Here’s a take on the separation of church and state I hadn’t considered before.
Ed Myers was raised a Mennonite and now attends Catholic services with his family. His hobby is suing the government. He’s the latest to make a case against the Pledge of Allegiance in court, which he believes “unconstitutionally mingles God and government and dilutes his religion.”
Members of the Mennonite tradition oppose saying oaths to any entity but God, he said. Followers believe in trying to stay apart from the secular world and feel religion is sullied when mixed with government.
"To me, it's heresy," he said. "Government is about keeping civil order. Church is about loving and worshiping God. You don't mix . . . loving God because of free choice with something that's about duty and where you were born."
It's a pretty normal thing to find religious support for separation between church and state. The Baptists, for example, were founded upon it, and many Baptist churches support it still. There's a lot of tension between the secessionist strain of American Christianity (think homeschooling) and the "godly society" strain, with the "place at the table" group somewhere in the middle.
That said, it's important for secularists to remember that just because a theological case for some position exists within a religious community, an outsider pointing to it and saying "see, your own theology demands you agree with me" will have no credibility. It's a hard line to walk, since it's vital to recognize and support your allies within the religious community, but deceptive to regard them as the normative voice.
Myers himself seems to have a few pretty odd positions:
In 2003, he affixed stickers with pictures of a burning U.S. flag on his children's school bus while it sat idle in a parking lot to protest flag stickers the county put on the bus not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
I find it hard to understand his objection to the intermingling of State and . . . State?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 5, 2005 01:29 PMWell, yes, Ed is a bit of an oddball. What I found interesting was that while I fear religion corrupting government, his concern is over government corrupting religion.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at July 5, 2005 01:52 PMThat's still pretty standard, I think. Europe is often cited as the example of how government funding and establishment makes religion more dissolute. There's the vitality of the American marketplace of religious ideas, but there's also an absence of the kind of moral quandries government involvement presents to a church.
A case in point a few years ago was a German law requiring women seeking abortions to go through counseling with one of the German churches. We Americans (on both sides of this issue) would find the notion abhorrent from the perspective of the women, but the quandry presented to the churches was this: By issuing the certificate of completion of counseling, you have become an accomplice to the act itself. By withdrawing yourself, you lose a captive audience. But by participating, since the majority of counselees have no intention of following your advice, you've just become another arm of the abortion-performing arm of the state healthcare system.
This is a reason why churches should be very leery of the whole faith-based initiatives thing.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 5, 2005 02:12 PM