And yet, some Christians and many historians and sociologists view secularization as the genius of public Christianity, especially public Protestantism. In contrast to ancient Judaism and Islam, both of which imagine a public space dominated by a single religion, the church separates the sphere of shared life from the sphere of the church, reserving the sphere of the church for believers and regulating it by the demands of the gospel but defending the secular, neutral character of the public square.
John Milbank smells an equivocation in this argument. Western theology, he notes, has always acknowledged the reality of the saeculum, but this is understood in temporal rather than spatial terms. For Augustine, every earthly peace or justice, every political order, is relative to the absolute order, justice and peace of the eschaton. This secular age is a mixed age, during which wheat and tares grow up together. But this temporal secularity, Milbank argues, does not imply a morally neutral, secular public space, in part because, according to the classic view, both church and state partake of the conditions of the saeculum. The secular, Milbank insists, was not a natural order discovered when the veil of sacrality was lifted; the secular had to be created, and then defended, intellectually, politically, and even theologically. Early in the modern period, politicians and theorists formed, with the cooperation of theologians, the secular arena as a public space of amoral power politics, unrestrained economic self-interest, morally neutral social custom and structure. No word from God is permitted within this space, which is a playground where humans are freed to pursue their private happiness without any reference to ultimate ends. (Click on the title for a link to the full article.)
This touches on my earlier discussion of the freedom afforded by a state church. It turns out that Patrick Henry proposed that Christianity be designated as the state religion of Virginia, where he was a four time governor. He wasn't specifying a particular denomination, just Christianity, but he was up against Jefferson and Madison. His proposal did not carry the day though he tried several times. Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom did pass and Madison considered the establishment of Christianity to be a violation of the Roger William's tradition of "offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every religion" (qt. Moynahan, The Faith, 592). Patrick Henry's evangelical voice was a minority among our other deistic founders.
Stanley Fish argues that the First Amendment to the Constitution views religion as a dangerous element when combined with government. No doubt state religions have been coercive in the past, but they have also produced the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the Reformation. Would the Thomistic synthesis, the Sistine Chapel, the reforms of Luther and Calvin, and the music of Johan Sebastian Bach been possible without Christendom state-religion?
Christendom had its share of abuses but it also testified to the fact that "all things hold together in Christ" (Col. 1:17). We have lost this public testimony in America, while also depriving the government of an absolute basis for law. Our government derives "its just powers from the consent of the governed" (The Declaration of Independence). We are still in middle of this experiment which I suggest is going badly. Without a transcendent basis for moral law, right and wrong is only what the individual thinks it is. With no consensus possible, radical individualism tears at the moral fabric of society. The only healing possible comes through repentance and hope for a more robust public square where the church and the state dialogue until the coming of Christ.
Barach Obama recently disbanded the president's council on bioethics, where Christians had a voice on the dignity of human life made in the image of God. The president said that he needed a policy group not an advisory committee. Yikes! This is a step backward. A state with no thoughtful Christian input on one of the most significant questions of our time is secular in the worst way.
2 comments:
I may have missed this bit, but would you be for or against a Christian state religion? As I understood things, during Christendom, the duty of the state was, at the very least, to protect the Church and allow her to thrive. In our day, the state has in fact usurped many of the Church's duties, such as education, welfare, and even the establishment of morality. I think that in a lot of ways, America was and continues to be a product of Enlightenment and Modernist political thought. Yes, America has some roots in Christianity, but as we have seen, that's not what drives this country. The experiment in liberty has indeed failed, since true freedom cannot be obtained without the gospel, and the same would hold true for any nation that does not seek God first and foremost.
During Christendom there was a distinction of church and state without a separation of church and state. Their relationship was often love-hate, but the state always recognized the universal historical, moral, and theological claims of the church. The state financially supported its institutions for the building of a Christian civilization. The state could also usurp the church and decide when it could have communion (as in Geneva, to Calvin's chagrin) and who it could and could not discipline (as Henry II did with Archbishop Thomas Becket). I would argue that we have the opposite error w/out the benefits afforded by the state recognized churches of Christendom.
My thoughts on what would be better for present day America are in their infant stage, but I would at least be for a more robust church-state dialogue on issues like bio-ethics that we had under Bush. A word from God must be allowed in the public sphere in order to give God what is God's. I think this can be done without violating civil rights of atheists who are free to disagree or agree on other grounds.
I might even be for a non-coercive Christian state religion like they have in England and Scotland where a Christian church is recognized, encouraged, financially supported, and given an official public voice. By non-coercive I mean that no one is told what they have to believe in order to participate in politics, and the children of atheists aren't forced to say the pledge phrase "in God we trust." Other Christian Churches would also be encouraged to participate as well as non-Christian religions. Thus the market place of ideas would be expanded, not constricted, and we could shed our decayed secular skin that's so dry and itchy.
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