PART II
http://www.padnet.org/CSS2/CSS2Society.html
Church-State Separation:
A Keystone to Peace
Clark Moeller, January 2004 --
[Copyright 2004, Pennsylvania Alliance for Democracy -- Printing, copying
and distribution is encouraged with full attribution.]
SOCIETY
With the birth of the United States in 1787, a dream19 began to be realized
in practical political terms, a dream that everyone in a nation, the poor
as well as the rich, might be free politically and would have real
opportunities to improve their lives.20 This was a change from the age-old
expectation that only in death would the poor and powerless be free of
poverty and oppression.
Democracy21 and communism are two forms of government that have
emerged in modern civilization. These forms are works in progress:
communism in China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, for example, and
democracy in its various stages of development in 120 countries.22 Both
forms are secular23 and both continue to be in conflict with religious
institutions throughout the world.
In this section are sketched historical and current relationships
among many institutionalized religions, and between these and various
governments. The purpose of this review is to help us focus on two key
questions. Why are many religious communities in the world involved in
festering or violent conflicts, while religious communities in the United
States are not? Why do many governments suppress some religions, but this
has not been the pattern in the United States?
Religious Conflicts: The role of religion in politics and war has been a
constant factor throughout history, affecting the health, safety, and
welfare of mankind. History is replete with records of a dominant religion
suppressing foreign or minority religions. The Bible is one of those
records. The competition for power among different religious institutions
in league with kings and princes was one of the catalysts for the series of
wars that racked Europe throughout the Middle Ages and after.24 For
example, religious hostility between Protestants and Catholics was a major
ingredient in the Thirty Years' War in Europe from 1618 to 1648, which
killed as many people as died during the bubonic plague in the 1300s. By
the end of the war, many cities were almost depopulated. As a result, when
the Treaty of Westphalia was negotiated in 1646, the goal, in part, was to
stop wars based on religious difference.25
Unfortunately, religious adversaries are still at it. As the 20th
century ended, there were an estimated 56 violent national or international
religious conflicts worldwide.26 The explosive mixture of religious
differences in the Middle East, the Balkans, Indonesia, India, Pakistan,
Macedonia, Nigeria, South Africa, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet,
Ireland, and Afghanistan, to name some current hot spots, are vivid
testimony that religion has not lost its potential to spark firestorms of
violence.
The September 11, 2001, attack by al-Qaeda on New York City and
Washington, D.C., .crystalized for many Americans the magnitude of
religious violence the world faces, a violence that had started to surge
again in the 1990s. In 1993, al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center,
killing 6 people and injuring more than 1,000. In 1994, Dr. Baruch
Goldstein shot and killed 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the
Patriarchs in Hebron and wounded 150 others. His actions were not the
actions of a lone, deranged gunman, any more than al-Qaeda bombers were
acting on their own.
Goldstein acted as a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who "justified
ruthless action to exact vengeance for the violence done to Jews during the
millennia..."27 In 1995, Jewish religious fundamentalists held a rite of
Pulsa d'Nura near the home of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Prime Minister, which
sanctified killing Rabin, according to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Shortly after, Yigal
Amir, a student at the Jewish Orthodox University, Bar Ilan, assassinated
Rabin.28 If this Pulsa d'Nura had been an Islamic rite, it would be called
a ‘fatwa,' a religious edict.
Religious wars are violent conflicts between people of different
faiths or between different sects of the same faith. However, religiously
motivated terrorist attacks or assassinations such as that by Yigal Amir
are not so easy to identify unless there is a fairly direct connection
between a fatwa and the violence. When a fatwa is an edict calling
believers to arms, the religious leaders wrap themselves in the parchment
of their theologies, as some secular leaders wrap themselves in the flags
of their countries, evoking the source of their powerful authorities.
In 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa to
kill Salman Rushdie for publishing his Satanic Verses. Since then, Rushdie
has been living the hidden life of a person in a witness-protection
program. In 1990, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane,
was assassinated by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian who attended the Farouq
Mosque in Brooklyn, NY. He boasted that Kahane's assassination was an act
of jihad: "God the almighty enabled his extremely brave people with his
great power to destroy one of the top infidels."29 In 1993, al-Qaeda
bombers of the World Trade Center acted on the religious authority of the
Egyptian blind sheikh, Omar Ahmad Abdel Rahman, who proclaimed, "... the
Koran makes it, terrorism, among the means to perform jihad in the sake of
Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and who are our enemies,
too."30
In 1995, disciples of Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinri Kyo,
a religious group that was an amalgam of Christianity and Buddhism,
poisoned more than 5,500 subway riders in Tokyo using sarin, a nerve gas.
