The Separation of Church and State in the USA—Part 1 The separation of Church and State is the macro-politic of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’, the macro- politic of the history of western civilization, and now the macro- politic of globalization. In the United States, six models of church/state relations compete for dominance, and the ideas of ‘separation‘ in each of them compete for legal standing. Five of the six church-state models have a theology imbedded in both institutions. The sixth model has no theology imbedded in the state. It is worth a quick summarization of all six. First, a theocracy derives its power directly from God. The divinely appointed leadership rules the nation as God‘s proxy, as the high priest, prophet and king, often with no useful distinctions made among these offices. In the strict sense no independent state exists; but administrative districts, like tribes and clans have a measured autonomy. Moses was the head of a theocracy. Second, the sacred responsibilities and the secular responsibilities form two separate governing bodies. Ideally they remain separate and equal, meaning divine power flows separately to each and each has independent prerogatives worthy of mutual respect; with no ambition for one to control the other. Conflicts get settled amicably through concordats. But they rarely operate with equal influence. So third, the ‘church‘ ultimately controls the state. As we see in the book of 1 Samuel, for instance, while the High Priest Samuel was left with the ritual responsibilities and Saul was made king, Samuel retained the upper hand. Samuel anointed Saul as King, and would then anoint David as king while Saul was still living. In the contest of influence over both the crown and the children of Israel, Samuel had the better of it. In this model, divine power flows from God through the Chief Priest down to the king. Fourth, the state controls the church. When David became king, the flow of divine power went directly to the king, NOT to the king through the priesthood. Much is made in the Davidic covenant about God speaking directly to David, and David‘s capacity as a prophet and king, not as priest. When David‘s son Solomon assumes the throne the priesthood no longer has a say in regal succession. At the dedication of ‘Solomon‘s temple‘, King Solomon‘s prayer and sacrifices, not the priestly rituals, are the climax of the ceremony. The church and state are separate in these latter three arrangements, but politically they can be even in influence or else one controls the other. In Europe, from the first century on, the history of church/state conflict ebbs and flows from the first to the fourth of these models. At first the Roman Emperors have imperial power over the church, divinely ratified by the gods. Incrementally, the church grows in power equal with the emperors such that the emperors have divinely ratified civil authority and the church has divinely ratified spiritual authority, and both recognize their separate spheres of influence throughout the empire. The conflict continues at the theological level and in the real body politic until the Church assumes the superior position. Unum Sanctum (1302) declares the Roman Pontiff literally in charge of the empire and the world, outside of whom there is no salvation. The next four hundred years see the flow of power reverting back to the former models. Roughly during the seventeenth century a wholly pragmatic outlook began, contemporaneous with the fatigue and destruction of the wars loosed upon Europe as kings and church, and now the many churches of the Protestant reformation, sought dominance or independence. The secular outlook was based on the self- evident truth that the state simply required order. This eventually was to produce the fifth competitive model of church/state relations. In the fifth model, power flows up from the people to the state and the church through the consent of the people. On the one hand, the power is wholly secular in that it is a self-evident and unalienable right of the people exercised by the vote. On the other hand, the sacred stamp is placed on the process through the assertion of freedom of religion and conscience as the divine right of the individual believer, the divine obligation of the believing voter, and the divine obligation of the state to respect. So it is simultaneously secular, meaning a self-evident political science, and sacred, meaning revealed by God as a wholly legitimate option for organizing a society. While congregationalism remains controversial for the church, not even the authoritarian Roman Catholic Popes long disputed that the first mandate from God to the state is for good order without specifying any particular form of government. In the sixth model of church/state relations, the state has no theology. It asserts that the sacred is irrelevant or illegal in the state. It moves along a continuum in the direction of strict neutrality by the state towards religion such as we see to a limited degree in the United States, to a far greater degree in India, and ends in hostility towards religion, such as we saw in Soviet style communism. When we speak, therefore, of the separation of church and state in the United States, the meanings fall clearly between the extremes of a legalized theocracy and a wholly secular, atheistic state, not in them. Nevertheless, elements of the six models of separation operate to some competitive degree causing considerable confusion when one uses the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ as though it denoted merely one static condition.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 10:24:10 +0000
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