The Election, Your Spirituality, & the Soul of our Nation #12: Separation of Church & State

With much wisdom and foresight, the founders of America built a “wall of separation” between Church and state. Thomas Jefferson was adamant that the state has no business forcing religion on anybody, and that state-sponsored religion is a bad idea. I would say the Church was the true winner (if we consider the demise of government-run churches in Europe…)! While we don’t want some religion dominating government, we sure don’t want government telling religion what to do.

Yet something went haywire with this reasonable separation. A generation ago, Stephen L. Carter could write, “In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.” But nowadays, conservative evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and many African-American churches are all in politically with some candidate or another – or on a single issue. The separation is lost, and in an absurd way, with churches mindlessly cheerleading for somebody or something unworthy of the Gospel – or Jesus gets perverted into a party’s front man, which makes Jesus in heaven shudder.

Church and state are to be separate – which doesn’t mean they can’t talk to one another! In 1970, the Supreme Court clarified that “Churches, as much as secular bodies and private citizens, have the right of vigorous advocacy of legal and constitutional positions.” Good thing, too, since everything that matters in the real world can be labeled “political.” We wind up having laws, policies and government programs related to all those things Christians inevitably care about because of Jesus and Scripture: poverty, when life begins, strangers within our borders, war and peace.

Ours is to call out what is not of God, or what fakes godliness. We have the peculiar advantage of not being the ones who actually govern, or are accountable to a majority of voters. We are accountable to God, and we have the freedom to speak across that divide that separates church and state. We never sell out our independence by baptizing a single party or candidate. We maintain our prophetic distance. I love that. We also needn’t be wizards at how to get things done; but we know what God would want to have done. And so we speak up, we vote, we exercise engaged citizenship, we do the church’s part.

We need to calm down and not be surprised or get our back up if we hear something biblical and it seems to jam up against our political ideology. We should be open, and thank God, and try to find ways to get more engaged in God’s adventure on earth. We should gravitate toward candidates who mirror Jesus to us more clearly than others, and to policies that enact something resembling the kingdom of God. We invite others to join us.

So if God and God’s Church have something to say to the state, to its leaders and its citizens, what might that be? And where might faithful Christians lean on the issues of the day? In our next emails, we’ll think about how Christians think and talk, and then what they need to say and do.