Twelve died. In Algeria, between 1991 and 1998, 40,000 to 100,000 people
were killed as Islamic fundamentalists revolted against the government's
refusal to give up control after it lost an election. In some cases,
massacres of whole villages took place. In response, the Algerian
government contributed to the death toll.31 It is estimated that the
Taliban, founded in 1994, killed thousands of other Afghans in their
pogroms. Elsewhere, the bombing and attacks, big and small, continued. The
United States embassy in Nairobi was bombed; the Khobar Towers in Dhahran,
Saudia Arabia, were bombed, killing 19 United States soldiers; an attack in
Luxor, Egypt, killed 58 European tourists. In 2001, about 1,000 alleged
witches were "hacked to death in a single [religious] purge" in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo.32 In India, 58 Hindu pilgrims were burned
to death in railroad cars by a Muslim mob in February 2002. In reaction, an
estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed by rioting Hindus. Meanwhile, Hamas and
Islamic Jihad's youthful Palestinian suicide bombers continue to die
killing Israelis almost every week, and many more Palestinians are killed
by Israel.
Al-Qaeda's religious call for the indiscriminate killing of
noncombatant men, women and children was announced in a 1998 fatwa that
appeared in al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arabic-language newspaper in London. "To
kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an
individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it
is possible to do it."33 On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda killed nearly
3,000 people in their coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center in New
York, the Pentagon, and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. In October 2002,
al-Qaeda bombed a night club in Bali, Indonesia, killing 180 young people.
Certainly, not all religiously motivated conflicts are deadly. On
August 16, 2002, in Russia's neighboring country, Georgia, "Jehovah's
Witnesses were planning a summer revival [when] two dozen men wearing
crosses of the Georgian Orthodox Church arrived on buses and ransacked the
home of the host, Ushangi Bunturi. They piled Bibles, religious pamphlets
and Mr. Bunturi's belongings in the yard and burned them," reported Steven
Lee Meyers in The New York Times. "What was remarkable about the attack ...
was how unremarkable attacks like them have become in this country. [This
was one of] ... at least a dozen attacks ... this year."34
These lethal and nonlethal religious conflicts will likely increase
in the coming decades, according to Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor
of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University. "Muslims
and Christians are at each other's throats in Indonesia, the Philippines,
Sudan, and a growing number of African nations," notes Jenkins.35 There is,
he points out, an explosive growth of Christianity in the Southern
Hemisphere that will increasingly bring Christians into competition with
Muslim populations.36 This is underway now as a result of both birth rates
and significant Protestant evangelical missionary activities in Africa, the
Near East, and Asia. Many of these places have large Muslim populations37
that compete for converts in the same geographic areas and strive to
enforce their moral codes by means of secular law, as the following recent
example illustrates. "At least 105 people have been reported killed in the
fighting between Christians and Muslims in the northern city of Kaduna in
the past few days," reported Alan Cowell of The New York Times. " ... As
fury built over the [offensive] reference to Muhammad" [in a local paper],
"Muslim youths attacked and burned the newspaper's office in Kaduna, the
scene of fighting between Muslims and the city's Christian minority, in
which thousands of people were killed two years ago after imposition of
Shariah law, governed by the Koran."38 Twenty two churches and eight
mosques were destroyed in this rampage.
