Posts tagged First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Two weeks ago, I wrote an arti­cle on evi­dence for humanity’s old­est forms of reli­gion. In my view, many aspects of issues we face today can be illu­mi­nated by think­ing about their his­tory, and much of that his­tory is reli­gious in nature. That arti­cle didn’t gen­er­ate many com­ments, but those it did con­vinced me this is a topic many of our read­ers would like to think more about. This, then, is the sec­ond in what might become a con­tin­u­ing series on Old Time Religion.

The sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State is one of America’s most cher­ished free­doms. The right to wor­ship as we choose — or to not wor­ship at all — with­out the impo­si­tion of an offi­cial national reli­gion is the very first right listed in the Bill of Rights: “Con­gress shall make no law respect­ing an estab­lish­ment of religion…”

Yet, in an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion, reli­gion has never been absent from our pol­i­tics or our pub­lic dis­course, and attempts to ban­ish it com­pletely have always failed. We want to wor­ship as we choose; we do not want reli­gion to be imposed; yet we want our elected offi­cials to be reli­gious, and many of our most impor­tant his­tor­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies (abo­li­tion, pro­hi­bi­tion, civil rights, sup­port of or oppo­si­tion to var­i­ous wars, and so on) have often been couched in reli­gious terms.

The rela­tion­ship between faith and soci­ety is com­plex, par­tic­u­larly in west­ern cul­ture. The rea­sons for this com­plex­ity lie rooted in Euro­pean his­tory over the last two mil­len­nia. Exam­in­ing a part of that his­tory can help us under­stand why it is so hard to ban­ish reli­gious ideas and reli­gious moti­va­tions from our pol­i­tics and our gov­ern­ment. It may indeed be impos­si­ble to do so. We may not want to do it even if we could. (more…)