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On the Separation of Church and State
(Publisher’s note: On November 9th 2015, in Washington, D. C. the national organization known as Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, held its annual meeting. Our columnist, John Shelby Spong, delivered the keynote address to this conference. During the business session, by vote of their board of directors, Bishop Spong was presented with a plaque designating him as this organization’s national “Person of the Year.” The citation read: “For the bold defense of separation of Church and State and for your tenacious support of the rights of conscience for all.” Today’s column is the substance of the speech that Bishop Spong delivered to that assembly. We wanted our readers to know. ~ProgressiveChristianity.org)
It is a rather modern idea. It was born as the child of the enlightenment in the 18th century. Because it is so recent, it is still fragile, more of an ideal than a reality. Its boundaries are frequently transgressed. I refer to the provision in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights that establishes the separation of church and state. No political entity can impose religious uniformity on any citizen of this land, nor can any citizen be taxed for the support of any church.
Throughout most of human history such an idea was all but unimaginable. Historically religion has always been in the service of the state. In the Bible, Moses the political and tribal leader of Israel, appointed Aaron, his brother, to be the High Priest and second in command. To think of a separation of tribe from religion was not conceivable. The same was true in the history of the nation states of Europe. Almost without exception there was in each an “established church.” A citizen was a Presbyterian in Scotland, an Anglican in England, a Roman Catholic in Southern Europe and Ireland, a Lutheran in northern Germany and Scandinavia and a member of Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia, Eastern Europe and Greece. Public money supported the ecclesiastical organizations and they did the will of the state. This close connection was symbolized by the fact that a cross was emblazoned on most of their flags.
This connection does not suggest that the citizens of those lands were unified in either their religious convictions or in their political practices. It does mean that their battles were fought inside the structure of a state-supported religious system. We see the remnants of this system still at work in the political structures of the United States today.
In our current presidential nominating process, the candidates regularly appeal to the religious sensitivities of the people. “God bless America” ends almost every political speech. Recently, one candidate trying to show his familiarity with religious symbols described his participation in the service of Holy Communion this way: “I eat the little cracker and I sip the wine.” It was a good try, but it revealed how foreign this service really was to him. Others on the campaign trail quote the Bible frequently, though not always intelligently. Another presidential candidate recently suggested, to the amazement of students of Egyptian history, that the Egyptian pyramids were not built as burial places for the Pharaohs, but as huge granaries that the patriarch Joseph used to store the grain gathered during the seven years of plenty so that he could feed the people during the seven years of famine, referring to a story in the book of Genesis. In any Bible examination, this candidate would receive a failing grade.
A much more abhorrent use of the Bible was employed recently in Iowa at something called “A Freedom Forever Foundation” headed by a fundamentalist preacher. It was held in anticipation of the coming caucuses in that state. Three presidential candidates were on the program: Governor Mike Huckabee, Governor Bobby Jindal and Senator Ted Cruz. The host quoted the Bible to prove that God wanted this nation to “arrest and put to death all homosexual persons.” He qualified this call for murder only by saying that these homosexual persons should be given a chance to repent of their sins as a possible reprieve from execution. His text was Leviticus 20. The boundary between religion and politics, between church and state has always been fuzzy. The fact is that this boundary has regularly been violated.
The people appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to serve on the Supreme Court, whose task it is to interpret the Constitution, have historically been people of faith and religious convictions. In time, there grew up a tradition, not a law, that one seat on the Court was designated as “the Jewish seat” to which only a Jew could be appointed. There was also an earlier tradition that one seat was thought of as “the Catholic seat.” At one point during the administration of Harry Truman, he had to fill that seat. He appointed a man, who though not a Roman Catholic was married to one. Truman assumed that that was close enough. He learned quickly, however, from the Cardinal Archbishop of New York that this did not meet the expectations of the Catholic population for there to be a Catholic Justice.
It is interesting to note that the Supreme Court today is made up of six Roman Catholics and three Jews. For the first time in American history, no Protestant Christian sits on that bench. How times have changed. Three of the Roman Catholics, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, are identified with the most conservative aspects of Roman Catholicism. Two others, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, are identified as more moderate Roman Catholics, while the sixth, Justice Sotomayor, is clearly in the liberal wing of her church. Does the religious affiliation of the justices affect their vote? Can church and state ever be completely separated?
