Church and State Separation

CLAIMS CONNECTING or separating religion and politics exist both on the left and right. Therefore, some key historical, philosophical, and political elements are necessary to understand how the left approaches this issue. The long history of this topic has included discussion on theocracy, civil war, tolerance, separation of political powers, anti-clericalism, and civil religion, as well as the right to freedom of religion or freedom from religion.

A theocracy is a political system of religious leaders whose power supposedly comes from a deity, as found in ancient Egypt and the European Middle Ages. But this system imposes a dogma without clarifying the source of its legitimacy, thus creating conflicts among people of different beliefs.

Religious conflicts led to the Thirty Years War in Germany and the persecution of dissenters by the Church of England. While the Catholic Church was able to maintain its theocratic power in Europe for centuries, this situation changed with the Protestant Reformation, which backed the formation of secular nation-states aligned to either Papist or Reformed views.

Thus, on the eve of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes developed his political theory, defending a separation of the national state from the Roman Catholic Church, thereby seeking to avoid civil war. In Leviathan, he proposed total obedience to a local sovereign as a form of separation of the English state from the Roman Church, although he did not oppose the Church of England.

John Locke formulated his views around the separation of political powers and the principle of toleration. In 1689, he argued that religious freedom should be guaranteed in the private sphere. In his view, religion should not be imposed upon the individual by the state, because a church is a voluntary association of free people with shared beliefs. For Locke, intolerance, not religion, was the reason for conflicts, and religious freedom was a natural right.

The separation of church and state was further supported by the critique of religion during the Enlightenment, which questioned religion and upheld reason. Several methods were employed such as affirming the scientist as a secundus deus, embracing paganism and substituting Christian values for other cultural references, or promoting anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism in favor of lay leadership. As a result, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 stressed the principle of laïcité on political matters. Rousseau, however, argued that society could not survive without religion, and therefore it needed “the dogmas of civil religion.” But these dogmas would create a new problem: intolerance. Later secularism became the characteristic antidote to the dangers of religion and eventually Nietzsche would advocate the “death of God.”

In the 20th century, there have been instances of a breakdown in this separation. For instance, the Argentine president had to receive a sanction by the Pope before taking office, while Iran and Afghanistan installed conservative Islamic states. The left, while supporting the division between church and state, has often combined religion and politics. In the 1960s, African American churches were associated with the civil rights movement and the Latin American Base Communities followed liberation theology to oppose military rule. In the 1980s, a church movement against political authoritarianism in East Germany, Demokratie Jetzt, served as prelude to unification and its leaders became influential politicians.

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