[Home Page]
[Alternate Navigation]
|
by Clark Moeller |
[Welcome] [Home Page] [Alternate Navigation] |
 |
| |
Church-State Separation: A Keystone to Peace Clark Moeller, January 2004 -- [Copyright 2004, Pennsylvania Alliance for Democracy -- Printing, copying and distribution is encouraged with full attribution.] TABLE OF CONTENTS (opens in separate popup window) SOCIETY With the birth of the United States in 1787, a dream19 began to be realized in practical political terms, a dream that everyone in a nation, the poor as well as the rich, might be free politically and would have real opportunities to improve their lives.20 This was a change from the age-old expectation that only in death would the poor and powerless be free of poverty and oppression. Democracy21 and communism are two forms of government that have emerged in modern civilization. These forms are works in progress: communism in China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, for example, and democracy in its various stages of development in 120 countries.22 Both forms are secular23 and both continue to be in conflict with religious institutions throughout the world. In this section are sketched historical and current relationships among many institutionalized religions, and between these and various governments. The purpose of this review is to help us focus on two key questions. Why are many religious communities in the world involved in festering or violent conflicts, while religious communities in the United States are not? Why do many governments suppress some religions, but this has not been the pattern in the United States? |
| |
Religious Conflicts: The role of religion in politics and war has been a constant factor throughout history, affecting the health, safety, and welfare of mankind. History is replete with records of a dominant religion suppressing foreign or minority religions. The Bible is one of those records. The competition for power among different religious institutions in league with kings and princes was one of the catalysts for the series of wars that racked Europe throughout the Middle Ages and after.24 For example, religious hostility between Protestants and Catholics was a major ingredient in the Thirty Years' War in Europe from 1618 to 1648, which killed as many people as died during the bubonic plague in the 1300s. By the end of the war, many cities were almost depopulated. As a result, when the Treaty of Westphalia was negotiated in 1646, the goal, in part, was to stop wars based on religious difference.25 Unfortunately, religious adversaries are still at it. As the 20th century ended, there were an estimated 56 violent national or international religious conflicts worldwide.26 The explosive mixture of religious differences in the Middle East, the Balkans, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Macedonia, Nigeria, South Africa, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet, Ireland, and Afghanistan, to name some current hot spots, are vivid testimony that religion has not lost its potential to spark firestorms of violence. The September 11, 2001, attack by al-Qaeda on New York City and Washington, D.C., .crystalized for many Americans the magnitude of religious violence the world faces, a violence that had started to surge again in the 1990s. In 1993, al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center, killing 6 people and injuring more than 1,000. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein shot and killed 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and wounded 150 others. His actions were not the actions of a lone, deranged gunman, any more than al-Qaeda bombers were acting on their own. Goldstein acted as a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who "justified ruthless action to exact vengeance for the violence done to Jews during the millennia..."27 In 1995, Jewish religious fundamentalists held a rite of Pulsa d'Nura near the home of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Prime Minister, which sanctified killing Rabin, according to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Shortly after, Yigal Amir, a student at the Jewish Orthodox University, Bar Ilan, assassinated Rabin.28 If this Pulsa d'Nura had been an Islamic rite, it would be called a ‘fatwa,' a religious edict. Religious wars are violent conflicts between people of different faiths or between different sects of the same faith. However, religiously motivated terrorist attacks or assassinations such as that by Yigal Amir are not so easy to identify unless there is a fairly direct connection between a fatwa and the violence. When a fatwa is an edict calling believers to arms, the religious leaders wrap themselves in the parchment of their theologies, as some secular leaders wrap themselves in the flags of their countries, evoking the source of their powerful authorities. In 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie for publishing his Satanic Verses. Since then, Rushdie has been living the hidden life of a person in a witness-protection program. In 1990, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane, was assassinated by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian who attended the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, NY. He boasted that Kahane's assassination was an act of jihad: "God the almighty enabled his extremely brave people with his great power to destroy one of the top infidels."29 In 1993, al-Qaeda bombers of the World Trade Center acted on the religious authority of the Egyptian blind sheikh, Omar Ahmad Abdel Rahman, who