In the wake of the Charlie Kirk memorial service, there’s been a lot of attention to an important issue: the proper relationship between religion and politics. Let’s cut to the chase. A relationship between these two spheres of life is inevitable. But it needs to be a limited one.
There are two extremes, both of which are unworkable, even dangerous, though in different ways. One extreme is the complete separation of religion from public and political life, confining religion only to the personal and familial. That truncates and distorts most religious faith–certainly the one I know best, Christianity–exiling it an other-worldly “spiritual” realm and to private and individual matters alone.
The other extreme, the one more prominent at the moment, is the complete merger of the two. Politics becomes a kind of religion and religion a kind of politics, a dangerous conflation. David Brooks concluded a recent piece in The New York Times, “We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics,” with these words:
“The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.”
Editor Dave Zahl at the website Mockingbird takes a somewhat different but to my mind relevant approach to all this in a piece titled “Grace in a Time of Line-Drawing and Statement-Making.” The subtitle is “Eight Theses for Surviving the Internet,” but I really think it could also be, “Eight Theses for Surviving Life in the Times.”
In Zahl’s first two theses for contemporary survival, you catch the whiff of a down-to-earth grace in everyday life. The first is “it’s okay not to know things.” The second is “No one can care about or be interested in everything.” There’s a relief! Zahl elaborates on both of these, spinning out what he means. Check that out using the link above.
But it is the third of his theses that has the most direct implication for religion and politics in a time when there are a lot of pressures to conflate the two and turn life into an on-going holy war, whether of the cold or hot variety:
“This one is a bit controversial but here goes: the political-ethical realm is only one slice of reality, and arguably the thinnest. The real action is almost always happening below it, on the existential and/or metaphysical level. Remember your visit to your neighbor in hospice last week: personal pain, spiritual hopes and doubts, the desire to love and be loved — these things are not secondary. Focusing on them is not irresponsible or cowardly. Reserve your time and energy for swimming in those waters and you’ll reach a broader swath of the population, on a deeper frequency, with less noise.”
Some may see this as sealing off faith and personal life from the political. But I don’t think that’s quite what Zahl is saying. He is saying that is we are to avoid (in Brooks’s words) a politics that thinks one’s “opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible.” We have to see each other, perhaps especially those with politics different from our own, as human beings. We have to see them as people who experience “personal pain, spiritual hopes and doubts, the desire to love and be loved.”
When we lose sight of that, of our common humanity, when we see others as political actors only, whether allies or opponents, it is indeed possible “for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.” When the political absorbs everything and becomes a kind of religion, we distort ourselves. We disfigure others. We fracture life. After all, are people happy whose entire life is living, breathing, and eating politics? Really?
I think it useful to make a distinction between “politics and public life” on one hand, which is an important sphere of life and cannot be neglected by putting our heads in the sand or in some spiritual ether, and “partisan politics” that subsumes everything to one side or the other, requires taking and promoting a side in all times and in all places, and turns most everything into a political argument. That can’t be good for any of us.
My spouse and I are blessed to have a couple groups of friends with whom we get together for dinner on a regular basis. Many of them are politically active, some have served in elective office. All are concerned about our nation’s political life and health.
But in every group, some line is drawn around hashing out the latest political news and outrages. Some time is always held out, “sacred” you might say, for people to talk about personal pain and loss, for what gives us joy and hope, for where we find beauty, for our desire to love and be loved. And need I say it, this part of our life together often feels most real, most urgent and most of what connects us to one another.
I’ll conclude as I began: When it comes to religion and politics, a relationship between the two is inevitable, but it needs to be a limited one.
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“What Should be the Relationship Between Church and State?”
Basically zero.
Government should treat religious _institutions_ as it treats any non-profit corporation.
Religious must _institutions_ follow the law as does any non-profit corporation.
As to individual personal belief, government should say/do nothing which it would do if the individual was espousing any strongly-held belief.
What am I missing?
Don’t know, that seems sensible enough that Robinson must be thinking about some other aspect of the Relationship. Maybe he means that his colleagues in the business should clean up their act and stop trying to get Anti-Christs elected.
The central problem in the relationship between church and state is that religious thinking is fundamentally incompatible with the reasoning required in politics. In politics, the task is to reconcile the differing preferences of major groups—a messy process that requires reshaping principles and standards to produce acceptable, workable results. Religion, by contrast, rests on absolute and unchanging principles that, in the bargain, explicitly denies the legitimacy of the principles of other faiths. In such a setting, reconciling differing views may be much more difficult.
It is true that government action should rest on moral standards. But those standards should not derive from religion. They should be fashioned out of sensible arrangements for harmonious and effective living together. Another messy process, but history at least since the Crusades makes clear that basing a national moral stance on religious premises has led to widespread and tragic consequences—a risk that very much continues today.
In a rational system of government, church and state must remain as separate as possible, as the framers so consistently intended.
While this may sound lame, it remains true that we writers don’t write our headlines. Editors do that.
I did not understand my piece as being about “the proper relationship of church and state,” but the somewhat different, though related, relationship between religion and politics.