Why Separating the Church from the State is the Best Policy

Why Separating the Church from the State is the Best Policy

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Table of Content

Introduction .3

Churches in the US and Europe .8

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of Church-State Relations .14

Endnotes .20

Why Separating the Church from the State is the Best Policy

Introduction

Those sympathetic toward the British dissenters and critical of the aristocratic foundations of eighteenth-century British life have found it easy enough to dismiss Burke 's arguments as a simple defense of Whig oligarchy . [1] But Burke 's belief that religion and society , church and state , stood or fell together was only the latest and perhaps most eloquent expression of a very old tradition in all of Christendom . For men of Burke 's temperament , the lesson was finally driven home by the general weakening of religious establishments in America after the Revolution--particularly the formal disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia--and the assault on religion by the French Revolution . [2]

It is probably more difficult for Americans , whose government and society rest precisely on the very political philosophy and religious nonconformity which Burke opposed , than for citizens of more historically grounded nations , to view his defense of established religion and the confessional state with great sympathy . But in this author 's view , it is well worth the attempt . Jacques Maritain observed some forty years ago that while the confessional state may have only constituted the legal rather than the living , vital form of medieval sacral civilization , nevertheless medieval man and woman entered civil society and citizenship only through membership in the Church . Modern man and woman are citizens regardless of religious affiliation . Maritain cited the view of the distinguished Catholic theologian , Charles Journet , who distinguished between the Christian state which was at the service of right and truth , and the modern state which justifies itself in the service of freedom and the realization of human dignity According to Journet

It would be incorrect to describe medieval times as those of a confusion between the spiritual and the temporal . Their interrelations were characterized in medieval society by the fact that the spiritual did not confine itself to acting on the temporal as a regulator of political , social and cultural values . It tended . to become . a component element in the structure of society . Those who did not visibly belong to the Church were from the first dismissed society : the heathen over the frontiers , the Jews into ghettos . Those who , having first been Christians , afterwards broke with the Church , as heretics or schismatics , constituted a much greater danger--they shook the very bases of the new society and appeared as enemies of the public safety [3]

All justification...