The idea of separating church and state – now entrenched in many modern liberal democracies – is in some ways strange. After all, governments must keep themselves informed and inform their citizens. That’s why they turn to the science of meteorology to predict weather patterns, to economics to understand patterns of growth and decline, and to the medical sciences to improve public health. So why wouldn’t governments also keep close alliances with religious institutions to know what’s going on with God?
Separating church and state appears strange from other perspectives as well. In the historical sweep of large-scale human societies, it’s a relative newcomer, often associated with the United States’ founding father Thomas Jefferson. In 1802, Jefferson asserted the principle of separation in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God … that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
We’re fans of Jefferson’s principle, one of us (Neil Van Leeuwen) being a philosophy professor who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, and the other (Jacob Eisler) being a law professor who regularly attends synagogue. But Jefferson’s letter makes putting the principle into practice sound simpler than it is – as though governments could be entirely hands-off when it comes to people’s beliefs, or ‘opinions’. That, however, can’t be right: engaging with and shaping political, social and other kinds of beliefs is actually a core function of government. Public education guides what people believe about everything from mathematics to history to astronomy. Governments also shape beliefs for policy reasons. If fire department officials learn that people believe a building is safe when it isn’t, they will try to change what people believe about the building’s safety. Belief is also a category of legal interest. If a psychotherapist, for example, believes a patient is a danger to himself or others, the therapist is obligated by law to report that belief.
All this means that Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ can’t sensibly prohibit governments from intervening on beliefs of any type whatsoever. Rather, Jefferson – along with advocates of the principle who came after him – must have presupposed that there is something distinctive about religious beliefs that makes it reasonable to give them a different legal status.
But what is this distinctive thing? Is it that religious beliefs concern God? No, because Buddhism is a religion with its own beliefs, yet Buddhism has no supreme deity. Is it that religious beliefs concern the supernatural generally? No, because many superstitions that aren’t part of a religion concern the supernatural too. Is it that religious beliefs concern morality, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould once suggested?
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