In Europe and the countries of the old U.S.S.R., there is a
significant increase in the number of new, small, religious organizations
that are proselytizing in competition with the older, more well-known
religious institutions, such as the Russian Orthodox Church.39
Proselytizing often generates conflicts. "Proselytization is hardly ever
simply and exclusively about the communication of a religious message, to
be accepted or rejected on its own .terms," writes Abdullahi Ahmed
An-Na'im, a native of Sudan and professor of law at Emory University. He
continues, "Throughout human history, religious interaction has always been
as much about material interests and power relations as it has been about
spiritual insights and moral values."40
Furthermore, religious proselytizing aimed at impoverished local
populations of competing religious groups41 that is laced with hate speech
and uses the power of modern advertising technology, makes for unstable
social conditions, particularly in countries with a weak central
government. "While we can imagine any number of possible futures," notes
Jenkins, "a worst-case scenario would include a wave of religious conflicts
reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim
jihads" ... a "thirteenth century armed with nuclear warheads and
anthrax."42 In the United States, seven abortion providers have been shot
dead and two seriously injured in shootings or bombings; three providers in
Canada were injured between 1993 and 1998.43 These were religiously
motivated murders. The justification for these religious assassinations can
be found in the Christian apocalyptic literature of the religious right
published in the 1970s and 1980s,44 and in the anti-abortion ‘fatwa' of
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue. He said, "When I, or people
like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find
you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I
will make it part of my mission to see to it that they [those supporting a
woman's right to choose] are tried and executed."45 Fortunately, compared
with most other countries with diverse religious communities, the United
States has been relatively free since 1791 of this kind of religiously
motivated violence. With some exceptions,46 a civil neutrality generally
prevails among the religious communities in the United States. Among
congregations of different faiths such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam,
about 8% of congregations participate in interfaith social-outreach
activities.47 On the other hand, about 55% of liberal and moderate
Protestant and Catholic congregations work together ecumenically on
social-outreach activities such as soup kitchens. About 25% of evangelical
Protestant congregations participate in these activities. This civil
neutrality depends on tolerance, a core, secular value in American
society.48 According to surveys of Americans in the late 1990s conducted by
Professor Alan Wolfe at Boston University, 83% of Americans agree that "...
there are many different religious truths and we ought to be tolerant of
all of them."49 As a result, the relative tranquility among religious
communities in the United States stands in contrast to the experience in
many other countries. Furthermore, the peaceful relationship between
institutional religions and our government contrasts with the historical
experience elsewhere, as the following makes clear.
Government Repression: Religion established by the state, or given special
status or protection by the state, continues to be the norm worldwide. For
example, "[A]lmost all Muslim countries in Africa guarantee religious
freedom ... but in most instances that freedom is subject to often sweeping
conditions," writes J. D. van der Vyver, I.T. Cohen .Professor of
International Law and Human Rights at Emory University School of Law. The
constitution of Egypt, he continues, "contains an unqualified guarantee of
freedom of belief and the freedom of practice of religious rites ... but at
the same time states that Islamic jurisprudence shall be ‘the principal
source of legislation.' "50 A non-Muslim before such a court would have a
hard time believing that his or her religion was not a liability.
The results of this type of preferential treatment of specific
religions have complemented many governments' efforts to control
institutional religion. Of the 195 countries in the world, 120 are
democracies in various stages of development. In almost all democracies,
one or more religious institutions have managed to retain their position as
the established religion of the country, or to receive preferential
treatment or recognition from the government in other ways.51
For example, the Danish Parliament has "... absolute power in the
administration of the National Church."52 The state churches in the
Scandinavian countries and Germany are socialized53 to the extent that,
"the clergy of the state churches are civil servants as well as union
members."54 "... Russian law still makes it difficult for non-Orthodox
Christians to operate openly or to build places of worship and seminary
training," according to Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and
comparative religion at the University of Washington.55 All European
nations and most others have established religions, favor one over others
economically, or provide special recognition of the historic role of a
specific religion in their constitutions or laws.56
One criterion among a number that are used to evaluate a country's
degree of religious freedom is whether a government acknowledges the
legitimacy of all religions. Not to recognize a religion as a religion but
to label it a cult or sect, ineligible for the protection of religious
liberty under the law, is one way to limit religious freedom and to justify
governmental actions that discriminate against a religious group. For
example, during the 1990s, Germany threatened to outlaw Scientology and
discussed putting "Jehovah's Witnesses ... under secret-service watch. ...
