The Church-State Connection

How States Need Religions Authority To Maintain the Legitimacy of the State

The following is the introductory chapter to my latest project, a book currently in progress. If there is any interest in viewing other excerpts I will be willing to share them as the project proceeds. While I write mostly about non-religious subjects, my academic credentials, for what they be, are in the field of religious thought. They include a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Religion and some forty post-graduate courses from a variety of institutions that never focused towards earning additional letters after my name. Admittedly, I do not consider myself religious or a follower of any religion currently, I was a practicer of religionism for much of my early life and was probably as very ethically conservative. At the same time I developed a massive interest in the human conflicts with trying to control nature and consequently I began to believe more in practicing awe rather than ethics as a means that became the foundation of my core belief. I still believe in awe and respect for both nature and humankind and which is the foundational basis for most of what I wrote. The importance for me of pursuing this project is that I find religious ethicism as the prime counterforce to creating awe and respect for both and nature and humanity. State backed morality conflicts with state concepts of religious freedom and this state back morality is used to enforce state authority whether or not religious freedom is an official doctrine of the state. I view this morality as the prime cause of all immoral conflict that any state-sanctioned morality justifies itself to perpetuate immoral behavior towards citizens within the state and the environment in which its citizens.

So to complete this project is for me the most important project I have undertaken for myself. Perhaps it will resonate with some if I am successful in being able to define my interpretation.

Introduction

The reason that the religion and state can never be separated is that religion has always been a part of the state and when the American government established the religious freedom to grant its citizens freedom to choice of religion or no religion was contrary to the notion of the very roots of the development of religion as a subsidiary to enforce state authority through the means of religion.  

This book is meant to examine the establishment of religion as such a subsidiary as a support system for the state. In that sense, as America attempted to make the state an institution apart from the church there was a necessary component that would create within the state certain moral components of the state in its governance–at the time, primarily protestant Christianity, in the United States.  Of course, there was already existing within the creation these moral components of said religion, so though there may have existed Jewish citizens in the U.S., nevertheless, the laws usually codified the Christian sabbath as the day of rest, irregardless of the fact that the Jewish sabbath was Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.  For these reasons, Jewish persons in the earliest days until well into the 20th century, either had to find employment within the Jewish community, or disregard some of their own teachings, or attempt to compromise between both if they pursued professions or labor outside of Jewish community.

But either way state authority was maintained by the authentication of the gods that supported the authority of the state.   And this did not itself end when the United States amended its  constitution to grant what it called “freedom of religion.”  No one had to follow a state authorized church  but particular concepts and creeds remained authorized through legally mandated statutes—prayers that were established at meetings of both government and private institutions; blue laws; alcohol taxation and alcohol suppression;   censorship as protection from sexual prohibitions and legal prohibitions of certain sexual actions; public exhibitions of the  particular ethical codes; and emphases on success that granted higher values of “goodness” to oppressors who “earned” their entitlements from the states as justifiably moral and those who rebelled against oppression as justifiably immoral and deserving of having less responsibility towards their own personal destiny.  Social rectification whether it was in the form of abolition,  housing for the unsheltered, food for the unfed, or unionism were were seen as liberal attempts to give religious blackeyes to the state sanctioned morality of who deserved what and as these movements began to gather momentum opposition to them was framed once again ethical violations against the “deserving” in favor of the sinfully undeserving.  The civil war abolished chattel ownership of people but permitted the development of a nationally sanctioned gulag to return those who thought they were now free to either return to labor as paid chattel or choose to be legally rechattelized in these legal gulags by the establishment as a somehow sinful skin shadings.  Racism was promoted by national promotions that the freedoms given to the blacks of equality did not erase the increased sinful behavior inherently expressed because of that darker shading.

A series of court decisions that began in the late 50’s to reduce the influence of protestant Christianity, by the 1970’s, began to bring forth a backlash to return the nation to what they perceived the proper moral fabric, upon which they argued, the nation had been founded.  At the same time  many religious institutions were losing membership and more people seemed to be attempting to ignore religious indoctrinations, the Supreme Court put a nail in the coffin of separation with its decision in Roe v. Wade.  This gave the churches within the United States the calling card to make an issue of the religious separation around the issue and ignite a controversy that continues to attempt to fuse Christian moral principles with rightest suppression against what it saw as the liberal attack against it.  That these Christian principles, per se, were not necessarily founded on any previous conceptions of governance, they were an essential ingredient to reunite what it saw as the moral principles of the early United States governance with a renewed dominance to the church to be part and parcel with the governance of the nation.

