Why is Secularism Exempt from the
Separation of Church and State?
by John Hendryx
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Amendment I of the Constitution of the United States of America
Introduction
The following are excerpts of an ongoing conversation I have been having with a good friend of mine who is a PhD. Candidate in history and is a self-proclaimed postmodern secularist. Almost by default, secularists tend to think their views are "neutral" and thereby believe our country should exclude "religious groups" from influencing the content of our children's education as well as public policy matters. I took my friend's discussion of the gay marriage issue as a launch pad to discuss his own presuppositions - and pointed out that they are no less religious than anyone else's.
This pretended neutrality has placed Secularists in a dominant position in our society. But instead of being resigned to this, and thereby handing Secularists exclusive power in our public policy, we should really be utilizing the separation of church and state against their own intrusive religious tyranny into public policy. It is because there is no neutrality in the area of morals I argue that Secularists should also fall under the same "non-establishment" limitations that all other religious groups must abide by.
In the discussion my secularist friend is highlighted in blue.
Comments and Discussion
John: "We've been fascinated by the explosive developments in the human rights movement out in San Francisco and Massachusetts over the past few weeks. Find it interesting that so many conservatives are so opposed to marriage for gays... something I suspect in almost all cases stems from a deeply felt animosity towards the mere existence of gays, not from any deep analysis of the impact of allowing them to marry on the institution of marriage. So many have argued that marriage is a 'sacred' institution... baffling, since this is an argument over what the secular and civil state should do. No one is trying to force the churches of America to recognize these marriages. Secular marriage is most emphatically an important, treasured, valuable, and historic institution, but not a sacred one... a sacred marriage, to those who believe in such things, would have to occur under the auspices of some religious official, not a state official. I'm interested in hearing your views though..."
Ayoooo, I knew I could count on your for stirring up a good dialogue on some contemporary event. Sure, I'll take the bait. I will respond to you with my own thoughts about the homosexual issue in particular, and then I would like to deconstruct a few of the thing you said to me in your above comment.
I think it is clear that Scripture does not conceive of the church's primary role in the world as one of opposing public immorality through political means. The early first and second century Christians lived in an extremely diverse, corrupt and immoral society where they did not have any access to political power or influence in public policy other than through persuading people to believe the gospel. These early Christians did not waste their time picketing or protesting, as we now see some doing. Shouting matches were not their calling. They witnessed to the historic fact of the resurrection, they prayed, worshiped, and lived pious & holy lives. Indeed this witness, in many cases, influenced society, but in many other cases, society went on in its paganism. These Christians knew that if there were to be a vast change of public ideas of morals, it would have to come through the grace of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by an imperial edict or judicial ruling. Laws do very little to change people's thinking or heart's disposition on such matters. And there is no evidence that Jesus went out of his way to take on any political causes, probably because, in themselves, they do have any power to change hearts.
Of course, many wanted Jesus to be a political organizer but that wasn't His interest (except in an eschatological sense). But that does not automatically mean He approved of the status quo. On the contrary, it simply means that the path of Jesus Christ is not identical with the path of political activism. I think Jesus' view of society really tended to grow out of his view of our individual and corporate alienation from God. He gave a diversity of responses to our alienation, but He did not mistake any symptomatic aspect of our lost condition--sexual depravity, greed, poverty, war, ignorance--from the root cause and remedy of that alienation: the gospel.
Jesus lived His life submerged in a culture of social problems and sympathetically tended to those problems, yet he never held out any hope for the substantial eradication of those problems apart from the gospel. The first century Christians, as revealed in the Scriptures, exemplified radical kinds of love and service, but none of these manifested itself as a stress on political activism. So there is great hope in the difference in the way Jesus views the actions of a Christian from the romantic possibilities for a political utopia, which may restrain some evil but itself really has no power to transform anyone.
Frankly, I have always viewed moralizing crusades with great suspicion. It appears to me to commit the church to such a course of action, which was never part of its original purpose, and is an attempt to accomplish something that must ultimately fail. The ultimate effect of merely attempting to focus on legal change might very well be to impede the hearing of the Gospel by those who need it most. To put it in other terms, we cannot minister to people if they perceive us primarily as their political enemies. I will give to you, however, that many biblically/theologically illiterate so-called Christians are crassly political and hostile to all kinds of groups. So surprising as it may sound to you, a more conservative view of theology is the answer to dealing with such ignorance and bigotry.
