Hail
Columbia

Fred Clark, a Christian blogger famous for his deconstructions of the Left Behind series, has written some insightful posts over the years on the topic of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. He argues from a historically Baptist position why strict separation of church and state benefits – and is in fact necessary for – religion.

In Establishment, Fred explains why some religious people see a tension between the Establishment clause and the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, when actually the two clauses are both necessary and mutually supportive:

For many Americans, however, the First Amendment is complicated.

For those who subscribe to what my old friend Dwight Ozard called “hegemonic religion,” the First Amendment seems incoherent and contradictory. The core belief of hegemonic religion is that religion cannot be freely exercised unless it is also established in law. Those who subscribe to a form of hegemonic religion therefore view the First Amendment as presenting a conflict or, they like to say, a “tension” between its two religious clauses.
Those of us from other, non-hegemonic religious traditions do not see this supposed conflict. Here is what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says about religion:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

Sometimes a comma is just a comma and not a vast chasm separating two competing and incompatible ideas. The two clauses there do not conflict. At all. They are logically necessary counterparts of one another. Congress may not make any law establishing religion and Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. Congress may not make any law establishing religion because to do so would be to prohibit the free exercise of religion.

Hegemonic believers don’t seem to appreciate this point. They can grasp that the establishment of one, official state religion might inhibit the freedom of those not belonging to the One True Official Sect, but they don’t perceive how such an establishment also fundamentally alters the relationship of members of that official sect to their own church — requiring lockstep assent to its official doctrines and practices as set forth thereafter by its official and legal enforcers.
The establishment of any sect casts suspicion on all members of that sect. Coerced belief is belief that cannot be trusted. Coerced belief, therefore, will never be trusted — it will be dis-trusted, inspected, codified, measured and forced to demonstrate its loyalty and legitimacy time and again.

This is no less true when the coercion is softer, the result of a set of privileges, incentives and disincentives. All such privileges and incentives incentivize disingenuous claims of religious belonging. To privilege any one set of believers, therefore, requires the implementation of mechanisms to challenge and sort out the genuine believers from the mere pretenders claiming allegiance only in order to gain access to those privileges that accompany membership in the established sect. Such sorting mechanisms are never perfect — allowing many hypocritical posers to slip past while unjustly condemning many sincere and genuine believers. And such sorting mechanisms are never pretty. This is where inquisitions come from.

There’s only one way to have an established religion without having an inquisition and that is to go without any such tests to distinguish genuine from disingenuous allegiance to official doctrine. That results in a different kind of disaster for the official, established sect. It means that nominal, indistinct, content-less faith becomes the norm. It turns the established sect into something toothless and vague — the C&E faith of the C of E (Christmas, Easter, Church, England).

These are the unavoidable options for any sect that becomes official and established. It can become monstrous or it can become mundane, but either way it cannot continue to be exercised as freely. Establishment restricts the religious freedom of those belonging to the official sect just as surely as it restricts the freedom of the religious minorities it disenfranchises.

All of which is why here in America support for a secular state (a redundant phrase) comes not just from Baptists and Anabaptists, Pagans and freethinkers and other sects with a history as dissenting, persecuted minorities, but also from adherents of sects that are or have been legally established, official religions — from Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Hindus, Jews, Sunnis, Shiites, Anglicans, etc. The free exercise of those traditions is freer in a country with a secular state than it is in a country in which any one of them is legally enforced and officially privileged.

In Michael Medved hates Catholics, Fred explains how displaying the Ten Commandments restricts the free exercise of religion for Christians by means of government influence in sectarian disagreements:

Michael Medved, writing at TownHall.com, says that “liberals … hate the Ten Commandments.”

He reaches this conclusion because civil libertarian groups like the ACLU and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty believe that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

These groups oppose the establishment of any official state religion. Medved seizes on a particular instance of this opposition and pretends that it is based on the particular content of the religious establishment, rather than on the general constitutional principle.

We civil libertarians and Baptists view both the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment as necessary for the protection of religious liberty. We view these clauses as complementary. We believe that the establishment of a state-sponsored, official, privileged religion would disastrously, and unconstitutionally, prohibit the free exercise of religion.

People like Medved, however, see these two clauses as contradictory. They believe that the only way to guarantee the free exercise of their religion is to grant it official state sanction — to create an establishment of religion. Thus they view the Establishment clause as a limitation, a negation, of the Free Exercise clause. Some of Medved’s allies, people like disrobed judge Roy Moore, unabashedly call for the elimination of the Establishment clause. Others take a subtler, more gradual approach, arguing as Medved does that certain broad privileges — like the posting of the Ten Commandments — should be granted to certain popular religions as a way of making the Establishment clause more elastic and less of a perceived threat to Free Exercise.

Medved goes on to list the Ten Commandments – the Protestant version. He acknowledges diversity of opinions on how to number the Commandments, and then he takes sides.

Medved claims he is presenting an “innocuous and generally uncontroversial … summary of universal moral precepts,” but what he is actually stating is this: where Catholics differ from Protestants, he sides with the Protestants. And not with all the Protestants, since he chooses the Stone Edition rather than the King James Version preferred by KJV-only fundamentalists. Medved relegates those fundamentalists, like the Catholics, to the fringes. Their religion is secondary, inferior, wrong, false, illegitimate, unprivileged and unprotected.

Michael Medved hates Catholics. He believes that their free exercise of religion is legitimate only within limits.

Perhaps you think this is an overstatement. After all, column space is limited, so Medved had to choose one enumeration and one translation over the others. But that choice was a matter of preference, and that preference elevates one sectarian perspective over the others. And just like Medved, any courthouse wishing to display a monument to the Ten Commandments would be forced to choose: Protestant or Catholic? Mainline or fundamentalist? And to choose is to prefer, to elevate and to subjugate, to establish and to limit the free exercise of religion.

Thanks to Fred Clark for kind permission to mirror parts of these posts.