Lux Lucet

“We have the same vocabulary, but a different dictionary,” was a saying coined a hundred years or so back. It was used by Bible believing Christians to describe liberals who were surreptitiously working to undermine the churches of the day.

The liberals didn’t like a fair fight. Instead of openly declaring their unbelief in the Bible, liberal ministers and scholars were wont to cloak their liberalism in the language of Scripture. The social gospelers would speak of the “divinity of Christ” and for all the world appear to be sound Christians. But instead meaning that Jesus was fully God, they meant only that Jesus, as do all men, had a spark of divinity within him. This is not Christianity. It is a humanist lie.

But old-school social gospelers are not the only people to redefine words to suit their agenda. One prominent example of this is what some atheists and liberals have done to the term “separation of church and state.”

If you’re like me, you probably grew up thinking that 1) these words are found in the Constitution and 2) they mean Christian ideas are legally prohibited from having even the smallest influence in matters of government. Both ideas are false.

But their falsity doesn’t stop many people from passionately believing them. Take a look at this video of a recent Town Hall held by Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

When minister steps up to pray, some in the audience scream “Prayer? Prayer?” A man can be heard loudly repeating “separation of church and state, separation of church and state.” Another says, “He’s [the minister] not supposed to be up there [at the lectern].”

When the minister ends the prayer in Jesus’ name, the crowd again explodes.

Now for all I know, the loud mouthed protesters may have been dupes paid by George Soros. Perhaps they were expressing an honest, albeit mistaken, opinion. At any rate, they would be better served taking time to learn a thing or two about the Constitution before getting so worked up a minister doing his job.

The Separation of Church and State – Two Fallacies

The first fallacy mentioned above, the idea that the words “separation of church and state” are found in the Constitution is the lesser of the two issues.

Although the Constitution does not explicitly use the words “separation of church and state” the idea, when properly understood, is found there. It is a simple matter of logic.

The Westminster Confession speaks of the whole council of God, stating that it is either expressly stated, or by good and necessary consequences implied, in the 66 books of the Bible. For example, the Bible never uses the term “Trinity” but the doctrine of the Trinity – the idea that there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all of whom are fully and equally God – is implied in several passage of Scripture.

In like fashion, the Constitution prohibits religious tests for holding office and in the First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And it is these words that people point to when then say that the Constitution separates church and state. This seems fair enough. But what, exactly, does it mean to have a separation of church and state?

And this leads us to a discussion of second and more important commonly believed fallacy about the separation of church and state.

It has become – if I may use this term in connection with secularists, liberals, atheists and progressives – a article of faith that separation of church and state means that religious, and more specifically Christian, ideas are Constitutionally prohibited from being used as a basis for law in American government.

Humanist Austin Cline gives voice to this view. He writes, “[T]he separation of church and state ensures that private citizens, when acting in the role of some government official, cannot have any aspect of their private religious beliefs imposed upon others.”

Cline goes on to give examples of what he means by this, writing, “School teachers cannot promote their religion to other people’s children…Local officials cannot require certain religious practices on the part of government employees, for example by deciding what sort of Bible will be read in class…Government leaders cannot make members of other religions feel like they are unwanted.”

This all seems reasonable enough, but what if we test Cline’s argument further by bringing up the topic of theft. The Bible prohibits theft “Thou shalt not steal” making it an “aspect of their [Christian’s] private religious beliefs,” and, therefore according to Cline, a concept that cannot be “imposed upon others.”

So does this mean that Austin Cline wouldn’t mind if I stole his wallet? His argument would seem to require complete passivity on his part to my act of stealing.

Of course, I seriously doubt that he would take the theft of his wallet with perfect equanimity. And if I’m right about this, it would simply indicate that he is fine with the idea of imposing morality upon others, he just doesn’t want the source of that morality to be the Bible.

That Cline believes in some sort of ethical norm can be seen in his following paragraph where he writes, “[T]his requires moral self-restraint on government officials.” But from where he takes his ethics, Cline doesn’t say. Maybe they come from Immanuel Kant or some other secular philosopher such as Max Stirner.

Stirner was a 19th century German anarchist thinker, who had a rather interesting view of property. He wrote, “Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property…What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing. I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing.”

Life in Stirner’s world would be like something out of Mad Max. It would be a terrifying dog-eat-dog world. Would Cline find this preferable to living in a nation whose laws were shaped by the Bible? Probably not. But his blanket refusal to allow Scripture to be used as the source of American law suggests that he thinks Stirner’s views are more in line with the Constitution that the Law of Moses. And in this he is greatly mistaken.

Separation of Church and State – What it Means

There is an important distinction that must be made in the discussion of the separation of church and states that seems to be lost on nearly everyone. John Robbins wrote, “[S]ome people today cannot or will not distinguish between (1) governors’ acknowledging God and Jesus Christ, and (2) governors’ forcing or subsidizing private citizens to do so” (Christians and the Civil War).

Understanding the distinction between these two types of activities is key to understanding the meaning of the separation of church and state. The Constitutions does not prohibit civil magistrates from naming the name of Christ or using the Bible to draft legislation. The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from setting up a taxpayer subsidized state church or prohibiting men from exercising their religious beliefs.

That this is the meaning of the First Amendment is supported by at least three considerations.

First, simple logic does not support the reading that Cline and other secularists put on the First Amendment. One cannot deduce that governors are prohibited from acknowledging God and Jesus Christ or from using the Bible in carrying out the duties of their office from a statement prohibiting the federal government from establishing a taxpayer funded church.

Second, at the time the Constitution was adopted the United States was 98% Protestant. Why would a Protestant nation write and adopt a Constitution that prohibited the use of the Bible in public service? To anyone with any knowledge of the Reformation, that makes no sense at all.

Third, the very words “separation of church and state” come from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote explaining the meaning of the Constitution to a group of Baptists who were concerned about losing their religious freedom.

In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson wrote,

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties (emphasis added).

The wall of separation was erected to protect churches from governmental encroachments, not to keep Christian magistrates from using the Bible in the course of carrying out their duties.  Those who say otherwise are either deceived themselves or liars seeking to deceive others.  It is commonly said that one cannot impose morality.  But what is the legal code other than morality imposed?  The United States will have laws of one sort or another.  And those laws either will be taken from the Bible or from some secular source.  We in the West have the tremendous privilege of living under a legal code formulated largely under the teachings of the Bible.  And this is why the West has been free and prosperous.  Remove the Bible and we’re slaves, all of us.