On the Separation of Church and State

          I recently read this report on a statement Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made regarding separation of church and state.  According to a report on The Huffington Post Santorum said:

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute," he told 'This Week' host George Stephanopoulos. "The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country...to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up."

This report appeared under the banner headline “Santorum:  Separation of Church and State ‘Makes Me Want To Throw Up.’”  The next day Santorum tried to clarify his position on separation of church and state by saying that the state has no right to tell the church what to do, a clarification that really doesn't help much.  I think the policies that Rick Santorum advocates are so destructive as almost to call his mental competence into question; but this headline, which to some extent at least misrepresents what Santorum apparently actually said, and what Santorum actually did say (according to this report) raise the question of separation of church and state in our country in a particularly stark way.  As both the Huffington Post headline and Santorum’s comments demonstrate, that concept is widely misunderstood.  It is, however, a concept that is so central to the American way of government and of life that understanding it is vitally important for all Americans.  Perhaps this essay can contribute to that understanding.

The concept of separation of church and state is a product of Enlightenment rationalism.  The norm in Europe before the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and indeed the norm in Europe even today in one form or another) was for the church to be anything but separate from the state.  In the German principalities of the Reformation, for example, the choice the local ruler made about which version of Christianity to accept determined what the faith was for the people he ruled.  In Orthodox eastern Europe and Russia, there was an intimate relationship between the local Orthodox church and the state.  In Russia, the situation with which I am most familiar, the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the major buttresses of autocracy, and the autocracy gave a privileged position to and protected the Russian Orthodox Church.  An intimate relationship of mutual support if not outright legal establishment was the normal relationship between church and state in all of Europe.  In Great Britain the monarch was, and is, the titular head of the church.  Religious freedom for the people was unheard of and would have been considered a very strange concept by most Europeans.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were reacting against religion in general and Christianity in particular in most of their thinking and especially in the way they replaced faith with human reason as the arbiter of truth in all matters.  In the Enlightenment the notion of individual freedom of conscience appeared virtually for the first time.  The notion was articulated and gained at least some popular acceptance that faith was a personal matter that the government had no business trying to determine for people.  The Enlightenment rationalists also thought that established churches exerted a deleterious influence on government, keeping it from making rational decisions.  The notion that church and state should be separate developed as a way of protecting the individual from dictation by the state in matters of faith and to protect the state from control by a church.

The United States Constitution is above all else a product of Enlightenment rationalism.  The notion that it primarily a Christian document is utter nonsense that no serious student of history can possibly maintain.  It is the product of a cultural and intellectual movement, the Enlightenment, that was as much as anything else a reaction against Christianity as Christianity had come to be in the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
The US Constitution never uses the phrase “separation of church and state,” but it has two provisions that the US courts have held establish the doctrine of separation of church and state as a central principle of US constitutional law.  The first is contained in the body of the Constitution as originally written.  Article 6 of the Constitution states, among other things, that no “religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”  This provision meant that no person could be excluded from public office or (probably) from public employment in the federal government because of the person's faith or lack of faith.  The second provision appears in the First Amendment to the Constitution.  That Amendment states, among other things, that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  The federal courts have established a huge and complex body of case law interpreting this provision of the First Amendment, both of the so-called anti-establishment clause (the first clause of the sentence) and the so-called free exercise clause (the second clause of the sentence).  At the risk of oversimplification we can say that the thrust of that case law is that the government must allow the widest possible exercise of religion compatible with public order and decency and that no governmental entity may enact or adopt laws, regulations, or practices that tend to favor any religion over any other religion or over no religion. 

What does that mean for the role of religion in American life?  It means first of all that the government must pretty much stay out of religious issues.  It means that the government may not force any person to belong to or to follow any religion or faith tradition.  It means that all persons in this country are free to accept and to follow any religion they want or to accept and to follow no religion at all.  With regard to politics it means that no person may be legally disqualified from running for public office because of the position that person holds on religious matters, either because he accepts a particular religion or because she does not.

Now we need to consider what separation of church and state does not mean in our country.  It does not mean that citizens and candidates for public office must keep their religious beliefs out of their policy positions.  All political positions are based on some system of values.  Even if a particular politician is really concerned with nothing but gaining power for himself he is still operating from a system of values.  The only value may be the politician’s personal power, but to that politician that is still a value.  Separation of church and state in no way means, and indeed in no way can mean, that politicians must detach their policy positions from their values, whatever those values may be and regardless of whether those values are grounded in a religion or in something else.  Let’s take abortion as an example.  Many people are opposed to abortion on moral grounds that stem in their understanding from their religious faith.  It is perfectly appropriate for those people to support public policies that limit or even outlaw abortion.  We may or may not share their value on this issue.  We may or may not agree with them that Christianity or some other faith tradition requires this kind of opposition to abortion and that public policy should severely limit or ban abortion.  The fact remains that it is perfectly legitimate for a person to advocate public policies on abortion that reflect their values and support politicians who share those values. 

