Squeezing religion out

Charles J. Chaput is the Catholic archbishop of Denver. I have often quoted or referred to his writing because he gets the church/state relationship right. In "A Charitable Endeavor," inspired by continued secular attacks on not only the free exercise of religion — but even the free speech rights of religious people — Chaput notes that many "have forgotten the moral vision of our nation’s founding thinkers." The article is about the increasing difficulty Catholic charities are having working with government without compromising the integrity of Catholic teaching. As he does that he reminds us of some important understandings relevant to all religious believers in the United States:

The United States is an historical oddity. Unlike the nations of modern Europe, America was not founded on the basis of territorial, cultural, ethnic, or confessional concerns. America is what the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray called “a proposition country,” built on a set of moral claims about God, the human person, the meaning of life, and the purpose of society. These propositions, in turn, emerged from the Judeo–Christian values and vocabulary of America’s first settlers and founders.

America’s founding documents are thus a mix of commonsense realism and transcendent idealism. God is named as “Creator” and “Supreme Judge” over individuals and governments. The human person is said to be endowed with God-given, and therefore inalienable, rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The purpose of government is clearly defined and sharply limited: to help secure and defend these basic rights for its citizens.

The American proposition envisions the self-rule of a free people living under a limited government. Civil authority governs with the people’s consent and in accord with the natural law and natural rights established by “Nature’s God.” The people’s freedom is not a moral license. Rather, it is the liberty and duty to pursue the good. The American ideal resembles Lord Acton’s famous definition of freedom: “not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”

These beliefs shaped how the founders saw the role of religion in American life. In much of continental Europe, the rise of the nation-state was based on a negative secularity, hostile to religion and often brutally anticlerical. But in America, secularity was pressed into the service of cooperating with and promoting religion. Church and state were kept separate not to diminish religion, but to ensure that citizens could worship freely and practice their faith without government interference. In fact, America’s founders believed that religious faith and its institutions played a vital role in forming the civic virtues needed for national survival.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his great study of American democracy: “I do not know whether all [American citizens] have faith in their religions—for who can read the bottom of men’s hearts? But I am certain that they believe religion to be necessary for the preservation of republican institutions. This is not the opinion of one class of citizens or one party but of the nation as a whole. One encounters it among people of every rank.”

Since religious faith was seen as foundational for public morality and political discourse, America’s churches have always been accepted as key mediating institutions in the nation’s civic life. This idea of mediating structures—such as churches, fraternal organizations, and families, which all stand between the individual and the larger institutions of civic power—helps explain the historically unique role of the Church.

Government was never meant to be a large presence in our American life. But too often today our knowledge classes—leadership groups in politics, law, higher education, and the media—no longer seem to believe that. America was built on the premise that the power of the state should be modest, because real life is much larger than politics. Human beings are the product of a vast, rich fabric of other loyalties and relationships in families, neighborhoods, workplaces, religious communities, and voluntary associations.

The American proposition presumes the truth of Edmund Burke’s dictum: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Such respect for the essentially nonpolitical nature of human life has given a special vigor to American charitable efforts. The American environment has always favored minimal government involvement and maximum participation from individuals and voluntary associations. ....

Two points are vital here. First, the American proposition presumes that large areas of our common life as a nation exist where government has no special competence and no business intruding. Second, self-government means exactly that: self-government. The solutions to problems in American society are mainly the duty of individuals working together in associations. Government involvement is never the first, and usually not the preferred, course of action. .... [more]

Thanks to Insight Scoop for the reference.

A Charitable Endeavor | First Things