Separation of Church and State Is Good for Religion

Following up yesterday's post on Colorado's student financial aid policies -- Colorado was giving financial aid to students at some religious colleges but not other religious colleges, including Naropa University, based on a capricious judgment of how "pervasively sectarian" the colleges were. A federal district court decided Colorado could not do that.

Today there's an editorial in support of the decision in the Colorado Springs Gazette. I agree with this part of the editorial:

State discrimination against specific religions - and favoritism of others - doesn't get more blatant than this. They [Colorado] decided to fund students at Catholic and Methodist colleges, but not at Buddhist and evangelical schools. This was a violation of the free exercise clause, the establishment clause, and the equal protection clause in one bold snub of constitutional law.

Other parts of the editorial are a bit muddled, however. It calls separation of church and state a "pop culture interpretation of the First Amendment" and "the sloppy argument for discrimination against religion." The editorial is correct to say that the phrase doesn't appear in the Constitution. What it leaves out is that separation of church and state is a metaphor coined by Thomas Jefferson to explain the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment.

I wrote another post on separation of church and state awhile back:

In the last post I mentioned the establishment clause. This is a clause in the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that prohibits Congress from establishing an official state religion. The same amendment also prohibits Congress from interfering in citizens' free exercise of religion. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" as a metaphor explaining the establishment and free exercise clauses. The 14th Amendment extended these prohibitions to state governments, also. ...

... The basic purpose of the establishment clause is to prevent a majority faction from using the power of government to impose religious beliefs and practices on others. The Founding Fathers, 18th century men, were aware of the bloody history of religious wars in Europe, in which Catholics and Protestants fought to seat monarchs of their own faith on Europe's thrones.

These wars were fought because it was accepted practice for nations to establish an official state religion. The "established" church could expect to be subsidized with tax money and property granted by the monarch. The heads of the established church also could expect to have some influence in government, often to the detriment of the un-established churches.

The American Founding Fathers hoped to prevent bloodshed and oppression by denying government the authority to extend religious patronage or to legislate in matters of religious practice. This prohibition was never meant to be hostile to religion, or to ban religion from public life. Instead, it was hoped that if government had no power to favor one religion over another, religious factions would not fight over who got to control government.

That only worked up to a point. The ink wasn't dry on the Bill of Rights before "religious factions" began trying to get around the First Amendment and use government to impose their own religious views on others. It has been an ongoing struggle to keep the wall of separation from crumbling.

Attorneys for Colorado argued to the district court that their policies were meant to comply with separation of church and state. Yet by making subjective judgments about which religious institutions were "pervasively sectarian" and which were not, Colorado was doing exactly the opposite. The state could have chosen to make financial aid available to students at all religious colleges, or no religious colleges, but they may not favor some religious colleges over others.

The editorial continues,

Freedom is what our Constitution protects, and religious freedom results only in a society where anyone may practice any religion, including Satanism, paganism, atheism or tree worship. Helping students attend a Catholic school but not a Buddhist school curtails the theological free-for-all that's essential to maintaining religious freedom.

This is right. However, the next paragraph begins,

Radical atheists and secularists likely won't applaud this ruling, favoring some religious discrimination over none at all.

Possibly, but I don't think "secularism" is the real enemy of religion, if we define "secular" as "not specifically relating to religion or to a religious body." A genuinely secular society is one that is religion neutral. In such a society the Catholic school and the Evangelical school and the Buddhist school all get the same treatment from government, whatever that treatment is. One religion is not favored over another.

Ironically, most of the time the real enemy of religion is not secularism, but religion. Through most of human history -- with some notable exceptions in the 20th century -- the worst oppressors of religions have been other religions. Were it not for separation of church and state in the U.S., there probably wouldn't be a Naropa University at all. Instead, there would be a hodgepodge of laws dictating which religions are allowable and which are not, and somehow I doubt Buddhism would make the A list.