Separation of Church and State?
What
do you think of the idea of separation of church and state?
It all depends on what you mean
by it. If you mean, “Do I believe in institutional separation, i.e., that the government of the church should be kept
separate from the government of the state”,
then yes I’m all for it. The church should not be a department of the state nor
the state a ministry of the church. Each has its own officers and its own
sphere of responsibility.
But if you mean, “Do I believe in
the separation of God from government,” which is what so many people mean who
cry “Separation of church and state!” then no, I don’t believe it for moment. The
state, no less than the church, has a responsibility to acknowledge God and to
be subject to him.
Now
therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve
the Lord with fear,
and rejoice with trembling
Kiss
the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in
the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed
are all who take refuge in him (Ps. 2:10-12)
Those who hold office in civil
government have a responsibility not only to live faithfully as Christians in
their private lives, but also to govern faithfully as Christians in their
public office, openly acknowledging the Lord’s authority and governing in terms
of his word. Much of the Bible, in fact, is given as instruction to those who
hold public office—the case laws of the Old Testament, for instance. God tells
Moses, “These are the judgments [i.e., rulings]
that you are to set before” the elders and judges of the people (Ex. 21:1; cf.
Deut. 1:17). Civil magistrates are not to rule on their own authority, but are
to look to God’s law as a guide in terms of the proper scope of government, as
well as in terms of specific pieces of legislation, and in terms of how to rule
in criminal cases.
Not only this, but much of the
material in the prophets is both a denunciation of rulers for failing to uphold
God’s law, and a call for them to repent.
Church and state each have
their own particular spheres of responsibility. The state has two chief
responsibilities. First, it is to defend its citizens against foreign invasion.
Second, it is to maintain domestic order by enforcing laws against what God
defines as criminal behavior.[1]
The church, on the other hand, is to teach the word of God and to be a center
for his public worship. So church and state each have their own
responsibilities, but both are under the authority of God and his word.
Leaders in civil government
ought to be members of the church who listen to the teaching of God’s word and
faithfully apply it to their calling as public officials. This was, in fact, a
requirement in the early days of our nation. The colonies, and later, after the
War for Independence, the states had religious tests for public office-holders.
As a part of the swearing in ceremony officials had to swear that they believed
in the Christian religion and in the divinity of Christ, and that they accepted
the Bible as God’s own revealed word.[2]
It is unfortunate that our nation’s founding documents are not more
explicit in this respect. Our Founders shied away from requiring a religious
test for federal office-holders,[3]
not because they were hoping to establish a secular society, but because they deemed
this something to be taken care of at the state level. The states had their own
religious tests. If the federal government imposed a religious test, it would
impinge upon the right of the states to do so.[4]
The Founders seem to have taken
it for granted that ours was a Christian nation and the states would send
Christian men to serve in the Federal government and so they didn’t see the
need to express themselves more fully on this point in our founding documents.
In the Declaration we have mention made of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s
God.” And it is said “all Men are created equal,” and that they are “endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” In the Constitution we have an
acknowledgement of the Lord’s Day, and the date of its passage is said to be
“the Seventeenth Day of September in the
Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.” So there is
clearly a Christian presupposition in these documents. But we could wish the
Founders had been prescient enough to have seen the need to give a fuller
account of these things so that there would not be so much confusion today
concerning their original intentions.
[1] Note
that I said criminal behavior, not sinful behavior. All criminal behavior
is sinful, but not all sinful behavior is criminal.
[2] See,
for instance, Gary DeMar, America’s
Christian History: The Untold Story
(Powder Springs, GA: 2005)
[3] “…no
religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or
public Trust under the United States” (Article VI).
[4] This
is also the rationale behind the establishment clause of the First
Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The Amendment restricts the power of
Congress in these matters lest the acts of Congress contradict the laws of the
states.
Comments
To the extent that some would like confirmation--in those very words--of the founders' intent to separate government and religion, Madison and Jefferson supplied it. Madison, who had a central role in drafting the Constitution and the First Amendment, confirmed that he understood them to “[s]trongly guard[] . . . the separation between Religion and Government.” Madison, Detached Memoranda (~1820). Indeed, he understood the original Constitution--without the First Amendment--to separate religion and government. He made plain, too, that they guarded against more than just laws creating state sponsored churches or imposing a state religion. Mindful that even as new principles are proclaimed, old habits die hard and citizens and politicians could tend to entangle government and religion (e.g., “the appointment of chaplains to the two houses of Congress” and “for the army and navy” and “[r]eligious proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgivings and fasts”), he considered the question whether these actions were “consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom” and responded: “In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the United States forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion.”
While the First Amendment limited only the federal government, the Constitution was later amended to protect from infringement by states and their political subdivisions the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process, and equal protection of the laws. The courts naturally have looked to the Bill of Rights for the important rights thus protected by the 14th Amendment and have ruled that it effectively extends the First Amendment’s guarantees vis a vis the federal government to the states and their subdivisions--hence the law does reach the city councils and public school teachers. While the founders drafted the First Amendment to constrain the federal government, they certainly understood that later amendments could extend the Bill of Rights' constraints to state and local governments.
You allude to the "Sundays excepted" clause in the Constitution and infuse it with meaning it simply does not have. It does not shut down the government on that day or encourage a day of inactivity or even preclude a President from vetoing bills on Sundays. It merely excepts Sundays from the count of ten days a President has to veto bills and, thus, assures a President the better part of two work weeks for that purpose. The clause serves, if anything, to protect the President from losing time in effect as a result of the operation of state laws, prevalent at the time of the founding, restricting activities on Sundays, including travel.
You also make much of the Constitution's date, which, in keeping with the convention of the time, is keyed to the Christian calendar, without actually offering any reason this trivial observation should be regarded as substantive or significant. It is, in any event, moot since the dating language is not part of the text of the Constitution voted upon and adopted by the Convention or ratified by the states. It was apparently just appended by the scrivener who prepared copies of the document. http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/2011/05/us-constitution-and-year-of-our-lord.html