A Short History of Church-State Separation, Part One

Since the inception of civilization there has been a strong human impulse to make sure everyone in a particular society conformed to the dominant belief system. Such thinking probably has extremely deep roots in the tribal prehistory of humanity, where group solidarity and adherence to the tribe's governing ethos were paramount. The earliest Mesopotamian city-states were ruled by a priestly class; ancient Egypt's pharaohs ultimately came to be seen as gods. The Chinese emperor was said to possess "The Mandate of Heaven", the east Asian version of the West's "Divine Right of Kings". Socrates was forced by the Athenians to kill himself for "impiety". In European history, the dominance of the Christian faith beginning in the Fourth Century CE became one of the great shaping influences of western civilization. No aspect of European life was unaffected by the intermingling of human political activity with human religious practices. For many centuries Christianity dominated the governance of Europe. The concept of individual religious choice was unknown. Those who fell outside of the Official Faith, such as Jews, were persecuted, exiled, discriminated against, even subjected to physical destruction. A society's members had to conform, for what was said to be the survival of the society itself. Such conformity also made it easier for the dominant classes of European society to exercise control over their populations.

Eventually, those people who ran the civil government clashed with the ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church over the exercise of temporal power. The long struggle between Church and State had commenced. With the onset of the Reformation, a savage era of religious war added a new dimension to such struggles. Political and religious motives were inextricably linked in the chaos of the period between 1517 and 1648. The culminating horror of the era was the Thirty Years' War, in which anywhere from 10% to 30% of Europe's German speaking population was wiped out. The butcheries and atrocities of this period were so terrible that many rational men and women were deeply shocked. Men such as Erasmus had earlier counseled moderation, in vain; now men such as Michel de Montaigne began to urge tolerance. It became clear that Europeans could not bring back the era of monolithic religious belief; they were going to have to live with each other. With the onset of what many have called the Scientific Revolution, voices began to be heard urging the adoption of empiricism as the standard of evaluating reality. Intellectual confidence spread, and from this confidence emerged the movement among Europe's thinkers called the Enlightenment.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment called into question a startling array of accepted beliefs, especially those associated with religious dogmatism. Such figures as Voltaire clashed directly with the Church hierarchy. Voltaire, a Deist, asserted that religious tolerance was one of society's most urgent necessities. His conviction was echoed by many others. David Hume called into doubt all certainty, religious or otherwise. Freedom of conscience began to be seen by many as the only way to prevent religious differences from erupting into civil violence.

From the milieu of the French and Scottish Enlightenments there developed the ideas of the American founders. It became apparent to most of them that in order to protect religious liberty, it would be necessary to remove the power of the government to coerce people into belief. It was in this context that the American Constitution was written, primarily by James Madison. The addition of the Bill of Rights in 1791, primarily to placate those who worried about excessive government power in the new republic, reflected this sensibility. The practice of religion would be protected, but no specific religious faith was to in any way have the official sanction of the government. It has been the implementation of this delicate balancing act between non-establishment and freedom of religious expression that has caused endless wrangling and hairsplitting in our history. This was reflected yet again in today's Supreme Court decisions concerning the public display of the Ten Commandments.

More to come.