Separation of Church and State Is Easy to Achieve, by Eliminating Church

From: The Conservatory

Despite various attempts to paint the majority of Founding Fathers as Deists in order to advance the secularist agenda, the evidence shows that they were, by and large, pious Christians. By separating Church and State, they meant to prevent a church—such as the Anglican Church in Britain—from becoming established. Often historians of the English Reformation like to refer to what emerged in the wake of Henry VIII’s separation from the Roman Catholic Church as an episcopacy that satisfactorily occupied the middle ground between Roman Catholicism and Anabaptism. They refer to this as “the religious settlement.” In point of fact, there was very little settled as far as the Catholic recusants on one hand and the Protestant sectarians on the other were concerned. Fortune hunters arrived at Jamestown, which is why its first attempts at plantation were such an abject failure. Religious zealots arrived at Plymouth, which is why it succeeded.

The origins of the formerly Christian Europe go back a thousand years earlier, to the collapse of the Roman Emperor. Constantine did not charter the Christianity of the late Empire, but he did raise it to prominence. As Rome collapsed from without and within, the Christian Church under Gregorius Maximus took up many of the functions that once belonged to the secular (and mostly polytheistic) government. Gregory’s writings reveal that he was chary of intermingling Church with government, feeling it likely that the Church would grow too worldly as a result, but he felt that it was necessary to maintain some of the appurtenances of government, or what Obama might call infrastructure, and the Church was the only organization capable of filling the gap.

The immediate worry of the Founders, then, in a very different spiritual age, was that a church or churches would encroach on the operation of government. They did not envision that government itself would begin to encroach on the territory occupied by churches, but that is what has happened, as Peter’s post on rosaries illustrates. Religious controversy and clashes between state-sanctioned churches had led to a couple of centuries of inter-Christian warfare by the time the first colonists arrived on these shores. In short, religious fervor was exploitatively channeled by princes in order to advance their territorial ambitions. As first constituted, the United States was federal, and some of the colonies were originally representative of certain Christian sects. Looking at European history, the Founders thought it best to check any similar ambitions on the part of church-identifiers.

As the rise of Progressivism and the Occupy Wall Street movement show, big government has arrogated to itself many of what were the functions and prerogatives that once belonged to churches. Among these, importantly, was a role in the indoctrination of the American citizen. If religion wasn’t taught in the schools, it was certainly tolerated, and even when churches differed from government, local or otherwise, they took note of the importance of the American experiment in sermon and song. There have always been freethinkers and atheists in the United States, and they have largely been tolerated, too. We no longer have Shakers, though we admire their furniture and bedspreads, and the great hey-day of the arts colonies of upper New York state, inhabited by nudists and free-love advocates, are long gone. But tolerance then did not mean, as it increasingly does now, a right not to evoke expressed scandal or criticism, only in the direction of whatever secularists advocate.

Under Obama, the only churches that are protected are those that receive special status by virtue of their collaboration with big government in the perpetuation of the grievance industry. Long ago, even before Obama was elected, I noted that his policies would lead to the legalized marginalization and even elimination of churches in the public sphere, in areas such as health care, adoption and charity. Every single one of those predictions has come true. Of course, as his spokesmouths say, physicians are free to find other employment if they don’t want to be involved in the business of aborting babies. Freedom of conscience is something that only right-thinking people ought to be afforded, because it would be cruel to force a woman to travel an extra half hour to procure an abortion. If Kent Conrad is “infuriated” by Obama’s reneging on giving his state special privileges in ObamaCare, imagine what the doltish Catholic Bishops who supported his candidacy and his social agenda must be feeling. Well, it’s too late to speak out on it now, fellas, because if you preach publicly against those policies, the administration will rescind your non-profit status.

The latest administration depredation of church privilege involves what is called the “ministerial exception” to the Establishment Clause. In other words, churches are exempt from what we now think of as EOE regulation, or at least have been until now. I don’t like to invoke slippery slope arguments, but in this case, it’s a movement towards the totalitarian Chinese government’s claim that it is their privilege to install Catholic clergy or a new Dalai Lama, and spokespeople and sympathizers to the administration have expressed in a variety of ways their envy of the Chinese government’s powers.

I would argue that belonging to a church or synagogue or even a mosque, depending, is likely to increase tolerance, in that it runs interference on the prevailing culture and its reflection in government institutions. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, we say, speaking of a power to whom we give our allegiance entirely voluntarily. We are forced to inspect our values closely when they come into conflict with those promoted by public institutions. We are forced to choose. Those who, like the naifs of Occupy Wall Street, have made a fetish of government-backed secularism are so unused to choosing that they would much rather have their choosing done for them.

Progressivism is a jealous god, that will have none before it, and that part about eliminating the churches? I was just kidding, by Gaia! The state will merely assume its functions.