The theologically conservative position is that Christians should take no more interest in what gays do in their private lives than in what any other fallen sinner does, and that we should not distinguish ourselves by obsessing on the various homosexual agendas. Of course when we vote, we must do what we think is best by Biblical standards. But it is clear that homosexuality has by no means outpaced heterosexuality in the committing acts of evil. I am convinced that the response of Christians must include a great deal more love genuine acceptance of our gay friends and family. A Christians' principled opposition to gay marriage ought to be one form of confessing how unworthily we as Christians have treated marriage itself.
(The Internet Monk)
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Now, I would like to challenge some of the basic assumptions evident in your letter to me.
Perhaps I should begin by pointing out that your opinion about the merits of homosexual marriage is itself, no more "neutral" than my own. It is profoundly influenced by your own religious presuppositions. In fact I would argue that your view that homosexuals have the right to marry is no more "value-neutral" than any other religious view. You would impose on the collective society a view that cannot be demonstrated to be right, except that it is your own groups' arbitrary preference. The fact is that your own particular beliefs on the matter are anything but "secular' or "neutral" for they are ultimately based on your own underlying base commitments that you cannot ultimately account for, except by your own self-declared authority. A secular society doesn't mean only "secularists" can determine our laws and educational content, it means that all voices have the right to debate in the free market of ideas. This is because someone's concept of justice, morality and goodness will always ultimately be imposed. Bias is something that is impossible to avoid. We are all religious creatures and cannot refrain from making moral judgments every day of our lives. Our deepest social problems are thus, pre-political, embedded in our worldviews.
So it is naive to think that the only thing that makes one religious is that one goes to church and reads the Bible. It is difficult to see how Christians are under more influence from their own interpretive community than others are from theirs. Thus, it seems obvious to me that you enjoy being a postmodern secularist, and the philosophy of this group has been influential on you, but ultimately you just believe what you like to believe. This preference is derived from the answer you find most satisfactory but is by no means self-validating. It is hard for me to see, therefore, how you can escape a kind of communal solipsism. What therefore, gives your group the right to be exempt from the limitations of the "separation of church and state" since you appeal to an absolute authority for your morals that you cannot account for?
It is a fact that we live in a pluralistic society. But when pluralism starts to become a philosophy, or a religious dogma then it takes on new characteristics and could be characterized by calling it something more akin to "religious pluralism." It has affirmations and denials and a missionary force. This contemporary dogmatism itself is evidence that postmodernism is really just ultramodern. Religious pluralism has become so opinionated that it tends to drive out empirical pluralism; its plea for tolerance is so imperial that it is remarkably intolerant. True tolerance, however, simultaneously argues for truth and insists people have the right to disagree without fear of coercion. To give you a better idea of what I mean, you often are morally outraged that some conservatives have a gall to attempt to determine for the rest of us the standards our society will operate on, all the while you secularists are free to arbitrarily determine the standards our society should operate on (because you hide under the umbrella of so-called non-religious relativism). There seems to be a double standard here. By calling my position a religion you can conveniently neutralize any attempt by Christians to be involved in public policy in a society governed by separation of church and state. Yet your own belief system (that you somehow believe to be neutral and non-religious) can have free reign to alone determine the direction of our society. But there is no way to verify the authority of your claims to know truth. Thus your assumption is that liberal religious pluralism does, in effect, have a monopoly on the truth. It alone claims the vantage point from which the true relation of the religions can be seen. This religious pluralism is already, therefore, presupposed to be the summum bonum, the god by which all other claims must be judged. But it is a totalitarian imposition to enforce the view that all views are equally valid.
You said: "We've been fascinated by the explosive developments in the human rights movement out in San Francisco and Massachusetts over the past few weeks. …So many have argued that marriage is a 'sacred' institution... baffling, since this is an argument over what the secular and civil state should do."