On June 22, 1998, the French tax authority placed a $50 million lien for
back taxes on all property of the Jehovah's Witnesses."57 "Only by ‘October
30, 1981, [did] the Belgian government finally withdraw its absolute ban on
the transportation of Jehovah's Witnesses' publications.' "58 In
Switzerland, the Criminal Law Commission on Cultic Abuses has proposed a
new article for its criminal code to cover "mind control" in reaction to
the murders and suicides that occurred at the Solar Temple.59 Austria,
Belgium, and France have established government "anti-sect" agencies.60
Distinguishing a cult from a religion for legislative purposes
makes no sense because these differ only by the size of the group and how
well known they may be.61 Nevertheless, some European "anti-sect agencies"
make pejorative distinctions, claiming that cults or sects need to be
restricted because they violate health and safety standards. Although there
have been a few bizarre episodes involving little-known religious groups,62
such as the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, these episodes
pale in comparison with the history of homicidal violence among some
world-wide religions and the abuse of children that has been tolerated
systemically by other religious institutions.63
Administrative discrimination against minority religions is not
limited to Europe. In Communist China, the constitution provides for
freedom of religion, but members of the Falun Gong are persecuted
nonetheless.64 The government also denied Amway Corporation, an American
business, permission to use door-to-door salespeople to sell their products
in China, because these sales initiatives were interpreted by the Chinese
government as the tactics of a religious cult. In Singapore, "the
government has banned the wearing of Muslim head scarves in the nation's
ten Muslim independent schools."65
In many countries, official government hostility to some religions
has been and continues to be violent and harshly repressive. The pogroms in
Russia and Poland were examples of religious harassment by the czars. The
U.S.S.R. tried to eradicate religious institutions by seizing all church
property under Lenin, and Stalin purged the entire church leadership. The
Soviet goal was to eradicate religious belief. In Germany, the Nazi
government murdered six million Jews, a formal effort at genocide to
eradicate Jews and their religion. The Catholic Church was suppressed
periodically in Mexico from 1859 to 1991.66 In 1917, the Mexican
constitution "nationalized church property, abolished religious orders,
forbade church garb, and excluded the church from education."67
In April 1975, Pol Pot took control of the Communist Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia and started a reign of terror in which 13% of the country's
population of 13 million were killed. All religion was outlawed and many
Buddhist monks were murdered.68
"In the 1980s, the [Tunisian] regime [of Bourguiba] concluded that
the Islamic movement Nahda had gained too much power. ... Nahda, according
to government officials, was planning to overthrow the [Bourguiba] regime.
Islamists were rounded up en masse and thrown in prison, and the [Islamic]
party structure was dismantled."69
In Uzbekistan, as of 1999, more than 200 individuals remained
imprisoned for their faith. A pattern of arbitrary arrests of unregistered
Muslims continues. In Azerbaijan, Baptists have been imprisoned. In Turkey,
religious speech and the wearing of customary Muslim head scarves in public
buildings and universities is prohibited.70 The Communist Party governing
Vietnam continues to suppress religion. "After 1975, the government banned
the pre-independence Buddhist organization of Southern and Central Vietnam
and replaced it with a state-sponsored group created specifically to put
Buddhist activities under government control."71
In theocratic states, civil rights are often absent because they
are not part of the local culture, or rejected because they are
incompatible with the revealed truth of a religion that governs the
society.72 We are all familiar with the news reports about the suppression
of non-Muslim people in many predominately Muslim states such as
Afghanistan under the Taliban, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. We know
that certain fundamentalist extremists have encouraged their fellow
citizens in these states to kill the infidel, particularly the American and
the Israeli infidel.73
If the policies and behaviors of most governments74 are an
indication of the attitudes their leaders hold about institutionalized
religion, they believe that religions not under the control of government
should be co-opted by the government, such as making the clergy .civil
servants, having religions watched closely, outlawed, or eliminated.
However, with a few notable exceptions,75 these have not been the
practices of government in the United States, as the following makes clear.
An American Experiment: As of 1791 when the Bill of Rights was adopted,
the European experience of nearly continuous religious warfare and the
religious discrimination that was common in most colonies76 were object
lessons for the leaders in colonial Pennsylvania77 and Virginia. They knew
the history of these conflicts between governments and organized religion,
and this understanding inspired their decision to separate church from
state in their colonies.78 As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
commented in 2002, "[t]he history of governmentally established religion,
both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had
allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result
had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of
those who held contrary beliefs."79
The founders' legislative initiatives in Virginia and Pennsylvania
set the stage for including the Establishment Clause in the Bill of Rights
in 1791: "Congress will make no law respecting the establishment of
religion." These ten words have become summarized in the commonly used
synonyms of "church-state separation" and "separation of church and state,"
and the metaphor "wall of separation."
