Separation of Church and State Has Failed
Editor’s Note: This is a transcript of a speech delivered at the National Conservatism Conference on Tuesday, July 9th, 2024. It is printed here with the speaker’s permission. Video of this talk is available at National Conservatism’s YouTube channel.
The title of my talk poses a question: Should Catholics Fear Ending Separation? The short answer is simple: No! And it is not a half-hearted “No.” Catholics can only rejoice over the demise of the extreme secularism behind the legal conceit of “strict separation.”
For more than a century after the Founding, our constitutional order prevented religious establishment at the federal level. But that order permitted the government, local, state, and even federal, to aid and assist the churches in the promotion of the religious life of the American people. Under the Constitution, the states have police power, which means the authority, and indeed, the duty, “to enact and enforce laws to protect and promote the health, safety, morals, order, peace, comfort, and general welfare of the people.” It was taken for granted to the promotion of religion fell under the proper police power of the states. The establishment of Sabbatarian blue laws offers an obvious instance, as did the requirements of biblical literary and prayer at the beginning of the school day.
In the decades after the Civil War, the influx of Catholic immigrants created panic in Protestant America. By the end of the nineteenth century, many states had passed Blaine Amendments designed to severely limit government support of religion. It was the first stage of “strict separation.” It arose almost entirely to prevent public funding of Catholic institutions. Few were concerned with ongoing government support for a generic Protestantism.
After World War II, however, the secularist ideology of separationism took hold. In the 1947 Everson decision, the Supreme Court introduced the novel idea that the constitution prohibits state and local governments from giving preference to religion. In the 1948 McCollum decision, the Court deemed voluntary religious instruction in public schools a violation of the First Amendment. In the two decisions in the early 1960s, the Court ruled unconstitutional the use of even the most anodyne ecumenical prayer in schools. Other decisions severely curtailed public support of religious symbols. The ideology of strict separation was ascendant. It dictated that even the slightest hint of public support for religion amounts to a violation of the First Amendment.
Legal scholars can debate this unfortunate evolution of church/state jurisprudence. But whatever one thinks about the rise of strict separation over the last 70 years, one thing is clear and beyond dispute: American Catholicism had nothing to do with it.
After the 1948 McCollum decision, the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray denounced the outcome. Driving Christianity out of government schools did not create a “neutral” environment, he argued. On the contrary, it threw the weight of government power behind secularism.
Murray was not a revanchist Catholic. His reflections on the proper and fitting alliance of Catholicism with America’s constitutional traditions were extraordinarily influential. Most scholars agree that Murray had significant influence over the drafting of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, which emphasized the Catholic Church’s support of the right of individuals to worship God, free of governmental coercion. But neither the Declaration nor Murray withdrew support for the evident moral truth that we should encourage and support religion. As the Declaration states: “Government is to help create conditions favorable to the flourishing of religious life.”
In other words, civil authority has a positive duty to encourage religiosity among the polity’s citizens. The reason is two-fold. First, we are created by God for the purpose of knowing and serving him. We are not made to be simply rich, healthy, and satiated. Our souls seek transcendence. Therefore, a good society educates the young to look above, as it were, and not just below. If a society fails to encourage transcendence, citizens become debased, addicted, and unhappy. Sadly, this is our present condition. Mental health among the young is in the toilet. This has come about in part because of the triumph of state-sponsored secularism.
The second reason concerns social stability and the virtues necessary for sustaining a well-functioning polity. The Founders often stipulated that a free society requires a moral citizenry, and they recognized that religion is a great moral tutor. Therefore, civil authorities have a utilitarian duty to promote religiosity. The more inclined a nation is to regular church attendance, the more well-ordered its public life will be.
Again, Murray was far-seeing. He recognized that the ideology of secularism would undermine the American tradition of ordered liberty. And, indeed, it has. The Great and the Good bemoan polarization. They wring their hands over the dysfunctional black underclass, which is now increasingly multicultural as a white and Hispanic underclass grows. Institutions are collapsing. Our universities are run by feckless bureaucrats. These and other signs of social disintegration have many causes, of course, but primary among them has been the decline of religion and the triumph of a spiritually empty secularism.
Our duty to honor and serve God is not a revealed truth. Nor do we need to rely on the bible to know that civil authority should promote religion. These are fundamental principles of natural law, recognized by all societies that are not debased by the liberalism that makes secularism into the ersatz state religion. These duties are not “special” Catholic teachings. However, as a matter of historical fact, in the centuries after the French Revolution, the Catholic Church has been the single most powerful and articulate adversary of modern liberalism and its perennial efforts to destroy the religious life in the West. Catholic resistance has earned great antipathy. In Germany in the late nineteenth century, the power of the state was employed in an effort to destroy the social influence of the Catholic Church. A few decades later, in France, radical measures were imposed toward the same end. I’ve already noted the Blaine Amendments. This historical experience makes modern Catholicism acutely aware of the vicious and destructive tendencies of secular liberalism.
The Second Vatican Council set aside the hysterical and hyperbolic aspect of the Catholic tradition of anti-liberalism. But the Church retained her concern about liberalism’s tendency toward the ersatz religion of secularism. Throughout his pontificate, Pope John Paul II warned of the dangers of a society without transcendence. In retrospect, the main thrust of Catholic social teaching after the Second Vatican Council has been to save the liberal West from its self-destructive excesses by grounding the modern quest for freedom in the larger, perennial and far more fundamental human quest for transcendence.
Today, we have opportunities to repair the damage done by constitutionally imposed secularism based on the specious legal notion that there must be “wall of separation” between religion and public life. Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida have mandated biblical literacy for school children. Louisiana will require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. These modest measures move America in the right direction. No Catholic could object. On the contrary, we should be cheering. The ideology of strict separation has done great damage to our society. The time has come to repurpose the words of Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Chief Justice John Roberts, tear down that wall!”
Image Credit: Unsplash
