. has strong laws that uphold the separation of church and state, but public opinion varies, according to data from the World Values Surveys. For example, 38% of Americans say that "Politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office," and 49% agree that "It would be better for America if more people with strong religious beliefs held public office." Americans with traditional values favor less separation of church and state, while those with secular values favor more. (Source: "America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception," Princeton University Press 2005.) These findings raise an important question: Which is the "American model"--a clear separation in law or considerable variation in attitudes and continuing debates?
Wayne Baker
Professor
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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