The separation of church and state

A blogswarm dedicated to the separation of church and state is being held this Easter Weekend.

As a contribution to the discussion against theocracy, I propose the material below. First a few ‘cool’ (but optional) PowerPoint presentations that take us back in time and may serve as background to my final link:

The Wars of Religion

The Age of Reason and Enlightenment

The French Revolution – ‘Bourgeois’ Phase

The French Revolution – ‘Radical’ Phase

Finally, the article that best addresses the question of the separation of church and state is, in my opinion, one authored by Constantin Fasolt, Professor of History at The University of Chicago: Separation of Church and State – The Past and Future of Sacred and Profane

The received wisdom about religion in the history of Europe is that religion has gradually lost power over the European mind. During the Middle Ages religion ruled supreme. Then the Reformation broke up the unity of Christianity; the Enlightenment shook the foundations of religion; and the astonishing discoveries made by the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, especially the theory of evolution, dealt a deathblow to religion. Thereafter religion survived only in the nooks and crannies of modern life. It could no longer show itself in public without looking befuddled, ignorant, and cranky. God had died. If Max Weber can be believed, the outcome was a spiritually barren and disenchanted form of life in an “iron cage” of modern legal, scientific, and bureaucratic rationality whose origin and nature Weber so feverishly sought to understand.

1 A Challenge to the Received Wisdom

In my opinion, this view is wrong. In the first place, it rests on a mistaken notion of religion because it identifies religion with the intellectual content of religious faith. It points, for example, to the account of human origins in the book of Genesis, contrasts it with the account established on principles of science, and concludes that science has displaced religion. The contrast between biblical and scientific accounts is perfectly real. But the conclusion does not follow. Religion does not consist of any particular belief. It rather consists of distinguishing the sacred from the profane. The ways in which that distinction can be drawn are infinitely variable. So far from displacing that distinction, science may well have become its most important source of strength.

Second, the received wisdom imposes a false continuity on European religious history. Because it identifies religion with the content of particular beliefs, it identifies the history of religion with the history of those beliefs. As a result, the history of religion looks like the gradual displacement of certain dogmas of theology rooted in sacred texts by certain secular-scientific views founded on rational analysis and empirical observation. The speed and intensity of the change may be acknowledged to have varied over time and place. But overall there is a single development that leads from the assertion of religious supremacy at the beginning to its denial at the end. In fact, so I shall try to argue, there is no such development. There rather are two separate phases, a medieval and a modern one, each with its own religious faith, each zealous in its devotion to the sacraments. The displacement of medieval theology by modern scientific rationality went hand in hand with the assertion of a modern form of religion that makes its own claims on supremacy. What looks like a gradual displacement of religion by science at the level of particular beliefs conceals a transition from one form of religion to another.

Third, the received wisdom offers a false explanation for the decline of religion. It maintains that religion fell under the onslaught of enemies of faith. It views the history of religion in terms of a battle between opposing parties. On one side are those who have religious faith, and on the other those who rest their case on reason. This is pure ideology. In fact faith and reason are fully present on both sides, in medieval as well as modern times. Religious faith has rather fallen under the onslaught of its friends. It fell because the friends of religion, far from opposing reason, harnessed their reason most closely to their faith and worked the hardest to turn their faith into a coherent intellectual system. They meant to lead their faith to victory. Instead they crossed the boundary between the sacred and the profane. They did not realize that faith expires in the arms of systems. They violated the taboo and paid the penalty. The danger posed by heresy was small by comparison.

Fourth, the received wisdom is blind to the power of religion in the modern world. It draws attention to the dismantling of traditional Christianity. But it fails to notice the concomitant establishment of a modern faith that leaves nothing to be desired in terms of the clarity with which it distinguishes the sacred from the profane, or the religious intensity with which its sacraments are worshiped by the faithful flock. The received wisdom therefore has no conceptual means with which to grasp the religious crisis that has been growing for a century and is now in full bloom. Of course it notices the pathologies of modern society. It knows about the growth of religious fundamentalism at home and abroad. It understands that it is facing a fundamental challenge. But it is so closely identified with the religion whose crisis we are witnessing today that it cannot interpret the challenge as anything other than an assault on reason and cannot respond except by repeating itself. It cannot tell the difference between faith and reason and confuses knowledge with belief. Far from supplying us with an intelligible account of our current predicament, it looks with blind eyes at others and fails to comprehend itself. [...]

On the one hand, the separation of church and state is widely seen as a unique accomplishment of the modern West of which the West deserves to be proud because it secures freedom from religious oppression. It is one of the most important ingredients in the received wisdom, one of the chief exhibits in the great trial designed to convict the Middle Ages of having sacrificed human rights on the altar of religious orthodoxy, and demonstrate the progress made by the modern world to liberty and reason. On the other hand, the separation of church and state is now under growing assault by religious fundamentalists. If you accept the received wisdom, that assault will look like a battle between ignorance and reason, reaction and progress, oppression and liberty. If you agree with the perspective adopted here, it will rather look like a religious war over the question, “What is sacred?” The separation of church and state thus furnishes a kind of litmus test for the question I have proposed. Is it a principle of reason? Or is it an article of faith? – Link

Related link: First Freedom First