3 views of church-state relations explained

Historically, governments have taken one of three approaches to church-state relations, according to Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land. In his book “The Divided States of America? What Liberals and Conservatives are Missing in the God and Country Shouting Match!” he labels the approaches avoidance, acknowledgment and accommodation.

AVOIDANCE: According to this view, all recognition of the church should be removed from government, creating a secular society as in modern France.

John Wilsey, assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Havard School for Theological Studies in Houston, said many who champion “separation of church and state” espouse the avoidance view. Yet neither the majority of America’s Founding Fathers nor its early religious dissenters—including Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists—held this perspective, he said.

Early American dissenters “knew that a separation of church and state, a wall of separation would eventually lead to a limiting of government as well as religion,” said Wilsey, author of “One Nation Under God? An Evangelical Critique of Christian America.” Under the avoidance view, “government can’t say anything or do anything to acknowledge religion, and the church can’t do anything at all in the public square, which inhibits religious freedom.”

Some believe avoidance is necessary to accommodate the broad variety of religious convictions in America today. But there is a better way, according to Wilsey.

Most Americans assume “separation of church and state” is “what the Founders intended from the very beginning,” he said. “And certainly some did. Thomas Jefferson favored that. But in terms of the religious dissenters who gained us religious freedom during the Revolutionary period and shortly thereafter, that was not really the intent.”

In terms of Baptists, Land in a 2008 speech at Criswell College, quoted Roger Williams, an early American Baptist writing decades before the Constitution was drafted, that there must be a “wall of separation” to keep the “wilderness of the world” from encroaching upon the “garden of the church.”      

Later, that “wall of separation” language made its way into Thomas Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, defending the Baptists’ from oppression as a religious minority in Connecticut. Yet Land said Jefferson obviously didn’t intend for a radical “separation” like that championed by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union or Americans United.

Land told the Criswell audience that if Jefferson had intended that government avoid religious expression in its domain, it is curious that Jefferson, the Sunday after penning his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, attended Sunday worship services in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber led by his friend John Leland, a Baptist pastor from Connecticut.
    
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This view argues that government should affirm a majority religion, as with the government of Iran affirming Islam.

“The problem with that is that it’s going to deny religious freedom to anyone who doesn’t hold [the officially recognized] view, anybody who’s not subscribed to that religion that’s acknowledged by the state,” Wilsey said. “You cannot have true religious freedom in a state that has an established church, or even an acknowledged church.”

Though America did not have an official state church, Protestantism served as a de facto state religion until the second half of the 20th century, he said. This resulted in groups like Mormons, Roman Catholics and adherents of Native American religions being persecuted and having their religious freedoms impinged, Wilsey said.

Speaking at Criswell, Land said of this, “The last thing we as Baptists should want is government-sponsored religion. Government-sponsored religion is like getting a hug from a python.”

ACCOMMODATION: According to this view, all religious perspectives should be respected by government and citizens should understand the value of religion in America’s past, present and future. Religiously informed moral values should inform public policy discussions under the accommodation view.

Accommodation “is the ideal situation and certainly the intent in the First Amendment,” Wilsey said.
In early America, religious dissenters were highly involved in politics, arguing for their right to practice their faith without persecution and allowing their religion to inform their political views in the public square, he said.

“The government did not see that as a threat,” Wilsey said of the dissenters’ political involvement. “The government of course welcomed this. So I think that model that we had at the very beginning was the model we ought to try to recover today.”

Land said the accommodation position most closely honors the American Founders’ intent and historic Baptist principles.

“The accommodation position would say, ‘If the people in the community want to have a manger scene on the courthouse lawn, then they ought to be allowed to collect the money and buy a manger scene and the government should accommodate their wish by allowing its display at the appropriate Christmas time, and they should provide police protection for it and the lighting for it and possibly even the storage for it during the Christmas season,” Land explained.

“But that also means that if there are Jewish people in the community and they want to have a Menorah scene at the appropriate time in the Jewish calendar, then they ought to be able to have a Menorah celebrating Judaism as well. And if there are Muslims in that community, then at the appropriate time they ought to be allowed to display a Muslim scene. Accommodation means the government is an umpire. And the government makes sure that everybody plays fair.”

—With reporting by Jerry Pierce