Three years after Roe, baptist minister Jerry Falwell decided to bunk the long-standing practice of the southern Baptist tradition that had held its church’ role within the governance of the nation that basically had taught withdrawal from involvement within governing affairs as affirmative to its teachings that members of its Church separate themselves from governance; and began an active crusade to entice its membership to become a controlling voice to reform the government to follow its church by reestablishing a national ethic morality that all citizens should be required to obey, returning the church to its central role within the governing of the society.  One of his earliest “converts” was Robert Grant, who founded an advocacy group called Christian Voice.  At first the Christian Voice also attracted conservative Catholic and Jewish leaders in support of its attempt to moralify the government. But Grant made the comment that the “Christian right was a sham…led by three Catholics and a Jew.”  Thus feeling ostracized the “catholics and jews” pulled out, and in doing so pulled most of their money from Christian Voice.  Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, and Richard Viguerie (the three Catholics) and Howard Phillips (the Jew) met with Falwell who had been crisscrossing the country on a gospel crusade for the past two years preaching Jesus expected Christians to be active in creating the final dispensation by making the United States government a “Christian nation” so that Jesus would be able to return and save all.  Together, they decided to create the Moral Majority, coined by Weyrich, that could be an advocacy group to appeal to all religious conservatives no matter religion, that would actively seek to create a mood of remoralization of the nation that could dominate the political dialogue to make dissatisfied citizens concerned about the declining governmental morals.  

This book is meant to explore how religion and state have always been interlinked and how religion was used by the early states to support those founding states.  In chapter one we will discuss how early communities created social order through ritualistic practices that limited dominance by singular individuals and how with the rise of the first kingdoms, how those first kingdoms created religion from the rituals that would support those attempting to take control of society.  In return religions themselves became co-equal powers in governance. 

In the second chapter we will discuss how religion suborned the state over  several centuries until religion became the state after the Jewish leaders were allowed to return from their “Babylonian captivity.”  This model was later followed in the Christian church during the medieval area, and much of the ascending Islamic faith which we plan to discuss in chapter three.  Chapter four will focus on the protestant reformation that was enabled by princes desiring to break the church authority over the state.  In chapter five we plan to survey how this movement became part of the Muslim concept of state, infused submission to Muslim practice as well as how some states like Iran and the Taliban became totally dominated by the religion and how some states manage to secure secular authority by demanding religious compliance to the state.

In the final chapters we shall return to the U.S. doctrine of separation of church and state that began to develop out of enlightenment thought and attempt to come to grips with exactly what separation of church and state entailed to their way of thinking in chapter seven.  In chapter seven and eight, respectively, on discussing how the states often tried to enforce morality throughout our history and the attempts to enshrine a certain perspective of morality within the legal codes and then a survey of court decisions that finally formed a modern consensus of the legal definition of separation of church and state.  Finally this book will conclude in the final two chapters on how Roe galvanized some of the richer and more powerful citizens to use Roe as a tool to break up many of the recent social movements and return power to the wealthy in chapter nine, and finally we will conclude by a brief discussion of the current attempt to undermine the entire concept of separation and state.

The relevance of course, as I shall propose, is that justice based on individuality becomes in conflict with justice based on morality.  And morality is, essentially, the means a state employs to place limitations upon individuals and continues to be so intertwined that freedom only comes by subsuming the justice of individuality under the umbrella of moral correction.  Moral correction demands an obedience to a god who reinforces behavior that the state then uses as moral authority to enforce both the autocratic judgements of the God and the state.  While I do not propose this unity was a unique introduction into statehood by the judeo-christian-muslim religions, the concept of a unitary (sometimes call monotheism, but in my opinion, better termed statetheism) was uniquely situated to create religious states, whereas states that were built from a multitude of gods had more freedom to refrain religions from co-equal status within the states by redirecting the most favored god according to need.  Gods who could struggle for supremacy could support struggle among humans for supremacy and still maintain the supremacy of the leaders who might victoriously alter the leadership, whereas statetheistic religions forced intra-state conflict defined by religious servitude where the champion of the state could maintain its support by a continuity of the same god and limit conflict between classes whose leaders all worshiped the one god who ruled through multiple kings eliminating the opportunity of a differing god to lead people of a subclass to the same authority.