What would be illegitimate under the doctrine of separation of church and state as it has developed in this country would be for the government to look only to the teachings of a particular religion in making its policy decisions.  It would be inappropriate for the US government to ban abortion because abortion violates the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, for example.  It would not be inappropriate for a particular representative or senator to vote to prohibit abortion because abortion violates her conscience even if her conscience is informed by or based upon the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  I admit that we’re talking about a fine line here.  Just to continue using the Roman Catholic Church as an example, it is impermissible for the US government to let the Vatican dictate public policy to it or for the government to abdicate its responsibility for creating public policy and give Vatican decrees the power of law.  It would be inappropriate for the Senate to pass a rule allowing Senators to speak only in favor of laws consistent with Vatican policies or teachings.  It is not inappropriate for individual Senators to support bills that reflect Vatican policies or teachings and to oppose bills that violate those policies or teachings.  But what if the American electorate, to create an absurd and impossible hypothetical, voted into office only Senators who committed to supporting only bills that the Vatican endorsed?  Those Senators keeping their campaign promise and voting only for bills that the Vatican endorsed would not be violating the doctrine of separation of church and state.  They would merely be acting in the public arena on the basis of their values, which is what every politician does in any event.

Which brings us back to Rick Santorum and the Huffington Post’s somewhat misleading headline.  The first thing to say about that item is that the headline misquotes Santorum.  The headlines has it that Santorum said that separation of church and state makes him want to throw up.  He didn’t say that, or if he did he said it only indirectly.  Santorum’s statement (at least as it was quoted in the Huffington Post) has three elements.  They are, in the order in which they appear in that statement:

1.      “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are (sic) absolute."

2.      “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

3.      “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes me want to throw up.”

The first thing to say about this statement is that Santorum misunderstands the doctrine of separation of church and state.  He seems here to take it to mean two things.  The first is that “the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state.”  Whether or not separation of church and state actually mean that depends on what is meant by “can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state.”  Under the doctrine of separation of church and state the state cannot allow any church to dictate to it what its policies shall be.  The church, any church, may express its position of matters of public policy.  It may lobby Congress in support of positions it supports.  My own United Church of Christ does that all the time.  Any law that sought to prohibit that kind of participation by a church in the public political process would violate both the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and that Amendment’s guarantee of  the freedoms of speech and of petitioning the government for redress of grievances. 

The second thing Santorum seems to take separation of church and state to mean is that “people of faith [can] have no role in the public square.”  Santorum may hear criticism of his extremist social views that are grounded in what seems to be an extremist conservative Catholicism as an attempt to keep people of faith from having a role in the public square, but surely that’s not what they are.  People of faith, like Santorum, have every right to speak their mind in the public square.  The rest of us have every right to disagree with them, to call their extremist positions extremist, to say our faith leads us to a different conclusion.  Disagreeing with someone is not the same thing as trying to deny her the right to speak her mind, to express her opinions, on matters of public interest.  So Santorum pretty clearly does not understand the doctrine of separation of church and state.

Yet it does no one any good for the Huffington Post or anyone else to misrepresent what Santorum or any other public figure actually said.  Santorum didn’t say “separation of church and state makes me want to throw up,” as the Huffington Post headline says he did.  He said that the notion that people of faith may have no voice in the public square makes him want to throw up.  That position makes me want to throw up too, to adopt for the moment Santorum’s rather coarse way of putting it.  Santorum apparently misunderstands separation of church and state to mean that people of faith may have no voice in the public square, but that’s not what it means.  So Santorum said only indirectly that separation of church and state makes him sick.  What he said was that a particular misunderstanding of the meaning of separation of church and state makes him sick. 

I know that headlines are not the place for nuance, but this Huffington Post headline creates a real possibility of misunderstanding.  People with a better understanding of separation of church and state will read the headline, and perhaps only the headline, and get a false impression of what Santorum actually thinks.  We don’t need to create a false impression of what Santorum really thinks in order to discredit him.  What he actually thinks is plenty bizarre enough to discredit him.  Misleading headlines like this one simply create an opening for Santorum and his ilk to scream that they aren’t getting a fair shake from the “liberal” press.

Separation of church and state is indeed a foundational concept in US law.  It is one of the bulwarks of whatever freedom we have left.  After Citizens United v. FEC our political freedom, our right to vote, doesn’t mean very much.  Our elections have been delivered over to control by those with huge amounts of money, but our freedoms of speech and of religion still mean something.  Separation of church and state is essential to our maintaining those freedoms.  The state has no right to tell us what we must believe.  It has no right to advantage any religion over any other, or over atheism for that matter.  We must not let politicians like Rick Santorum distort the meaning of that doctrine, and it doesn’t help in that effort for us to misrepresent even a little bit what they say.