proclaimed, "... the Koran makes it, terrorism, among the means to perform jihad in the sake of Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and who are our enemies, too."30 In 1995, disciples of Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinri Kyo, a religious group that was an amalgam of Christianity and Buddhism, poisoned more than 5,500 subway riders in Tokyo using sarin, a nerve gas. Twelve died. In Algeria, between 1991 and 1998, 40,000 to 100,000 people were killed as Islamic fundamentalists revolted against the government's refusal to give up control after it lost an election. In some cases, massacres of whole villages took place. In response, the Algerian government contributed to the death toll.31 It is estimated that the Taliban, founded in 1994, killed thousands of other Afghans in their pogroms. Elsewhere, the bombing and attacks, big and small, continued. The United States embassy in Nairobi was bombed; the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudia Arabia, were bombed, killing 19 United States soldiers; an attack in Luxor, Egypt, killed 58 European tourists. In 2001, about 1,000 alleged witches were "hacked to death in a single [religious] purge" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.32 In India, 58 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in railroad cars by a Muslim mob in February 2002. In reaction, an estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed by rioting Hindus. Meanwhile, Hamas and Islamic Jihad's youthful Palestinian suicide bombers continue to die killing Israelis almost every week, and many more Palestinians are killed by Israel. Al-Qaeda's religious call for the indiscriminate killing of noncombatant men, women and children was announced in a 1998 fatwa that appeared in al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arabic-language newspaper in London. "To kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."33 On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people in their coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. In October 2002, al-Qaeda bombed a night club in Bali, Indonesia, killing 180 young people. Certainly, not all religiously motivated conflicts are deadly. On August 16, 2002, in Russia's neighboring country, Georgia, "Jehovah's Witnesses were planning a summer revival [when] two dozen men wearing crosses of the Georgian Orthodox Church arrived on buses and ransacked the home of the host, Ushangi Bunturi. They piled Bibles, religious pamphlets and Mr. Bunturi's belongings in the yard and burned them," reported Steven Lee Meyers in The New York Times. "What was remarkable about the attack ... was how unremarkable attacks like them have become in this country. [This was one of] ... at least a dozen attacks ... this year."34 These lethal and nonlethal religious conflicts will likely increase in the coming decades, according to Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University. "Muslims and Christians are at each other's throats in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sudan, and a growing number of African nations," notes Jenkins.35 There is, he points out, an explosive growth of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere that will increasingly bring Christians into competition with Muslim populations.36 This is underway now as a result of both birth rates and significant Protestant evangelical missionary activities in Africa, the Near East, and Asia. Many of these places have large Muslim populations37 that compete for converts in the same geographic areas and strive to enforce their moral codes by means of secular law, as the following recent example illustrates. "At least 105 people have been reported killed in the fighting between Christians and Muslims in the northern city of Kaduna in the past few days," reported Alan Cowell of The New York Times. " ... As fury built over the [offensive] reference to Muhammad" [in a local paper], "Muslim youths attacked and burned the newspaper's office in Kaduna, the scene of fighting between Muslims and the city's Christian minority, in which thousands of people were killed two years ago after imposition of Shariah law, governed by the Koran."38 Twenty two churches and eight mosques were destroyed in this rampage. In Europe and the countries of the old U.S.S.R., there is a significant increase in the number of new, small, religious organizations that are proselytizing in competition with the older, more well-known religious institutions, such as the Russian Orthodox Church.39 Proselytizing often generates conflicts. "Proselytization is hardly ever simply and exclusively about the communication of a religious message, to be accepted or rejected on its own .terms," writes Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, a native of Sudan and professor of law at Emory University. He continues, "Throughout human history, religious interaction has always been as much about material interests and power relations as it has been about spiritual insights and moral values."40 Furthermore, religious proselytizing aimed at impoverished local populations of competing religious groups41 that is laced with hate speech and uses the power of modern advertising technology, makes for unstable social conditions, particularly in countries with a weak central government. "While we can imagine any number of possible futures," notes Jenkins, "a worst-case scenario would include a wave of religious conflicts reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a new age of Christian crusades and Muslim jihads" ... a "thirteenth century armed with nuclear