I was listening to this episode of Speaking of Faith, which discusses the original intentions of the American separation of church and state. The guest, Steven Waldman, had researched what many prominent Founding Fathers of America, like Jefferson, Washington, and especially Madison thought about this separation.

His narrative begins in early America, where the Constitution did not include the First Amendment. In this time, there was a large amount of religious persecution between Christian groups. He gives the example of Mary Dyer, who was executed in Massachusetts for being a Quaker.

He points out that during this time, the proponents of the separation of church and state were the predecessors of today’s Evangelicals. Their focus on individual piety and spirituality fit this philosophy well, notwithstanding that they were the ones being persecuted by the existing religious establishments.

And eventually, through various political maneuverings, they got their wish.

Yet strangely enough, the same group that was pushing for this separation is attempting to bridge church and state again. This movement is generally called the “Religious Right”. Their stance is that by putting religious morality into law, that the state can be improved. But there is the problem that disagreement with the conservative politics, some of which is based on these conservative Christian viewpoints, implies that they are in opposition to Christianity. Also, Christianity is blamed for the failures of these conservative politics. People that want to distance themselves from the one side of politics find themselves nominally alienated from a religion.

Waldman notes this: And what we are seeing now is polling data that says that one of the effects of the dominance of religious conservatives in the last 20 years is that it’s soured a generation, not on politics, it’s soured them on Christianity. That’s the big issue that religious leaders have to grapple with right now. I think Waldman has this exactly right.

The problem is that both separation of church and state and merging the two both do not work. A completely separated, secular state becomes the church of the secular. The church-state, as exhibited many times in the past,  is corrupted by absolute power and can be quite intolerant. Therefore, I believe neither is the true answer.

To have a political sphere that is not at odds with the church, the entire constitution of the state must be based on religion. The state needs to exist solely for religious need, with religious objectives, and working towards fostering a just religious society. The church itself looks surprisingly similar to this paradigm. Perhaps the proper state is the church.

This is different than the merging of church and state. This process tries to tack on Christian values to the secular political sphere that has completely different objectives. Church as state is ideologically consistent, and is not corruptible in the same way as historical church-states have been, for the church ought to see power as ultimately Christ’s.

However, I have not the political experience or knowledge to know how this would work out. I can see how it would be very difficult to obtain in the first place, with the very heterogeneous religious areas that would need to unite to make this possible.

This is a complex problem, and I will continue my studies on the subject.