Most of us are so familiar with the idea of the separation of politics and religion, of church and state, that we find it hard to imagine anything very different. However if we take a larger historical perspective we quickly learn how recent this apparent separation has been, and how in most of human history the two have been inextricably linked. The Egyptians deified their pharaohs, the Romans their emperors. After the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity, the intertwining of church and state produced Christendom where the Church could create and dispose of kings, lords and emperors if they failed in their “Christian” duties. The whole of society, of culture, was viewed as Christian and so the Church could interfere in all aspects of people’s lives.
The story of the disentanglement of this relationship between Church and state is complex and one of conflict and struggle. While the wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant nations was a major factor leading to the eventual separation of Church and state in the West – often portrayed by Enlightenment propaganda as the triumph of reason over tradition, ignorance and superstition – there was an earlier more theoretical advance within Christianity itself that facilitated the movement.
The intellectual foundations for Christendom were laid by Augustine of Hippo, North African bishop, theologian and towering intellect. The two categories which dominated his thought were grace, revealed in Jesus Christ and mediated by the Church, and sin, manifest in human corruption and weakness and leading to damnation. This was an all or nothing approach…
Augustine was aware of difficulties in his position – according to him pagans could not only not do good, they could not know anything (even he could see this was not right, and he came later to retract it!). But his overall framework provided a simple and direct solution to the problem of the relationship between Church and state…
The intellectual seeds of our modern separation were actually made by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas objected to the dialectical approach of Augustine ... Following the philosophy of Aristotle, he introduced a middle term, which he called “nature”…
Aquinas’ position was a nuanced distinction between faith and reason, grace
and nature with implications for church and state which went beyond his own
time’s actual practice. Less nuanced and more pragmatic was the position of
reformer, Martin Luther (who) promoted the notion of “freedom of conscience”
and a separation of Church and state. The state had no right to violate the
freedom of conscience of a religious believer. The pragmatic nature of this
position was of course revealed when Luther himself invoked the right of
“Christian princes” to suppress the Anabaptist sects that later emerged. And of
course the other major reformer John Calvin reestablished a virtual theocracy
in
These ambiguities came to a head with the resulting “wars of religion” which
troubled
Of course it is still not clear that Christianity, or at least Catholicism, is itself necessarily comfortable with the modern secular state either… It was only during the pontificate of John Paul II that the Church could say something positive about democratic forms of government. But even these positive things are held in balance with various cautions. “The value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes” (EvangeliumVitae n.70). Hence Cardinal Pell now speaks of “democratic personalism” or “normative democracy” as alternatives to the “secular democracy” that often reduces things to their lowest common denominator. Is such talk anything more than a “thin edge of the wedge” for a return to the theocracy of Christendom? Does the Church want to tell us how to vote?
In fact our political discourse seems to bifurcate into the either/or of either secular democracy or a return of Christendom. One or the other, with no ground in between. Whenever a church leader speaks out on any issue, from the “Left” or the “Right” the spectre is raised of undue interference of religion in politics.
It is interesting, and somewhat timely, that these issues have been raised in the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, “God is love”… What we find in (the second part of this document) is a clear rejection of the Christendom model of Church-state relationship: “it is not the Church’s responsibility to make [its] teaching prevail in political life … the Church cannot and must not replace the state” (n.28). The Church’s task is to “inform consciences”, “stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice”, and foster “greater readiness to act accordingly” (n.28). The Church’s social teaching is based on “reason and natural law”, “rational argument” so that a “just society must be the achievement of politics, not the Church” (n.28). In fact “the direct duty to work for a just ordering of society … is proper to the lay faithful … called to take part in public life as a personal capacity” (n.29). Note however, there is more than a hint here that by “Church” the encyclical means “hierarchy” in distinction to the laity acting in a personal capacity.
I would like to suggest that the account presented by Benedict here is not arbitrary, but based on, at least implicitly, what I shall refer to as a “scale of values”. Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan speaks of a hierarchical scale of values, from vital, to social, cultural, personal culminating in religious value (Lonergan, Method in Theology; London, DLT, 1972; 31-32)
For Lonergan this scale has a certain transcultural normativity, and we can see it operating in the schema suggested by the pope. The Church’s task is first and foremost a religious task and so begins with religious values. The conversion induced by religious value has an inevitable impact on our personal values, that is, it “informs consciences”. This process is not automatic or inevitable, but without it our religious conversion is ultimately inauthentic. Moreover, one can be moral without the intervention of religion, but if religion does not shift the probabilities towards authentic moral life we should all pack up and go home. Reflection on our moral conversion produces a tradition of “rational argument”, of what the encyclical refers to as “reason and natural law”. This confidence in reason is itself part of that tradition, since the one God is the source of all truth for which we strive – this was strongly reaffirmed in the encyclical Fides et ratio, by John Paul II. Further by locating this contribution as one of “reason and natural law” the pope is signaling that the Church has no divine revelation to offer which would provide automatic answers to the issues we address.
This process requires significant cultural engagement, debate, discussion, and argumentation. Again this process is not automatic or inevitable. That tradition is littered with historical mistakes, notably the past justification of slavery, now repudiated of course. But there is a certain self-correcting principle at work which weeds out such problems over time. It is only at the end of this multiple mediation through personal and cultural values that we can speak of a “direct duty to work for a just ordering of society”, a task “proper to the lay faithful”. Political engagement is the proximate outcome of a cultural transformation, and the more remote outcome of moral and religious conversions.
What we witness in the document is a process of mediation, from religious to personal to cultural to social values… By the time we come to the social and political level, it is quite possible for good Christian people to disagree with one another, as noted at Vatican II (see Gaudium et spes, n.43).
The temptation, often enough succumbed to, is to move directly from the religious to the political, as if a political program can be read straight out of one’s religious beliefs. This is the essence of a theocracy, giving the political realm a divine authority, which is unquestioned and unquestionable…
…the Church and religious people generally must learn to live with and mourn their own failures. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident that in the issue of abortion and more recently the debate over RU486. Where shifting the culture proves difficult, where resistance to “reason” is powerful, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to become a political lobby group which seeks to attain its goals by direct political action. Such a decision is fraught with ambiguity where “with equal sincerity some of the faithful will disagree with others on a given matter.”
This temptation carries with it the subsequent danger of being treated as nothing more than a political lobby group, representing “special interests”. One of the great shortcomings of our present culture is its almost total lack of confidence in reason and argument, its almost fearful reaction to the notion of truth, if not necessarily as the outcome of reasoning, but even as its possible asymptotic goal. Whether this is relativism… Whether this is relativism or post-modernism, the end result is that all argument is viewed as a manifestation of the will to power, an exercise in domination and control. If reason does not have the goal of truth, then power is all that is left… A culture which denies the possibilities of reason and truth denies its own ability to autonomously critique the political process. Everything is then reduced to the political and all that is left is special interests, lobby groups, and political factions. This is depressingly close to what we find in our Australian political landscape at present.
So the question of Church-state relationships remains complex. We should resist simplistic solutions based on stale slogans such as “separation of Church and state”, but equally we need to present an alternative other than a return to a Christendom model of relationship. This is one of the biggest challenges faced by religious communities who are seeking a voice in the political order. It is a challenge not just for post-Christian western societies but for many other societies and cultures with a religious basis, whether Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist. Much depends on our success or failure to meet this challenge.
This is an edited version of a speech given recently by Professor Neil
Ormerod, as part of the series Soulful Conversations, organised by the