warheads and anthrax."42 In the United States, seven abortion providers have been shot dead and two seriously injured in shootings or bombings; three providers in Canada were injured between 1993 and 1998.43 These were religiously motivated murders. The justification for these religious assassinations can be found in the Christian apocalyptic literature of the religious right published in the 1970s and 1980s,44 and in the anti-abortion ‘fatwa' of Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue. He said, "When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they [those supporting a woman's right to choose] are tried and executed."45 Fortunately, compared with most other countries with diverse religious communities, the United States has been relatively free since 1791 of this kind of religiously motivated violence. With some exceptions,46 a civil neutrality generally prevails among the religious communities in the United States. Among congregations of different faiths such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, about 8% of congregations participate in interfaith social-outreach activities.47 On the other hand, about 55% of liberal and moderate Protestant and Catholic congregations work together ecumenically on social-outreach activities such as soup kitchens. About 25% of evangelical Protestant congregations participate in these activities. This civil neutrality depends on tolerance, a core, secular value in American society.48 According to surveys of Americans in the late 1990s conducted by Professor Alan Wolfe at Boston University, 83% of Americans agree that "... there are many different religious truths and we ought to be tolerant of all of them."49 As a result, the relative tranquility among religious communities in the United States stands in contrast to the experience in many other countries. Furthermore, the peaceful relationship between institutional religions and our government contrasts with the historical experience elsewhere, as the following makes clear. Government Repression: Religion established by the state, or given special status or protection by the state, continues to be the norm worldwide. For example, "[A]lmost all Muslim countries in Africa guarantee religious freedom ... but in most instances that freedom is subject to often sweeping conditions," writes J. D. van der Vyver, I.T. Cohen .Professor of International Law and Human Rights at Emory University School of Law. The constitution of Egypt, he continues, "contains an unqualified guarantee of freedom of belief and the freedom of practice of religious rites ... but at the same time states that Islamic jurisprudence shall be ‘the principal source of legislation.' "50 A non-Muslim before such a court would have a hard time believing that his or her religion was not a liability. The results of this type of preferential treatment of specific religions have complemented many governments' efforts to control institutional religion. Of the 195 countries in the world, 120 are democracies in various stages of development. In almost all democracies, one or more religious institutions have managed to retain their position as the established religion of the country, or to receive preferential treatment or recognition from the government in other ways.51 For example, the Danish Parliament has "... absolute power in the administration of the National Church."52 The state churches in the Scandinavian countries and Germany are socialized53 to the extent that, "the clergy of the state churches are civil servants as well as union members."54 "... Russian law still makes it difficult for non-Orthodox Christians to operate openly or to build places of worship and seminary training," according to Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington.55 All European nations and most others have established religions, favor one over others economically, or provide special recognition of the historic role of a specific religion in their constitutions or laws.56 One criterion among a number that are used to evaluate a country's degree of religious freedom is whether a government acknowledges the legitimacy of all religions. Not to recognize a religion as a religion but to label it a cult or sect, ineligible for the protection of religious liberty under the law, is one way to limit religious freedom and to justify governmental actions that discriminate against a religious group. For example, during the 1990s, Germany threatened to outlaw Scientology and discussed putting "Jehovah's Witnesses ... under secret-service watch. ... On June 22, 1998, the French tax authority placed a $50 million lien for back taxes on all property of the Jehovah's Witnesses."57 "Only by ‘October 30, 1981, [did] the Belgian government finally withdraw its absolute ban on the transportation of Jehovah's Witnesses' publications.' "58 In Switzerland, the Criminal Law Commission on Cultic Abuses has proposed a new article for its criminal code to cover "mind control" in reaction to the murders and suicides that occurred at the Solar Temple.59 Austria, Belgium, and France have established government "anti-sect" agencies.60 Distinguishing a cult from a religion for legislative purposes makes no sense because these differ only by the size of the group and how well known they may be.61 Nevertheless, some European "anti-sect agencies" make pejorative distinctions, claiming that cults or sects need to be restricted because they violate health and safety standards. Although there have been a few bizarre episodes involving little-known religious groups,62 such as the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, these