Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
The United States Constitution expressly forbids government intrusion in religion. The "Establishment Clause" seems to effectively forbid religious intrusion in government. These are two sides of the same coin or, as the song goes, you can't have one without the other. It is here suggested that if the Constitution did not specifically preclude the establishment of a state religion, such establishment would still be unconstitutional, because any official religion would necessarily infringe on others' freedom of religion.
Certain of the "religious right" have been chafing over recent Supreme Court decisions regarding the Establishment Clause. Some seem to feel that the government has a duty to provide space for Christian groups to hold meetings; some are horrified by the absence of organized Christian prayer in public school classrooms. Apparently, none has yet pushed for including algebra in the Sunday School curriculum.
The current efforts of fundamentalists to ensure that everyone's laws conform closely to their Bible may be philosophically distasteful, but in large part they are constitutionally permissible. Where these efforts are clearly not permissible is where they infringe on the religious freedom of others, the Establishment Clause notwithstanding.
To judge the effect of the Clause on American life, we can study Court decisions, school board policies, questions regarding tax-exempt status, legislative chaplains, etc. How can we evaluate the hypothetical effect of its non-existence? Perhaps some thought-experiment is in order.
What would life in the United States be like with a state religion? Consider official prayers. We would have them, of, course, and they'd be Christian, of course. (One wonders whether Christians would be so annoyed by the Clause if they lived in a country with a majority Druid population.) What, then, could dissuade a Jewish or Muslim parent from suing a school district for interfering with their right to control the religious education of their child? How could the Court find against them?
Perhaps-almost certainly-someone would try the "let them leave the room" strategy, excluding children from the activities of their peers on the basis of religious belief-which children are taught is of the utmost importance. Anyone who has ever had a child, or been a child, can understand the hurtfulness of such an act. Would we be too hasty to conclude that some court would necessarily find this to be discrimination on religious grounds? Or, might the guarantee of equal protection be enough to protect them?
Consider also the violation of conscience involved in using people's tax dollars to advance a message they consider offensive, if not blasphemous. The notion of Jesus as Messiah is offensive to Jews, and the idea that God fathered a son by a human mother is revolting to many Muslims. It would not be difficult to construct a case that such compulsion constitutes infringement of religious freedom.
Now, what about atheists? It might be argued that they, nominally having no religion on which to infringe, are uniquely protected by the Clause. How could our hypothetical court find atheists' rights as deserving of protection as believers'? This brings us to some basic questions about the nature of freedom itself.
The overwhelming importance of religious freedom is a function of our definition of God. As a matter of political philosophy, it would seem that behind freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is an ultimate right, freedom of thought. It defies reason to hold that we are free to say what we think and print what we think, but not to think what we thin. And if God is omnipotent, ever-present and all-knowing, it follows that God is all-important. If we are free to think what we will about anything, we must be free to think what we will about God. Then by definition, questions regarding God are the most important questions of all. Various believers disagree on many subjects, but no religion holds that God is inconsequential. And if we are allowed to decide relatively minor questions like how God wants us to pray, or what to call clergymen and the like, why not the fundamental question of whether God exists? Put another way, of what value is any of this freedom if we are not free to decide for ourselves the most important question on the most important subject we can imagine? If religious freedom is guaranteed, then we cannot resist concluding that the right to be an atheist "emanates from the penumbra."
If questions about God are the most important questions, and freedom of thought is the most important freedom, we arrive at a paradox: that the Clause is redundant in that it guarantees rights guaranteed elsewhere in the Constitution, and that, in term of the freedom it protects, it can be considered the most important part of that document.
If the Clause is redundant, why is it there? If it is not legally or philosophically necessary, does it serve some practical purpose? Could we safely remove it? Let us consider the background against which the Founders did their work.
In the late 1700's, historical trends were moving away from state religion. Prior to the emergence of the modern nation-state in the 1600's, the relationship between church and state was more like a rivalry between kings and popes as temporal monarchs.
With the Reformation came the revolutionary idea that no intermediary was needed between Man and God. This proved to be a major blow to state religion: if a person's relationship to God required no pope or priest, what claim could be made by a king or prince? This, if nothing else, guaranteed that the Reformation would have political effects as well as philosophical, as evidenced by the continent-wide religious wars that followed.
There is another profound philosophical aspect of state religion. The state must express its will through law, and law must be enforced through, well, force. The ultimate and inescapable result of Establishment is that matters of conscience, ideas and religious beliefs are imposed on the citizen by force of arms.
A parallel problem is that temporal power becomes endowed with spiritual force, and that any law on any subject becomes an expression of God's will, and God ultimately becomes concerned with matters like zoning. Then lawmakers and the executive are tempted to believe they are acting not merely in accordance with the wishes of society or sovereign, but with the mandate of the Almighty. (Why the Supreme Being needs the help of an Alabama state legislator to do his work is a theological point as yet unresolved.)
Besides the strong philosophical argument against state religion, our Founders could draw lessons from contemporary Anglican England, Catholic Spain and France, even Salem, Massachusetts. They could also see in bloody history what we can now see in Iran and Afghanistan: the extreme danger of a government confidently and forcefully executing God's will. They may have seen this prospect as too dangerous to be left to some hypothetical future Court, and we can certainly see the danger now, and be grateful for one more line of defense against theocracy.
In conclusion: that establishment equals infringement reminds us of the importance of "separation." The importance of the Clause is not just as a "wall of separation" but as a bulwark in the wall that protects the most basic and precious kind of freedom-freedom of thought-for us all.
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