September 23, 2007
3rd in a series on
Faith and Public Life
Matthew 22:15-22
“Separating the Powers”
“Our way of life.”
That
phrase gets used a lot these days – to explain or defend government action, or
to galvanize public support. “Our way of
life.” But what is “our way of
life”?
We could
try to answer that question organizationally – calling attention to our
democratic republic as opposed to a dictatorship or a monarchy; to the
distribution of and intentional balance of powers between a central government
and the various state governments; noting a federal government equally divided
among an executive branch, a legislative branch and a judicial branch. We could try to answer the question economically,
talking about capitalism and free markets as opposed to communism or
socialism. Or we could try to answer
philosophically, with words like justice and equality and the right of
self-determination and fair representation.
If we
kept scratching away at an explanation I suspect we would pretty quickly get
around to the idea of “freedom.” But,
again, that only gets us so far.
Freedom, after all, from what? Or, to go at it the other way, freedom to do what?
We aren’t, in other words, merely free, nor are we absolutely free. We have, according to the Constitution, a
right to bear arms, but we don’t have a right to use them any old way. There are limits. When it comes to words, we are free to say
almost anything we want – but that “almost” is just as important as the
“anything.” Concepts like “libel” and
“slander” remind us that there are some things we can’t say. We can’t, when it comes right down to it,
just go around doing whatever we please.
When
it comes to religion, to consider another example, we are free to exercise our
faith without government interference, but we are not free to force anyone else
to practice their faith our way. Constitutionally
speaking, those are known respectively as the “Free-exercise” clause and the
“Establishment” clause. “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.” If sometimes it feels
like those two clauses pull in opposite directions – as though they serve
competing interests – Professor Mark Toulouse of Brite Divinity School observes
in his helpful book titled God in Public,
“…that these two clauses actually complement one another. They serve a unity of purpose. Neither clause controls or defines the
other. Both have their areas of
jurisdiction, and both are needed” (p. 26).
Both
phrases serve to protect, but while one protects the public space, the other
protects the religious institutions. Exactly
how to interpret and apply those protections has been debated ever since the
phrases were added to the Bill of Rights.
For some their primary purpose is to guarantee a freedom “of”
religion. For others, their intent is to
guarantee a freedom “from” religion. Over
the course of judicial history, which emphasis is stressed seems to depend on
who is sitting on the Supreme Court at a given time.
At the
very least, however, it seems clear that the authors of the Constitution
imagined a country in which people of faith could be faithful according to the
tenets of their particular beliefs, and that they desired a level playing field
among those various beliefs – that this government accountable to all its
citizens would show no partiality to any one subset of that citizenry.
In
the beginning, that was complicated enough when the big tensions were simply
between Christian denominations – Protestants suspicious of Catholics;
Congregationalists suspicious of Baptists; and everybody suspicious of
Mormons. But it is no less relevant –
and probably even more important – these days when the tensions are between
completely different faiths – Christians and Muslims and Jews and Sikhs, Hindus
and Buddhists and Scientologists and Wiccans.
And in a pluralistic culture where faithful gather not just in
“Christian” churches but variously in mosques, synagogues, temples, and gurdwaras,
even our short-hand way of talking about the separation – “Church” and “State”
– seems outdated, at best, and implicitly preferential at worst.
America
is often referred to as a “Christian Nation”, and insofar as those who wrote
the founding and organizing documents of this country were, at least nominally,
adherents of the Christian faith, that is in a convoluted sense true. But it seems clear when you read their words
that those Christian men – and no doubt women behind the scenes – intended to
fashion a secular, spiritually neutral, governmental system. Not spiritually hostile – as if religious
traditions would have to defend their place – but neither spiritually
preferential – as if one religious tradition, by birthright, held a trump card
over others.
The founders,
it seems, were trying to preserve a precarious balance: religions protected from the government;
government protected from the religions, and for those who desired it, citizens
protected from the religions of each other.
“Separation,” to use again the short-hand way of referring to it, “of
church and state.”
