Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 17, 1993 TAG: 9305170263
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LARRY CRINER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Most Americans, if they think about the matter at all, probably regard the problem of the church-state relationship as very simple: "I believe in religious freedom and the separation of church and state."
But what is "church"? What is "state"? What is "separation"? Who should delimit the powers of the church and the state? These questions can perhaps never be fully answered. But they go to the heart of our philosophy of government, touching every aspect of public and private life.
When Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a Supreme Court ruling in the early '50s that "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being," he was expressing a point of view that had been sustained by the court for 150 years. However, this presupposition is no longer held today.
A profound shift in the court's thought and attitude toward religion has evolved over the last several decades. It has moved from a position of respect toward religion to skepticism and outright hostility.
Russell Hittinger, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank in Washington, in a new study of the court's view of religion, concludes that if one had to rely only on court opinion to ascertain what our culture means by religion, he would have reason to put religion in the same category as poisons and mental diseases.
The 1992 Lee v. Weisman decision, the court's most recent decision concerning school prayer, Hittinger says, was important because it crystallized the court's church-state jurisprudence of the last 40 years. In it, Justice Anthony Kennedy reasoned that the problem with public prayer is that it drains secular events of their meaning, robbing nonbelievers of the proper meanings and values associated with "life's most significant occasions." It has "the potential for divisiveness" among believers.
Justice Harry Blackmun, in his concurring opinion, fears it might lead to something far worse. Along with the death penalty, school prayer "is the only issue that elicits death threats." Moreover, religious fellowship is fine for discriminating adults, but it might be harmful to children. Kennedy writes, "We do not address whether that choice is acceptable if the affected citizens are adults, but we think the state may not, consistent with the Establishment Clause, place primary and secondary schoolchildren in this position."
The court's phobia of religion is pretty clear: It is not only divisive, but potentially homicidal; it tends to subvert the ordinary meanings and value of life; and it may be hazardous to the psyches of children. Indeed, were an alien from another world to survey the court's dicta about obscenity, he would find that obscenity rarely is described in terms as forbidding as is religion in Weisman.
In its 1990 Oregon Employment Division v. Smith decision, the court scaled the "wall of separation" and turned the principles governing church-state relations on their head. In it, the court moved from the constitutional principle that "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," to the principle that "government need not show a compelling interest" when interfering with religious practices that clash with "reasonable" laws.
Using the legal tenet articulated in Smith, a federal court in Minnesota rejected the charge of Cornerstone Bible Church that the city of Hastings impeded the church's ability to practice its faith by forbidding it to locate in a commercial zone. The court noted in its ruling that the rights of the church could be no more protected than those of an adult movie theater.
Certainly, the siege in Waco and the murder of Pensacola's Dr. David Gunn by a pro-life advocate will further tarnish the image of religion, accelerating the push to "cage" it. Battle lines already are forming over taxation and regulation of churches and religious groups, funding of religious social services, freedom of speech and discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs.
Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, alluded to an authority that was prior to all constitutions and positive laws - meaning, our rights come from God, not the state. Democracy for them was not just a theory of government; it was a philosophy of life that must live in the hearts of men.
In the words of John Adams: "We have no government armed with power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
For the republic to work, the founders thought, the people had to be guided by moral values. They asserted that without the virtues of religion, the social order weakens and eventually sickens and dies. Where there is no shared spiritual awareness, the moral and social foundations of living together are absent; the life of society becomes a question of force, politics a savage contest.
Adams and the others separated the church from the state, but not morality from government. As they understood it, politics cannot be indifferent to religion, because without religion, the springs of decency dry up and the social order becomes mortally wounded.
In America today, we have gone a long way on the road to point-blank denial of the primacy of religion. We see the growing ascendancy of secularism, which holds that God is nonexistent or irrelevant to human affairs, that man is the measure of all things. It asserts a doctrine of moral relativism and seeks to purge from the public square any residue of faith inherited from the older polity.
On the other side stand the reality of God and religion as the source of wisdom and virtue. This view teaches that we are incomplete creatures unless we have a living relationship with the divine.
The so-called culture war is a fight between these two positions. Religion and secularism, projecting different views of what it means to be human, view culture differently as they seek to solve the deepest problem of the human condition, a malaise that seems to be a product of the inherent and ineluctable conflict between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the physical, the mind and the body.
The risk is that America may become the home of a rigidly secularist civilization becoming totally preoccupied with material things. It may become a mechanical civilization: cold, bloodless, and sick without being sorry.
Symptoms to that effect are prevalent. Religion is regularly challenged in the name of morality, and nihilism is the most conspicuous trait of contemporary life. The belief that there is really nothing behind any faith or doctrine leads to the conviction that expediency alone matters. God has become, in some quarters, the dirty little "g" word that we no longer speak in public.
The stresses on our culture are mounting, and we have yet to count the human costs. Senseless killings are commonplace; the words law and order mean little; drug abuse eats away at the fabric of the nation. With all the talk about these problems, there lurks, at least in our more lucid moments, the perception that that which threatens to destroy us lies within.
In moving from a morality of self-imposed restraint, we have to rely increasingly on the law to protect us from ourselves. Once a people cease to believe in transcendental values, society becomes degenerate as freedon turns into license.
The question is: Can our democracy survive on so slender a moral base as secularism provides? Regrettably, the promises of either liberalism or conservatism, as workable social theories, will not suffice, because neither provides the grand ideal from which people can draw moral and spiritual strength and meaning.
Our job is to lay the foundations of a world where life and living together is once more sacred.
AUTHOR Larry Criner is associate senior editor of the World & I, a monthly magazine of the Washington Times.
by CNB