Over dinner tonight, I had time to do some reading and thinking. My reading led to more thinking, and I wound up with something that I had to get down before it left my head.
The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State
"The political foundations of modern Western states lie in ancient Greece and Rome. Every textbook on the history of Western civilization asks students to respect the political genius of Nebuchadnezzar, of Hammurabi, of Solon, of Pericles, of Julius Caesar, of Augustus Caesar. Not one of them was Christian. Not one of them even stood within the tradition of religious monotheism. Many of them certainly mixed religion and politics, but that is not usually held these days to be the reason for their success."
This passage set the stage for one thought that I had, a thought that starts with a passage a page later:
"One's religion is more of an issue in this country of religious disestablishment than in most countries where religious establishment still exists. ¶This is to say that a large portion of the American electorate thinks . . . that a good ruler must believe in God. We have powerful evidence that this is not true. We also have powerful evidence that many people who believe in God are not especially virtuous. In fact, our informal [religious] test that forces office seekers to mouth religious platitudes leads more often than not . . . to shameless pandering by politicians and what is quite literally an exploitation of God. Perhaps the de facto religious test for political office results from Americans' long standing fear of government and their altogether correct notion that democratic politics, being an eminently corruptible business, needs all the help from normative morals that it can get."
The seed that was sown and fertilized by this idea was the seemingly necessary interrelationship of church and state. The argument that I wound up at, this time around, was the idea held by many religious conservatives that the First Amendment's prohibitions against establishment of religion were to protect religion from the influence of the state, not the other way around.
The primary idea behind this position is the idea that the First Amendment only sought to keep the nose of government out of the affairs of the church. On the other hand, America being a "Christian nation" (their words, not mine) the church not only was allowed to influence the affairs of the state, it was a necessity for the state to reflect the views of the Christian populace.
However, this presents us with a problem that we can only see the result of today with the benefit of historical hindsight. The problems of a state, governed by the strictures of the church, are all-too-evident today. A state governed by the strictures of the church makes the state a slave to the church. Religious leaders rule by fiat, tearing down the political machinations devised to balance the power of the state against the self-interests of the populace. Would a state run by religious institutions have resulted in a nation any more advanced than the broken dictatorships of impoverished Africa, or the Islamic states of the Middle East?
Is the "free expression" of the Christian religion any different than the Islamic militants that seek to blow up infidels in the "free expression" of their religion? The difference between the two is found in the body of the state. Not all religions prohibit murder under all circumstances. It is only the body of the state which categorically prohibits murder (the Fifth Commandment notwithstanding). The biblical prohibitions against murder stand separate from the Ten Commandments' strictures regarding belief and worship of Godprohibitions that existed long before Moses ascended the mount.
The state therefore becomes the means of protecting the individual from the church. And thus, the separation between church and state must be reciprocally restrictive and exclusive.