What’s so great about ‘separation of church and state’?

Freedom of expression, universal suffrage, and separation of church and state. Our country prides itself on these foundational principles.

In fact, for many Americans, the document enshrining these principles has become an object of almost religious veneration. The Constitution is no mere legal agreement, but a sacred covenant between people and power, a reminder that no king or cleric can rule over us without our consent.

The church historically has always possessed and asserted its temporal powers. It rebuked kings. It crowned emperors. It waged wars, both literal and spiritual.

But what if I told you that some of these foundational principles themselves are the root cause of the current tyranny you’re facing?

Fathers know best?

Let’s take the separation of church and state, for example. The founding fathers, influenced by the Enlightenment, were pioneers of the democratic republic system, meaning they harbored a strong distaste for the theocratic monarchies that populated the European nations for much of the medieval and early modern eras. They saw the union of throne and altar as a source of corruption and oppression.

Many, though not all, leaned toward a rationalist or deist conception of God, meaning they conceived of God as one who designed the universe but refrained from interfering in human affairs. They admired natural law, not revealed law. They were wary of ecclesial authority, especially when it mingled with politics.

So they did something radical: They stripped the church of temporal power. Their primary aim, we’re sometimes told, was the promotion of religious freedom. But that’s simply not the case. The primary objective was to remove the church’s power in government affairs.

RELATED: Yes, Ken Burns, the founding fathers believed in God — and His ‘divine Providence’

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Domesticating God

For this reason, they saw fit to design a country that domesticated God, keeping Him confined to the church building. The rest of society and the government, in turn, were to be packaged within a professional secularist framework. “God” was not to meddle with the affairs of men. Hence, the separation of church and state.

Except, that’s not what really happened. A separation never really occurred. It was more of a replacement.

Religious vacuum

Sure, the church lost its temporal powers. But something else filled the religious vacuum. Something else always fills the religious vacuum. Remove one orthodoxy, and another takes its place. And that alternative orthodoxy was secular liberalism.

Instead of priests, we have an endless array of “highly qualified” experts and bureaucrats telling us what the truth is (and inversely what the heresies are). Instead of a bishop crowning a king, we have TV stations announcing the results of our newly elected leaders. Instead of trusting God, we trust “science.”

And then we wonder why we’ve gone so astray. We ask ourselves why we’ve lost all sense of tradition and God. Why does it feel like morality is made up on the spot? Why do our traditionally Christian institutions seem powerless to resist the tides of culture?

It’s because, from the beginning, we accepted the premise that God should not interfere with the affairs of men.

Head and body

I’m aware I speak harshly. But I’m also speaking truly. I grew up believing in the concept of separation of church and state. But the older I get, and the more I peel back the layers of history, the more I realize it was the wrong move. The founding fathers were simply wrong.

Ask yourself what a church is. Is it just a house of worship? No, it’s more than that, right? It’s the body of Christ, after all. So if Christ is head of the church, how is His body serving Him? What action is the body taking? What powers does the body possess? Jesus Christ isn’t just a brain floating in a vat. As head of the church, He has a fully operational and functional body that bends the world to His whim.

The church historically has always possessed and asserted its temporal powers. It rebuked kings. It crowned emperors. It waged wars, both literal and spiritual. It wrestled with the powers of the world, and often won. It has always had real power. It’s only today in our modern society that we believe it belongs nestled away in a hall full of pews.

Secular vision

And yet we are so immersed in secularism that we can barely recognize it as one ideology among others. It is simply “reality,” a reality that distorts our understanding of the past. As Andrew Willard Jones writes in “Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX,”

Our own vision is secular. Even when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal. To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—including religious history—is played. Within this secular vision, religion as a sociological category is often considered inessential to the concept of society itself. In this view, religious societies are, in a sense, accidentally religious: their religion can fade away. Secular societies, for their part, do not seem to have a religion proper to themselves at all, even if some individuals within them are religious.

Imagine you were in the middle of a nasty divorce. Ask yourself, could the church overrule the court? In Revelation 2:14, Jesus reprimands the church of Pergamum for tolerating sexual immorality. What is no-fault divorce except for legalized adultery? Yet today, our churches passively accept it and are unable to demand any kind of legal standing in court. Do we think we’re any different than the church of Pergamum?

Likewise, the state has redefined marriage to include same-sex unions. Where is the separation there? Where was it when the state invaded the church’s sacramental territory?

The truth is that the separation of church and state has never been real. It is an illusion. The state always imposes and enforces a theology, whether it’s Christian or not. Which means that the state is the church. And the church is the state. I would go so far as to say that the church cannot be even classified as the church unless it is the state.

If we want a re-emergence of Christendom, it means the church needs to once again wield state power. There’s no getting around it.