Be Careful What You Ask For: The High Price of Secularism
"By the middle of the twentieth century, the idea of separation between church and state had become an almost irrresistible American dogma," explains constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger. Hamburger, a law professor at the University of Chicago, had traced the victory of church-state separationism over the founder's intentions in the First Amendment.
His recent book, Separation of Church and State, published by Harvard University Press, is a massive study of American history and constitutional interpretation. His book should change the terms of debate on questions of church and state--but don't count on it.
Why are so many Americans afraid of this issue? Americans are rightly outraged at the action of a Federal District Court judge in ordering that Alabama's Ten Commandments monument be removed from its state Judicial Building. But that outrage will be wasted unless concerned citizens look at the root of the problem.
The problem is not just this isolated order from a federal court. Rather, the problem is the fact that a doctrine of strict separation between church and state has now become so imbedded in the nation's courts, that this decision is just one of many outrages that twist and reverse the intention of the Constitution's framers. The simple elegance of the First Amendment's actual language has been replaced with a secular vision that finds a violation of the Constitution whenever religious symbolism or religious language enters the public square. The shorthand for this vision is Thomas Jefferson's image of "a wall of separation between church and state."
Most evangelicals, frustrated and distressed by this trend, are unaware of hos American Protestants fueled the fire of the separationist vision. Hamburger forces us to look at our own history--even the history of the Southern Baptist Convention--to face the reality.
Having suffered persecution, Baptists cherish the ideal of religious liberty. E. Y. Mullins, perhaps the most influential Baptist theologian of the twentieth century, described the Baptist ideal as "a free church in a free state."
Originally published September 02, 2003.