But
as Verity Jones, Publisher and Editor of DisciplesWorld
magazine, writes in the current issue, that separation “…at once makes perfect sense and no sense at all. As a Christian, I am thankful that my own
congregation is free to worship and think and minister as it understands itself
to be called by God, without fear of reprisal or punishment from the state — or
from other Christians who might have state-sanctioned power. And I am thankful
for relationships with people of other faiths whose rights are equally
protected.
At the
same time, in our daily lives and in public discourse, the wall of separation
between church and state makes no sense at all. Our secular and religious
selves are not so easily divided. I am both an American citizen and a
Christian, and each identity informs the totality of my life.”
She goes on to assert the same claim as does Jim
Wallis in his bestselling book, God’s
Politics, that “God is never
private.” (Living God’s Politics, p. 4)
When
he looks, for example, at the biblical prophets, what he sees them talking
about “in the name of the Lord” were the quite secular issues of “land, labor,
capital, wages, debt, taxes, equity, fairness, courts, prisons, immigrants, other
races and peoples, economic divisions, social justice, war, and peace – the
stuff of politics.” When he pays
attention to whom those prophets routinely addressed, he notices that it was
typically “rulers, kings, judges, employers, landlords, owners of property and
wealth, and even religious leaders.”
Their’s,
in other words, was no private piety.
Their’s was a loud and public voice, spoken to nations and leaders “in
charge of things.” (God’s Politics,
p. 32)
And so
this enduring tension: the driving
conviction that the values so central to our faith demand public expression, and
the responding civic recognition that just because we believe it, just because
we want it, just because we are convinced that God’s own heart desires it
neither makes it so, nor makes it law.
Those values and convictions of our faith tradition must by necessity
compete for a place in the hearts of men and women alongside those being
advocated by voices from very different perspectives in the theatre of public discourse
and debate. And they must necessarily
prevail by persuasion, not legislation.
If that
feels stunting and dispiriting, know that it is not a new tension. Jesus was once asked to help delineate the
boundary between faith and citizenship.
Taking a coin and noting, with the help of the crowd, that the
engravings related to the emperor, Jesus responded, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the
things that are God’s.”
I want
to suggest that Jesus had two things in mind with that answer: one being a theological truth so large that
his detractors, that day, failed to recognize it; the other being a functional
truth so obvious they didn’t want to admit it.
We will
not get very far trying to absent ourselves from common life. We can try to bully it, finesse it, or even
deceive it, but ultimately we must function within it – as but one part of it. Sure, there are limits to our consent, but
government – that ordering element of culture – is only rarely evil. “Pay your taxes,” Jesus insisted. “Do your part.” “Respect the authorities in their efforts to
balance competing needs and maintain – even enlarge – some measure of
civilization.” It is not our role to
either forsake or coerce the public mind.
We live in the midst of it along with all the messy myriad of competing
and compatible voices alongside of us.
But
never lose sight of that larger reality:
that all we have and all we are and all we look in the face ultimately
bear the image – not of the emperor, neither this country nor any other – but
of the very God who made us. And so we
give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things
that are God’s.
We
can be Iowans. We can be Americans. Why, some – albeit a chosen few – can even be
Texans. But those temporal modifiers are
secondary; functional identifiers at best, little different in any ultimate
sense, from being Cubs fans, Cardinal fans, White Sox, Royals or Yankees
fans. We cheer for them, bumper sticker
our car, perhaps, for them, and even send some financial support to them for
the good that they achieve. But who we
are in any meaningful sense of the word are children of God, and God cannot
ultimately be outlawed or dismantled.
Some
have decried the decision of the courts that prevents school-sponsored prayers,
complaining that God has been taken out of the classroom. But every time a child walks through those
doors, God is fully present. Some have
lamented the absence of nativity scenes on courthouse lawns as banishing Jesus
from public life. But every time justice
is served, every time the voice of the silent is heard, Jesus is incarnate in
that place. And many are defiantly proud
that our coins boast “in God we trust.”
But every believer ought to blush at how few of our financial transactions
actually bear witness to that profession.
Heaven
has no flag; only love and a house not made with hands, with enough rooms to
accommodate as many as have the grace to live there – tax-free – in the light
of God’s own presence.