Nov. 18, 2007

The Great Wall of America
By Harry T. Cook
Even though the phrase “wall of separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution of the United States, Thomas Jefferson used it early in his presidency in reference to his and his fellow founders’ intention to keep ecclesiastical meddlers at arm’s length from the making of laws and the governance of country and government out of the church’s hair.

In the main since then, both Congress and the Supreme Court have honored that principle in the enacting and interpretation of laws, respectively. With clever lawyering, however, there have been instances in which sectarian conceits have overborne the wisdom of the separation doctrine.

For instance, two small suburban Detroit cities (Berkley and Clawson)
within five miles of one another have differing policies about the display of the Christian nativity scene. Berkley confines it to church property; Clawson won a federal suit against the American Civil Liberties Union almost 20 years ago that allows the display of Jesus, Mary and Joseph on city property as long as a menorah appears with them in company with Santa Claus and the requisite reindeer. So every once in a while, Jefferson’s stately wall is breached.

On the face of it, the separation of church and state, of religion and government, makes sense. It made sense to the founders because they enjoyed an ocean’s expanse between themselves and Great Britain with its state-sponsored church; hence, they had and took the opportunity to eliminate that hyphenated contradiction. Our founders were children of the Enlightenment and understood better than a lot of people might credit today why the governance of a free state would work better without the undue influence of piety and revealed certitudes.

Not that they were antagonistic to religion and its institutions, but, as Joseph Ellis has pointed out in his new book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, the founders saw the wisdom of setting up a governmental system that would treat disagreement as a strength rather than a weakness, a system arranged to encourage questions, doubt and argument rather than to produce answers and foreclose debate.

Bingo! If Ellis is right, and I think the data show him to be, that’s why, even if the wall of separation had not been implicit in the founders’ work, it would have to have been erected later on. Why?

Because hierarchical, institutional religion is organized to do just the opposite, i.e., to give answers, stifle doubt and suppress argument. It is an enterprise of proclamation, almost always of untestable propositions arrived at a priori, admitting of neither analysis nor critique. In many communions, the propositions are expressed in the form of creeds that begin with the words “We believe . . .”

Ninety-nine percent of those who by rubric stand and affirm such creeds have had neither the opportunity nor the resources to investigate the credibility of what they are being asked to aver.

Thus does much organized religion – my own Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. included – operate. And when the purveyors of piety are more evangelical and fundamentalist than most Episcopalians, the going gets tough for question, doubt and argument.

Part of the failure and, at the same time, part of the success of my approach to the religious life has been to free those who respond to my leadership from the necessity of confessing terms of a dead faith and to welcome them into the enterprise of inquiry and critical thinking.

The failure comes as people refuse to be freed and insist on the iteration of language and concept that originated before the observations of Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein, before the Enlightenment wisdom of Francis Bacon and others who, as E.L. Doctorow has written, insisted on putting claims of knowledge to the test with observation and experience.

Unless and until religion has followed that lead consistently and honestly, it needs to be walled off from the governance of a republic such as the United States of America.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
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