episodes pale in comparison with the history of homicidal violence among some world-wide religions and the abuse of children that has been tolerated systemically by other religious institutions.63 Administrative discrimination against minority religions is not limited to Europe. In Communist China, the constitution provides for freedom of religion, but members of the Falun Gong are persecuted nonetheless.64 The government also denied Amway Corporation, an American business, permission to use door-to-door salespeople to sell their products in China, because these sales initiatives were interpreted by the Chinese government as the tactics of a religious cult. In Singapore, "the government has banned the wearing of Muslim head scarves in the nation's ten Muslim independent schools."65 In many countries, official government hostility to some religions has been and continues to be violent and harshly repressive. The pogroms in Russia and Poland were examples of religious harassment by the czars. The U.S.S.R. tried to eradicate religious institutions by seizing all church property under Lenin, and Stalin purged the entire church leadership. The Soviet goal was to eradicate religious belief. In Germany, the Nazi government murdered six million Jews, a formal effort at genocide to eradicate Jews and their religion. The Catholic Church was suppressed periodically in Mexico from 1859 to 1991.66 In 1917, the Mexican constitution "nationalized church property, abolished religious orders, forbade church garb, and excluded the church from education."67 In April 1975, Pol Pot took control of the Communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and started a reign of terror in which 13% of the country's population of 13 million were killed. All religion was outlawed and many Buddhist monks were murdered.68 "In the 1980s, the [Tunisian] regime [of Bourguiba] concluded that the Islamic movement Nahda had gained too much power. ... Nahda, according to government officials, was planning to overthrow the [Bourguiba] regime. Islamists were rounded up en masse and thrown in prison, and the [Islamic] party structure was dismantled."69 In Uzbekistan, as of 1999, more than 200 individuals remained imprisoned for their faith. A pattern of arbitrary arrests of unregistered Muslims continues. In Azerbaijan, Baptists have been imprisoned. In Turkey, religious speech and the wearing of customary Muslim head scarves in public buildings and universities is prohibited.70 The Communist Party governing Vietnam continues to suppress religion. "After 1975, the government banned the pre-independence Buddhist organization of Southern and Central Vietnam and replaced it with a state-sponsored group created specifically to put Buddhist activities under government control."71 In theocratic states, civil rights are often absent because they are not part of the local culture, or rejected because they are incompatible with the revealed truth of a religion that governs the society.72 We are all familiar with the news reports about the suppression of non-Muslim people in many predominately Muslim states such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. We know that certain fundamentalist extremists have encouraged their fellow citizens in these states to kill the infidel, particularly the American and the Israeli infidel.73 If the policies and behaviors of most governments74 are an indication of the attitudes their leaders hold about institutionalized religion, they believe that religions not under the control of government should be co-opted by the government, such as making the clergy .civil servants, having religions watched closely, outlawed, or eliminated. However, with a few notable exceptions,75 these have not been the practices of government in the United States, as the following makes clear. An American Experiment: As of 1791 when the Bill of Rights was adopted, the European experience of nearly continuous religious warfare and the religious discrimination that was common in most colonies76 were object lessons for the leaders in colonial Pennsylvania77 and Virginia. They knew the history of these conflicts between governments and organized religion, and this understanding inspired their decision to separate church from state in their colonies.78 As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer commented in 2002, "[t]he history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs."79 The founders' legislative initiatives in Virginia and Pennsylvania set the stage for including the Establishment Clause in the Bill of Rights in 1791: "Congress will make no law respecting the establishment of religion." These ten words have become summarized in the commonly used synonyms of "church-state separation" and "separation of church and state," and the metaphor "wall of separation." Forty-four years later, in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville reported his interviews with "the members of all the different sects; I sought especially the society of the clergy, who are the depositories of the different creeds and are especially interested in their duration. ... I found that they differed upon matters of detail alone, and that they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in the country [the United States] mainly to the separation of church and state."80 Church-state separation was and continues to be a radical approach for managing the competition for power and control between government and organized religions. Church-state separation was intended to create a restraint on the government's involvement in