The Daily Warning

So, I’ve been thinking about Church and State recently, and here are some of my thoughts.

I’ve never been comfortable with the more oppressive things done in the name of preserving the separation of church and state.  It’s frequently used as a tool of miniscule religious minorities to get revenge on the society around them.  Atheists suing to get “under God” removed from the pledge, to stop extremely religious towns from publicly expressing that faith, to keep nativities out of Christmas displays, preventing religious kids from praying in school.  Our legal system being used so abusively could not possibly fit with the idea of what America is supposed to be.

But it’s right there in the first amendment, so it seemed.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

And what has struck me about this is that it’s perfectly balanced.  Government can’t be used to push government on anyone, and it can’t be used to restrict religious practice.

So what of school prayer?  Can anyone really argue that praying in public schools isn’t the establishment of religion?  It doesn’t have to be sectarian, obviously it is suggesting that there is a God and that goes a lot further than a lot of people go in their beliefs.  The question that gets forgotten is if anyone can realistically argue that not allowing prayer in school isn’t a restriction of free exercise?  You have to pay your property taxes, by law, and that means regardless of whether you send your kids to public schools or not, you are required by law  to pay for their operations.  Now there are many tricky ways of manipulating markets to add bias to where the market share ends up, but there is nothing more effective than having a law saying “You have to pay for X product, which you can have, or you can buy any other product and consume only it, but you’d still have to pay for X product as well”.  There is significant pressure from the government to send your kids to public schools.  A child’s education is an extremely significant aspect of his/her development, and parents are being pushed by their government away from schools that teach according to their world view.  Regardless of the merits you may or may not see in the secular world view, the first amendment prohibits the use of government to push that world view on people’s kids.

And that’s what’s important that has been misunderstood.  It isn’t protecting government from the church, suggesting that government is somehow too pure for the church, that the presence of the church in government would be corruptive to the government.  It was the exact opposite.

One thing that our founding fathers recognized far better than us is that the natural order in the body politic is dirty, deceitful, corrupt, that politicians will naturally be unprincipled corrupt panderers.  Our government is deliberately structured in a way to keep too much power out of the hands of anyone because if anyone ever got too much power it would only be a matter of time until an unprincipled corrupt panderer got control of that power and really started screwing things up.

The church is an extremely powerful force in society.  People are attracted to moral codes, and it seems obvious enough to most people that there is something more than we can possibly understand, and that it’s important so we should do our best.  The church is too pure for government.  We’ve seen examples of when government gets into the church.  It turns the clergy into corrupt panderers and the government inevitably uses the church’s credibility in order to steal a lot of power from the citizenry.

The reason we’ve forgotten this is because we’ve forgotten the truth about politicians.  Politicians are very good at what they do at the elite levels, and we’re a bunch of suckers.  People actually believe in President Obama, that’s he’s principled and pure and is really working to make things better for people.  The reality is that even if he genuinely does want to make the world a better place, and he’s doing absolutely everything he can to do so he is operating in an inherently corrupt institution, government.  He might have really wanted to save some jobs with the stimulus package, but it was guaranteed from day 1 that that bill wasn’t going to be anything but the largest pork-barrel handout the world has ever seen.

It won’t change, it’s the nature of politics.  That’s why the founders put in the constitution the means of keeping government under wraps.  Government is the punishment for our sins, it is only necessary because of our imperfections.  We’ve forgotten that, primarily over the last century.  First we had the 17th Amendment under Woodrow Wilson.  And the way it happened makes perfect sense.

People forget that there is a reason why state legislatures elected Senators.  Due to the government controlling most of our educations, we’re always taught to dismiss that part of the Constitution as our founding fathers simply being less democratic than we are now.  It’s in fact, once again, quite the opposite.  It was a major check on federal power.  It’s a similar idea to the German Bundesrat.  Separation of powers is primarily based on concepts of divide and conquer, if politicians have divergent interests, they take each other out and you can dominate them both.  In the federal government, everyone except for the Senate, answered directly to the people, and all shared one common interest, which was the expansion of federal power.  The Senate kept that under wraps, because the Senators all had to answer to the state legislatures, and so it was in all of their personal interests to preserve the power of the states to play a check on the federal government.

But, of course, keeping politicians in check with separation of powers is like water on concrete, it’ll find any crack.  So politicians, as usual, pretended publicly as if they were proud, honest and principled, and pretended as if allowing state legislatures to elect Senators was just a case of a bunch of dead slave holders who didn’t respect the people like our new proud, honest and principled politicians.  People bought into it, and it became politically impossible for the state legislatures to oppose the amendment, and so the Separation of Powers essentially went out the window.

Then came the Great Depression, and with it came the single worst President we have ever had, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  And so FDR, like the fascist he was, used people’s fear to expand the power of the federal government far beyond its Constitutional restraints, let the government into every nook and cranny of our lives.

And so now government exceeds the role of the church in our day to day life.  When dealing with the question of school prayer we miss that government shouldn’t be running our schools.  How the hell can anyone be surprised that our schools have been getting worse and worse and worse?  It’s the government, the only reason we have any good public schools is because of the prevalance of local control.

Issues of the role of the church and the state in our public and private lives are sometimes going to be complex, but not nearly as ridiculous as they are now.  It’s just one of the signs that we have fundamentally the wrong idea about government in our society today.

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