I think it is understandable, given your assumptions about the world, that you see homosexual marriage as a human rights issue. So it follows from this that you believe it is immoral for society to impede such marriages from taking place. You argue that the conservative postion is unjust and reject the traditional contention that marriage is sacred. However, by making it into a moral issue, you yourself would appear to be claiming the institution of marriage to be sacred. Where did your morality come from to declare this right or wrong? It would appear that you believe your views are self-validating. By claiming that such moralistic things as your views of human rights and injustice applies to all, you postulate and lay claim to a moral absolutism. But every proposition necessarily excludes its contradictories; therefore, anyone who affirms anything, as you are, is asserting an exclusive proposition. But since relativism is only a personal preference, how can you be angry with others for having a different opinion? And then impose your individual preference on them?
If there are limits to freedom how do you determine where to draw the line? Each time you extend the boundaries of freedom or draw the line at something like polygamy how can we understand your stance any other way than to believe you are deriving this moral authority from a self-authenticating starting-point, based solely on your own basic pre-commitments - premises you hold as unquestionable? It would appear that you thereby end up exalting your own reasoning as the supreme and ultimate authority as to what is right and wrong.
Your postmodern religious community should, therefore, not dominate public discourse by default. This appears to me to be nothing short of a power grab. The earliest appeals to separation of church and state in America were TO freedom of conscience and FROM the legal establishment of the supremacy of a particular denomination/religion. They were certainly not designed, as you seem to think, to keep Christians (or any religious group) from exerting influence. By exempting yourself from the "non-establishment clause" for your group you are using coercion, establishing secularism as the state religion, and all the while believing you are upholding tolerance. Haven't you thereby redefined "secular" to mean that the US meant to establish a secularist society, censoring out all opposing "religious" viewpoints from education and discourse in the public square? Don't you see the irony in being a relativist? Since you are willing to impose certain standards on others (like justice, human rights), you insist that some things are absolutely true, even though other things are not -- and of course you have then become the judge as to where to draw the line, as though truth could be a mere matter of personal convenience! (Bahnsen) So you build an unintelligible world by being both a rationalist and an irrationalist at the same time.
To take it a step further, objective and universal standards of reason, morality, and beauty simply cannot exist in your purely material world. You are fighting Christianity with borrowed Christian weapons. Secularism is borrowing objective rationality and morality from the Christian worldview in order to attack the rationality and morality of the Christian worldview. If relativism were true, morality, tragedy, and sorrow would have to be equally evanescent. If there is no personal revealed God, then all abstractions are mere chemical reactions, like vapor over noxious water. This would mean that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical epiphenomena we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is merely a carbon unit consisting of mostly water. Objective morals cannot be derived from such impersonal substance.
In other words, Objective truth, justice and human rights cannot be validly derived from the premises of your relativistic worldview. Furthermore, each time you assert to know the apparently esoteric knowledge that "there are no absolutes", you likewise are claiming the very knowledge you say no one else has since this statement is itself a strong assertion about the nature of spiritual truth. It is, therefore, a religious statement. In doing this, are you not demonstrating the same spiritual arrogance you accuse Christians of? The question comes down to how you know that truth is relative? Do you have some bird's eye access above us all that gives you this knowledge? So what makes it any less arrogant for you to impose on society your relativistic ethos than for a Christian to promote his? You often seem upset when Christians do something in the public square since you invoke "separation" all the while promoting your own pre-committments which are no less a religion.
This fatal inconsistency divests your system of any possibility of coherence. I would argue that these internal contradictions in your worldview, therefore, do not provide the preconditions for making sense out of man's experience. Do you see how you end up opposing yourself? Only belief in a personal God can account for moral absolutes. These moral opinions of yours are not self-validating.
One other thing. I wish to comment on one of your statements. You said, "I suspect in almost all cases stems from a deeply felt animosity towards the mere existence of gays…"
Isn't it possible that Christians might be for preserving our civilization and limiting certain behaviors because they actually love the people who are in bondage to them? Love hates what is harmful and destructive in others' lives. Love is not just sentimental. When I see my friends caught in something that is ultimately harmful I come humbly with a clear attitude of "I love you and am committed to you but I can't stand to see what this is doing to your life." This is both true on an individual and a societal level. I come myself as one also broken by sin, not in arrogant pride or hate, for I am no better. In calling persons to leave their idols that hold them in enslavement, you may interpret as hate, but this is really not the motive or affection going on in our hearts. Of course, I cannot speak for everyone. But those who are truly committed to their faith do have such affection.