Separation of Church and State the Past and Future of Sacred and Profane
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Separation of Church and State The Past and Future of Sacred and Profane Fourth National Conference of the Historical Society, June 3-5, 2004 © 2004 by Constantin Fasolt. All rights reserved. Note to Conference Participants I wanted to write a paper. Instead I wrote a little book. I do apologize for that. Since it is now written and makes the points that I would like to make, I have decided to present it as it is. At the same time I recognize that readers may be pressed for time. I have therefore included an overview of the whole argument below. I hope it will let the hurried catch my drift and prepare the unhurried for the text. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for the Fellowship that made it possible for me to write this piece. I would also like to thank Elemér Hankiss and Joseph Brinley for their comments on an earlier draft. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my intern Brian O'Hanlon. He read many different drafts, gave valuable critical suggestions on all of them, and helped me both to clarify my thoughts and to improve their presentation. Contents Contents.........................................................................................................................2 Overview........................................................................................................................3 1 A Challenge to the Received Wisdom............................................................................................ 3 2 An Alternative View........................................................................................................................ 4 3 Separation of Church and State..................................................................................................... 6 4 Method of Presentation.................................................................................................................. 8 1 Preface ...................................................................................................................... 10 2 Principles .................................................................................................................. 11 2.1 The Dilemma ............................................................................................................................. 11 2.2 History and Analogy ................................................................................................................. 13 2.3 Sacred and Profane................................................................................................................... 17 3 The Middle Ages....................................................................................................... 21 3.1 The Character of Religious Liberty in the Middle Ages .......................................................... 21 3.1.1 Three Reasons for Denying There Was Religious Liberty ............................................................. 22 3.1.2 Three Reasons for Asserting There Was Religious Liberty............................................................ 25 3.2 The History of Religious Liberty in the Middle Ages............................................................... 29 3.2.1 From Optimism to Anxiety............................................................................................................... 30 3.2.2 The Familiar Diagnosis: The Failure of the Clergy......................................................................... 31 3.3.3 A Different Diagnosis: The Dangers of Success ............................................................................. 33 3.2.4 The Failure of Reform ...................................................................................................................... 35 3.2.5 Anxiety and Terror............................................................................................................................ 36 3.2.6 From Reform to Reformation: The End of the Middle Ages.......................................................... 37 4 The Modern World .................................................................................................. 40 4.1 The Character of Modern Religion .......................................................................................... 40 4.1.1 Modern Articles of Faith .................................................................................................................. 41 4.1.2 Modern Sacraments .......................................................................................................................... 44 4.1.3 Modern Limits on Religious Liberty................................................................................................ 47 4.2 The History of Modern Religion............................................................................................... 49 4.2.1 From Optimism to Anxiety............................................................................................................... 49 4.2.2 The Dangers of Success.................................................................................................................... 51 4.2.3 Two Modern Heresies....................................................................................................................... 52 4.2.4 The Failure of Reform Revisited...................................................................................................... 54 5 The Present and the Future ..................................................................................... 55 5.1 A Test Case: Abortion............................................................................................................... 55 5.2 The Logic of Crisis.................................................................................................................... 57 5.3 Sex, Drugs, and Speech............................................................................................................. 59 5.4 The Tower of Babel ................................................................................................................... 61 5.5 The Future ................................................................................................................................. 62 Overview The received wisdom about religion in the history of Europe is that religion has gradually lost power over the European mind. During the Middle Ages religion ruled supreme. Then the Reformation broke up the unity of Christianity; the Enlightenment shook the foundations of religion; and the astonishing discoveries made by the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, especially the theory of evolution, dealt a deathblow to religion. Thereafter religion survived only in the nooks and crannies of modern life. It could no longer show itself in public without looking befuddled, ignorant, and cranky. God had died. If Max Weber can be believed, the outcome was a spiritually barren and disenchanted form of life in an "iron cage" of modern legal, scientific, and bureaucratic rationality whose origin and nature Weber so feverishly sought to understand. 1 A Challenge to the Received Wisdom In my opinion, this view is wrong. In the first place, it rests on a mistaken notion of religion because it identifies religion with the intellectual content of religious faith. It points, for example, to the account of human origins in the book of Genesis, contrasts it with the account established on principles of science, and concludes that science has displaced religion. The contrast between biblical and scientific accounts is perfectly real. But the conclusion does not follow. Religion does not consist of any particular belief. It rather consists of distinguishing the sacred from the profane. The ways in which that distinction can be drawn are infinitely variable. So far from displacing that distinction, science may well have become its most important source of strength. Second, the received wisdom imposes a false continuity on European religious history. Because it identifies religion with the content of particular beliefs, it identifies the history of religion with the history of those beliefs. As a result, the history of religion looks like the gradual displacement of certain dogmas of theology rooted in sacred texts by certain secular-scientific views founded on rational analysis and empirical observation. The speed and intensity of the change may be acknowledged to have varied over time and place. But overall there is a single development that leads from the assertion of religious supremacy at the beginning to its denial at the end. In fact, so I shall try to argue, there is no such development. There rather are two separate phases, a medieval and a modern one, each with its own religious faith, each zealous in its devotion to the sacraments. The displacement of medieval theology by modern scientific rationality went hand in hand with the assertion of a modern form of religion that makes its own claims on supremacy. What looks like a gradual displacement of religion by science at the level of particular beliefs conceals a transition from one form of religion to another. © 2004 by Constantin Fasolt 4 Third, the received wisdom offers a false explanation for the decline of religion. It maintains that religion fell under the onslaught of enemies of faith. It views the history of religion in terms of a battle between opposing parties. On one side are those who have religious faith, and on the other those who rest their case on reason.