Forty-four years later, in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville reported his
interviews with "the members of all the different sects; I sought
especially the society of the clergy, who are the depositories of the
different creeds and are especially interested in their duration. ... I
found that they differed upon matters of detail alone, and that they all
attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in the country [the United
States] mainly to the separation of church and state."80
Church-state separation was and continues to be a radical approach
for managing the competition for power and control between government and
organized religions. Church-state separation was intended to create a
restraint on the government's involvement in religion. The United States'
federal courts and the Supreme Court also have determined that the
Establishment Clause acts as a wall blocking institutionalized religions
from using the government in its various manifestations to proselytize or
harass those who hold different beliefs. It is the individual's religious
freedom that is being protected; and the drive for control inherent in
institutions, in this case religious institutions, is being constrained in
order to protect individuals from those churches which use their power
coercively. This does not infringe on an individual's religious freedom to
participate in church worship services, unless those church activities
infringe on the religious freedom of others, or put the safety and health
of the community at risk.
Church-state separation and other civil rights in the United States
are more comprehensive in law and practice, generally, than those in most
European democracies. For example, some hate speech that is protected
speech in the United States is against the law in England. From time to
time, England's government has demanded that certain information not be
..printed in a newspaper. In the United States that is called prior
restraint, and it's not legal.81
Freedom of the press is provided for in the Norwegian constitution,
adopted in 1814. But there is a catch. "There shall be liberty of the
press. No person may be punished for any writing, whatever its contents,
which he has caused to be printed or published, unless he willfully and
manifestly has either himself shown or incited others to disobedience to
the laws, contempt of religion or morality or the constitutional powers, or
resistance to their orders, or has advanced false and defamatory
accusations against anyone."82 [emphasis added] That "unless" clause
appears to make null and void Norway's constitutional provision for freedom
of the press. In practice, however, Norway appears to have a free press.
Our Bill of Rights set a high standard for individual freedom, but
the individual's religious liberty as guaranteed by the Establishment and
Free Exercise clauses have taken a long time to be realized in practice.
For example, it was only in 1940 that the United States Supreme Court
decided in Cantwell v. Connecticut that the Establishment and Free Exercise
Clauses applied to the states as well as to the federal government. Before
1940, church-state separation was not a universal blanket of protection for
the religious liberty of many minorities. For example, Catholic and Jewish
children in public schools often had to listen to the school administered
Protestant prayers. After Cantwell, and up to the mid 1980s, the United
States made progress in protecting everyone's religious liberty.
This brings us back to our two key questions at the beginning of
this chapter. Why are many religious communities in the world involved in
festering or violent conflicts, while religious communities in the United
States are not? Why do many governments suppress some religions, but this
has not been the pattern in the United States? In answer, I believe the
evidence is sufficient to propose the following peace-keeping theory:
Church-state separation is a necessary condition for maintaining
peace among religious communities, and between these and the government, if
government is not going to regulate or suppress religion.
Peace-Keeping Theory: In addition to the evidence, the peace-keeping
theory of church-state separation is supported by two common observations
of human behavior. First, behavior follows form; change the floor plan,
system of rewards, or rules which are enforced, and our behaviors will
adapt. Second, our behaviors strongly influence our attitudes and beliefs.
This explains, in part, the almost universal observation that people who
are raised and continue to live in the same community, do similar work, or
practice the same religious rituals generally share similar attitudes and
values.83
These two observations support the peace-keeping theory of
church-state separation. First, church-state separation has changed the
historical, zero-sum rules of competition among religions in the United
States and between these and government to a rule of co-existence. As a
result, we have lived, worked, and debated public issues peacefully for
over 200 years. Second, during this time, we have evolved values and
attitudes of tolerance tailored to this social and political environment of
co-existence.
In contrast, countries which have not evolved a culture supporting
church-state separa-.tion are more susceptible to religious violence and
government repression of religions. For an extreme example, the rules of
war have governed the violent relations between the Israelis and
Palestinians. Their endless plague of deadly behavior and homicidal
reaction has spawned attitudes of hatred and cultures of revenge, which
seem immune to all peace initiatives.
In summary, the United States has had more success than other
countries with complex religious communities in transforming the historic
win-lose relationship between church and state into a nonviolent, neutral
balance of interests. This has been accomplished without our government's
resorting to aggressive police action, controlling the administration of
religious institutions, or outlawing some minority religions. This
restraint highlights the benefits to society of church-state separation:
less violence and more domestic peace among people of different religions,
and between these religions and our government than has been the experience
in and among other countries with diverse religions. However, if the rules
are changed so that the cultural constraint of church-state separation is
stripped away, then behaviors will change, and so will the complementary
values.
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