Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1791, protects five freedoms. Few of us feel threatened with the loss of free speech, press, assembly, or petition. Although each is periodically reexamined in the light of new cultural or political realities, all have been regularly reaffirmed—indeed made even stronger—because of the challenges.
But this is not so of our freedom of religion. Few of us feel secure with the current interpretations of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Far from feeling that recent challenges have strengthened it, some feel the lifeblood of our religious freedom is slowly being sucked from our constitutionally protected veins.
Many reasons are given for this anemic state of affairs: secularization, privatization, or trivialization of religion are the ones most often mentioned. Yet one crucial misunderstanding threatens our ability to address them. We have failed to distinguish between questions of church and state on the one hand, and questions of religion and politics on the other. We treat them as if they are the same, and in so doing put ourselves in an impossible position. Christians must affirm the separation of church and state as institutions, but not the separation of the more loosely defined attitudes and values of religion and politics.
A Double Fortification
Failure to make this distinction is all the more unfortunate because the language of the First Amendment religion clauses requires such an understanding. Unlike the other First Amendment freedoms, the religion clauses form a double fortification, protecting the government and its citizens against oppression by church institutions, and protecting both institutional and personal religion against government interference. Religion was—and is—such a potent force that it merited this special attention that speech, press, assembly, and petition did not.
The first clause, against “an establishment of religion,” calls for church-state separation. The question is one of liberty, of freedom from governmental regulation, and from church domination and the power plays of bishops and other hierarchies. It is a hands-off policy that says the less interaction between government and church institutions the better.
The second clause, directing against “prohibiting the free exercise of religion,” is a religion-politics clause. Its intent is to make sure individuals (even groups) can express themselves and their faith freely. And that includes injecting personal religious values into the political process. It does not necessarily advocate interaction between man as religious and man as politician, but it does defend the right for that to occur. The question is one of equality, of individual freedom ensured by law, if necessary.
There is real genius in the way the Constitution protects against large religious groups ganging up on everyone else, without forfeiting the benefits of foundational religious values seasoning the political process through individually active Christians. Unfortunately, there has been a notable lack of genius in applying the constitutional mandates to the real world of law. Courts and Christian activist groups regularly behave as if the beneficial tension between the two clauses does not exist.
Courts have been singularly uncreative in trying to interpret this tension. Take the matter of school prayer, for example. Laws that would allow prayer (a practice so universal that it satisfies the separation concerns of the first clause), yet do not specify the content of prayer (thus allowing individual religious differences), have consistently been disallowed. In cases like these, the courts treat every case as if it is a church-state separation problem, ignoring the constitutional window of opportunity that allows for the seasoning of public life with spiritual values.
Similarly, some religious activist groups behave as if the second clause gives the institutional church the freedom to take over the political process altogether. They have come dangerously close to advocating that church institutions be used to force sectarian beliefs on the whole country. Instead of looking at creative ways of educating individual Christians on how the values of our faith should impact the world at large (and trusting that such wholesale awareness will inevitably have the desired effect on public life), they have succumbed to the temptation to reduce the church to political party status. When religious groups ignore the constitutional mandate for a democracy that is culturally and religiously pluralistic, they forfeit their spiritual stature. Even though the moral and social agendas of Christian activist groups may appear attractive, the church must be wary of being drawn into a strictly political posture. Throughout history, whenever the church has functioned primarily as a political force, the gospel has been compromised.
Only by recognizing the important tension between church-state and religion-politics can we efficiently attack the other threats to modern religious life.
The Secularization Of The Spiritual
Part of that recognition is to avoid being too idealistic about what constitutes spiritual issues. Religion and politics overlap in their spheres of interest. Both are concerned with values that determine how we live our lives. For example, both governmental and religious institutions have a strong interest in family issues—the education of children, the nutrition of pregnant women, the protection of battered wives, the regulation of divorce, and the collection of child-support payments. Both have methods and organizations that deal with these issues. It would be wrong to merge the efforts of church and state; it would be equally foolish, though, to think that they deal with totally different spheres.
But we must also recognize—and strongly reaffirm—the unique role of the church as the identifier of where “good” values come from. Recently, an organization called the Institute for Cultural Conservation announced a campaign to make “a case for cultural conservatism … in wholly secular terms.” We applaud such a movement insofar as it promotes values compatible with the Christian vision.
However, we reject the notion that the values themselves can be secularized. Values must be rooted in authority, or like all rootless plants they either wither and die, or else are blown about by the first strong gusts that spring up.
Lasting, true values have a transcendent source. They can be endorsed by a constitutionally based government because they “work”; but they work, and we believe in them, because the Bible tells us it is so.
The genius of our Constitution, rightly interpreted, is that it has been prophetically pragmatic, while at the same time it has defended our right to live by the values we hold dear.
By Terry Muck.