religion. The United States' federal courts and the Supreme Court also have determined that the Establishment Clause acts as a wall blocking institutionalized religions from using the government in its various manifestations to proselytize or harass those who hold different beliefs. It is the individual's religious freedom that is being protected; and the drive for control inherent in institutions, in this case religious institutions, is being constrained in order to protect individuals from those churches which use their power coercively. This does not infringe on an individual's religious freedom to participate in church worship services, unless those church activities infringe on the religious freedom of others, or put the safety and health of the community at risk. Church-state separation and other civil rights in the United States are more comprehensive in law and practice, generally, than those in most European democracies. For example, some hate speech that is protected speech in the United States is against the law in England. From time to time, England's government has demanded that certain information not be .printed in a newspaper. In the United States that is called prior restraint, and it's not legal.81 Freedom of the press is provided for in the Norwegian constitution, adopted in 1814. But there is a catch. "There shall be liberty of the press. No person may be punished for any writing, whatever its contents, which he has caused to be printed or published, unless he willfully and manifestly has either himself shown or incited others to disobedience to the laws, contempt of religion or morality or the constitutional powers, or resistance to their orders, or has advanced false and defamatory accusations against anyone."82 [emphasis added] That "unless" clause appears to make null and void Norway's constitutional provision for freedom of the press. In practice, however, Norway appears to have a free press. Our Bill of Rights set a high standard for individual freedom, but the individual's religious liberty as guaranteed by the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses have taken a long time to be realized in practice. For example, it was only in 1940 that the United States Supreme Court decided in Cantwell v. Connecticut that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses applied to the states as well as to the federal government. Before 1940, church-state separation was not a universal blanket of protection for the religious liberty of many minorities. For example, Catholic and Jewish children in public schools often had to listen to the school administered Protestant prayers. After Cantwell, and up to the mid 1980s, the United States made progress in protecting everyone's religious liberty. This brings us back to our two key questions at the beginning of this chapter. Why are many religious communities in the world involved in festering or violent conflicts, while religious communities in the United States are not? Why do many governments suppress some religions, but this has not been the pattern in the United States? In answer, I believe the evidence is sufficient to propose the following peace-keeping theory:
Peace-Keeping Theory: In addition to the evidence, the peace-keeping theory of church-state separation is supported by two common observations of human behavior. First, behavior follows form; change the floor plan, system of rewards, or rules which are enforced, and our behaviors will adapt. Second, our behaviors strongly influence our attitudes and beliefs. This explains, in part, the almost universal observation that people who are raised and continue to live in the same community, do similar work, or practice the same religious rituals generally share similar attitudes and values.83 These two observations support the peace-keeping theory of church-state separation. First, church-state separation has changed the historical, zero-sum rules of competition among religions in the United States and between these and government to a rule of co-existence. As a result, we have lived, worked, and debated public issues peacefully for over 200 years. Second, during this time, we have evolved values and attitudes of tolerance tailored to this social and political environment of co-existence. In contrast, countries which have not evolved a culture supporting church-state separa-.tion are more susceptible to religious violence and government repression of religions. For an extreme example, the rules of war have governed the violent relations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Their endless plague of deadly behavior and homicidal reaction has spawned attitudes of hatred and cultures of revenge, which seem immune to all peace initiatives. In summary, the United States has had more success than other countries with complex religious communities in transforming the historic win-lose relationship between church and state into a nonviolent, neutral balance of interests. This has been accomplished without our government's resorting to aggressive police action, controlling the administration of religious institutions, or outlawing some minority religions. This restraint highlights the benefits to society of church-state separation: less violence and more domestic peace among people of different religions, and between these religions and our government than has been the experience in and among other countries with diverse religions. However, if the rules are changed so that the cultural constraint of church-state separation is stripped away, then behaviors will change, and so will the complementary values. |