The Non-Neutrality of the Secular State

The Non-Neutrality of the Secular State | Benjamin Wiker | Catholic World Report

Jefferson’s view of the First Amendment has become authoritative. That is a problem, because Jefferson did intend to promote religion’s exile from public life.

As the bishops make clear in their statement on religious liberty “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the HHS mandate declaring that Catholic institutions must provide contraception and abortifacients in their insurance coverage is only one of a number of attacks by the secular state against the Church.

Why the attacks? Surely the state would declare that it is merely following the dictates of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which demands, so the Supreme Court tells us, that the federal government “erect a wall of separation between church and State.” Ushering religion out of the public square so that one sect doesn’t set up shop to the exclusion of others and thereby commandeer the government to do its bidding—well, that’s the government’s ordained job. Freedom of religion for everyone demands that no religion gain privileged access, and so all must be kept on the other side of the wall of separation. So we’re told.

The bishops do not agree. In “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” they quote from another important document, “In Defense of Religious Freedom,” a statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. ECT asserts that the First Amendment’s decree that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” does not “demand a naked public square, shorn of religiously informed moral conviction. The ‘separation of church and state’ is intended to protect freedom for religious conviction; it is not intended to promote religion’s exile from public life.”

I beg to differ, or perhaps, I beg at least to clarify. The historical and constitutional waters are too muddied to make such a clean and clear assertion. It is correct, I think, to assert that the First Amendment’s declaration that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” does not “demand a naked public square.” But if we scratch beyond the surface we find that the “separation of church and state” is in fact “intended to promote religion’s exile from public life.”

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