We have many 5-4 conservative victory decisions from the Court. The conservative majority is made up of five of the Roman Catholic justices. The liberal block of four includes the three Jewish Justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and the one liberal Roman Catholic, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. On some votes, however, there is a defection from the conservative Catholic side to the liberal side. Chief Justice Roberts, for example, joined the four liberals to uphold the crucial key provision of the Affordable Health Care Act. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the liberal foursome to make marriage equality a human right for all citizens. So there does appear to be some religious influences in politics for all sides, which means that the lines separating church and state are not always clear. It also means that the partnership between organized religion and political power has from time to time been used to violate the rights of American citizens, making the constitutional requirement for separation of church and state a necessity. Let me cite two clear illustrations, both interestingly enough, arising in the 1870’s in American history and both of which scream out for us to grasp with vigilance the constitutional requirement of the separation of church and state. In 1876 there was a presidential election, which pitted the Democratic Governor of New York, Samuel J. Tilden, against the Republican Governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden had won the popular vote by a quarter of a million ballots, but he was one vote short of victory in the Electoral College. Three states in the south, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, had fierce legal disputes about who had won their 19 electoral votes. One electoral vote in Oregon, clearly won by Hayes, was also contested. Instead of throwing this election into the House of Representatives, as the Constitution provides, the leadership of our nation, still torn by the Civil War, appointed a committee made up of thirteen members, seven republicans and six democrats to try to solve the electoral disputes. Can you predict who was destined to win? Behind the scenes, while the committee worked out front, a deal was struck between the religious and political leaders of the three southern “Bible Belt” states to place all their electoral votes into Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes’ column. Oregon did the same with its one vote thus giving Hayes a 185-184 Electoral College majority and the presidency. In return, Hayes agreed first to remove all Union troops from the South, thus ending reconstruction and returning political and law enforcement power to the white voters of the defeated Confederacy. Second, the new President also agreed to look the other way as the white South by legislative action installed segregation as the law of the land. State and church thus joined hands in 1876 to curtail the rights and the freedom of the South’s African-American population. Was it constitutional? Of course not! It illustrates, however, that when religious power and political power come together, they can even make illegal racial oppression operative. It was not until the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education was handed down in 1954 and the Civil Rights laws of 1964 and 1965 were passed under the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson that this country addressed this unconstitutional, but religiously supported violation.
Three years earlier in 1873, a case came before the Supreme Court of the United States entitled “Myra Bradwell v. the State of Illinois.” A woman had successfully satisfied every written requirement of the State of Illinois, including the passing of the bar examination, to enable her to practice law in Illinois. When she applied for her law license, however, she was turned down because she was a woman. No Illinois statutes prohibited women from practicing law, because no one had yet imagined that a woman would ever want to do so. So she appealed to the Supreme Court, where by an 8-1 vote (Chief Justice Salmon Chase being the sole dissenter), the Supreme Court upheld the State of Illinois. On what legal basis did the court do this? When one reads the majority opinion, the answer is clearly none. In the opinion written by Justice Bradley, the Court turned Myra Bradwell down on the basis of the Bible! His exact words state: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy, which belongs to the feminine sex, evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” The idea that God created the woman for “the more domestic role” is from Genesis 2 where the woman was made from the side of Adam not to be his equal, but to be his “helpmeet.”
The issues between church and state are always fuzzy, always subject to the tides of one’s conscience. Separation of the two will always be a struggle, but that struggle must always be engaged. So this radical enlightenment-born concept of the separation of church and state will always require constant attention. That is why we have this organization, which must always stay strong, vigilant and alert. Our freedom, perhaps even the survival of some of our fellow citizens, will be at risk if the separation is not both firm and effective.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Tom Hinds from Windsor, UK, writes:
Question:
We met most recently in June 2015 in Windsor, UK, when I drove you and Christine from your nephew’s home to Holy Trinity Church. I asked you then if the writing of the book, entitled Walking My Path in the Way of the Mystics was in your mind when you wrote your book on John’s gospel.
Another question/suggestion: You demonstrate cogently the inadequacies of the first-century world view for present day Christians. Have you thought of sketching a more appropriate world view by taking the concepts, processes and key words of the present day scientific world view and suggesting what each might imply and call for, in spirit terms, in the daily living of those wanting to walk in the Way of (and, perhaps, with) Jesus? E.g. Miriam Winter in Paradoxology (Orbis 2009) uses such words as: chaos, consciousness, connectedness, coincidence, creation, celebration, relativity, uncertainty, probability, continuity, relationship, wholeness and transformation.
Answer:
Dear Tom,
Thank you for your letter to my column and for your suggestions. I am honored that you spend your time and energy thinking of topics on which you think I should be writing. Unfortunately, that is not the way the writing genie operates.
I have now published twenty-six books. They all rose out of either my study life as a priest and later as a bishop or out of some experience I was having inside the institutional church as it sought to give leadership to the values of the world in which we were living. I think of the church’s role in the struggle for justice and equality for African-Americans, women and gay and lesbian people. In a sense each of my books laid the groundwork for the next. Never did I simply start in a new direction. I read deeply in the area of both Jewish and Christian mysticism before I wrote two books: Eternal Life: A New Vision and The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. I don’t see a further journey into that subject, much as I loved it.
I have two major writing projects lined up. I doubt if either will ever get developed into a book. I hope they will appear in my column on a week-to-week basis. To place either one of them into a book would be a five-year project. To place both of them into a book would be a ten-year project. To think that I might finish one or both of them in the time remaining to me in what William Shakespeare called “this mortal coil” is, I believe, to be unrealistic.
The first of these tentatively planned writing projects is entitled: Twelve Theses for the Continuing Reformation of Christianity. I may well deal with some of the subject matter mentioned in your second suggestion in that study. The second of my proposed writing projects is to sink myself into the gospel of Luke as deeply as I did into John, which preceded my book: The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, or as deeply as I have done on the gospel of Matthew in preparation for my book which comes out next February under the title, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy- A Journey into a New Christianity through the Doorway of Matthew’s Gospel. That project does not yet even have a tentative title.
Thank you for your letter and I hope to see you again in the fall of 2016 when I will once again do a lecture tour in the UK and Europe.
My best,
John Shelby Spong
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