Separation of Church and State?

by Murray Adamthwaite

“Separation of Church and State” remains the slogan and watchword for many professing Christians as they consider the challenge of a political process increasingly dominated by non-Christian and even anti-Christian policies and legislation. They might wring their proverbial hands, but still trot out the standard cliché when someone expresses support for a Christian candidate at election time, or a Christian-based party whose platform is to reverse the current trends and return to “traditional values”.

This adage is, of course, the legacy of history, but the idea that the Christian cannot be involved with the state goes back even as far as the early centuries. In the last phases of the Roman Empire, when resistance could have been offered to invading tribes, Christian theologians often discouraged their adherents from working for the state in any capacity, in the view that two were incompatible. The result was that many Christians entered the now popular monastic communes.

Modern Christians may not resort to the monastic life, but in other ways they are in fact making the same mistake in our present world, by using this slogan both to abdicate any Christian public involvement of their own, and refusing support to others who do. Since we face a collapsing culture and civilisation, the future will usher in a new age of barbarism unless a determined resistance is mounted.

In more recent times the slogan derives from the struggles of the Puritan settlers in the early American colonies of the seventeenth century, where they had fled to escape the oppressions of a state-established Church. In particular Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and with him the Baptists among these nonconformist Puritans contended that the state should not interfere in the functioning of the church, further insisting that a state-established institutional church, by coercing the conscience, was detrimental to the operations of both church and state, and that each should function within its own sphere. This proposition was framed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and later came thereby into our Australian Constitution of 1901.

Hence let it be clear, the call for “separation of church and state” is itself of Christian origin, not secular, and has a specific historical meaning. However, in the hands of secularists this wholesome doctrine has been hijacked and thoroughly perverted in the modern world: it has through them come to mean that Christianity has no place in the political process at all, “that religion [i.e. Christianity] should keep out of the public arena”, a notion the Puritan settlers of early America would have disowned with horror. The slogan has to do with the institutional state and the institutional church, not Christian influence in society and government. However, all too many (ill-informed) Christians have duly, and gratefully, received this cliché back from the secular humanist mincing machine, and then paraded it as “the Christian position”.

Should Christians therefore, as Christians, have a presence in public life and the political process, and bring that Christian influence to bear on the issues of the day? Overwhelmingly, I answer in the affirmative, and for the following reasons:

1. The first point must be to ask the question, “Whose world is this?” The Bible makes the answer obvious, “The Earth is the LORD’s, and all it contains” (Psalm 24:1). The same psalm gives the reason, “For He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers”, i.e. it is His first and foremost by right of creation. This means that all men everywhere are called to acknowledge Him as Lord and Master and submit to His authority. Although secularists wish to have God shunted out of His own world in every department of life and endeavour, we must insist that this is not man’s world at all!

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