How to: the separation of church and state

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

I do not want state-sponsored religion, because state-sponsored religion destroys religion. And it interferes with what I call, and Pope John Paul II called, the “sacred sanctuary of the soul.” No government has a right to interfere with a person’s relationship with God. That is between them and God and it must be wholly voluntary.

Some of our conservative leaders are falling into a trap of what I call the acknowledgment model. We have basically three models. One is the acknowledgment model where the government acknowledges the majority religion or gives favoritism to the majority religion in a society.

A second model is what I call the avoidance or the secularist model which is that you do not have any religious expression—you try to just completely sanitize the public spaces of any religious expression.

And then you have what I call the [third] model of seeking to accommodate those who are religious, whatever their religion is, and that is a pluralistic model.

It seems to me that those three models are really competing for ascendancy all over the world. In its extreme form, you have the sort of theocratic model like the Iranians where all women have to wear Muslim head coverings. Then you have the French model which is sort of the extreme on the other side that says you cannot wear Muslim head coverings and go to public school. It is, sort of, “the supreme value” of the French state (they have actually said this) is secularism.

Whereas, in America in Muskogee, Oklahoma, (in about as deep in red state country as you can get) they have concluded that Muslim girls may or may not wear their head scarves to school depending on the Muslim girls and their parents’ preference. That is pluralism. Where you have the right to express your faith, I have the right to express my faith, in public places and all the government does is make sure everybody plays fair: that the minority does not get to silence the majority and the majority does not get to silence the minority.

When we start having conservatives talking about having the government promote religion, that is not the government’s job. And I am absolutely convinced that unless Baptists weigh in with their understanding of the church and the state, and the proper relation of the two, that America is not going to get this right.

We are either going to get an aggressively secular state or we are going to get a state, and I think this is less likely, that we will get a state that acknowledges the Christian faith, some version of the Christian faith, some sort of broad version of the Christian faith, at the expense of other faiths.

A majority of Americans (if they are aware of it), a majority of Americans (if they understand it), that’s what they believe. They do not want the government promoting religion. They do not want the government censoring religion and suppressing religion. They want the government to acknowledge and to protect their right to express their values and their beliefs, whatever those beliefs and values are, in the public square.

If I can get enough people to understand this model, we can win the debate with this model. We can’t win the debate with having the government sponsoring Bible reading and prayer and the Christian faith. We cannot win that debate in America. We can win the debate with the model that I’ve proposed.