Why Separation of Church and State Has Failed
A Minor Tempest in the NatCon Teapot
This week, I had the opportunity to attend the fourth National Conservatism Conference in downtown DC as a moderator for a panel boldly titled, “The Separation of Church and State Has Failed.” As I told the many folks who came up to thank me after the panel, I can take no credit for either the title or the topic. Indeed, I was not even involved in the selection of speakers—although all were excellent choices for tackling this topic.
Timon Cline led off with “The Case for Renouncing Separation of Church and State,” hammering away at the history of the establishment clause, which as Philip Munoz and others have demonstrated, was intended to protect public religion in the states. Josh Hammer, a conservative Jew, followed with a talk on “The Jewish-Christian Anti-‘Separationism’ Alliance,” excoriating the role of liberal Jewish groups in trying to keep religion out of schools, and arguing that Jews who care about the Bible have nothing to fear from public promotion of Christian norms. In “America Already Has an Established Church,” Joshua Mitchell offered a pithy summary of his claims in American Awakening, outlining the essentially religious character of “woke” ideology as a deformation of Protestant doctrines of depravity and atonement. Finally, Rusty Reno answered the question, “Should Catholics Fear Ending Separation?” with a resounding “No.” You should soon be able to watch all four on NatCon’s YouTube channel.
I’ll have another post next week with some more general thoughts about the conference (along with what will be my regular sections on what I’m reading, what I’m writing, etc.), but I wanted to touch on this issue briefly, because when the NatCon team posted a brief summary of my introductory remarks on X, it became clear that I had poked the proverbial hornets’ nest. Here are those remarks in full, but as they were perforce quite brief, I’ve augmented them with links to more extensive writing I’ve done on these themes:
Welcome to the panel “Separation of Church and State has Failed.” If this is your first NatCon, you’ve probably gathered already that this is a crucial issue for the national conservative alliance and one that sets us apart from any forms of fusionist conservatism that simply accepts the late-20th century privatization of religion. If you’ve been around for longer, you’ll know that this has been a central theme for this movement from the beginning. There are at least three reasons that any serious conservative should reject the current reigning orthodoxy around the First Amendment and religion.
First, it is historically bogus. Conservatives who care about originalism should reckon with the simple fact that it is now a matter of scholarly record that the vast majority of the Founders were not interested in a “wall of separation” between church and state, and even those who were would have been shocked by just how high that wall has since grown, high enough to block out even the rays of natural revelation and civic religion that the most freethinking Founders still took for granted. [For further reading, see my essay, “The Search for a Christian Nation: Christian Nationalism and the American Founding.” See also my reviews of Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding (here) and Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land (here).]
Second, it is at war with reality. It is simply not possible for a polity to consistently divorce law from any religious foundations; another religion will always sneak back in the back door. As Pastor Wilson said this morning, “it’s not a question of whether you have a flag; it’s which flag it will be.” And as Senator Hawley stressed last night, the Christian principles once undergirding our politics have been replaced not with a utopian circle-dance of all faiths singing kumbaya, or a tolerant society of agnostic liberal rationalists, but with an aggressive woke religion being established by law. [For further reading, see my essays, “All Politics is Post-Liberal” (text | video) and “Reimagining a Christian America.”]
Third, by banishing religion to the private sphere and depriving it of any public content, we have reduced religion to nothing more than “sincerely held personal beliefs.” For a couple decades now, conservatives have staked everything in a massive gamble on “religious liberty” law as the best protection of conservative principles. But it is at best a two-edged sword. If we can get out of vaccine requirements by “sincerely held personal religious beliefs,” progressives can play that game too. It only took a few months after Dobbs for plaintiffs in Indiana to challenge a state abortion restriction on the basis of their sincerely held religious commitment to abortion. And an attorney in Texas told me yesterday that progressive NGOs are claiming immunity for smuggling in illegal immigrants on the basis of their newly-discovered religious convictions on the issue. [For further reading, see my essay “Against ‘Religious Liberty’.”]
Religion, then, which used to be the glue which bound society together, is being deployed as a universal solvent, just one more guise of expressive individualism. To reverse this trend, conservatives will have to have the courage to say some unpopular things out loud.
Now, it should go without saying—but alas, it does not—that among the unpopular things we should say out loud, I do NOT include, “We should rescind religious liberty for Hindus, Muslims, or Jews” or “We should have a nationally established church” or even “we should bring back state established churches.” For myself, even as a “RETVRN” ideal I’d be happy with something much more like the informal conscience-protecting Protestant establishment or “Christian institutionalism” of 19th-century America, which Miles Smith has beautifully outlined in his masterful new book Religion and Republic. (Edit: see clarificatory addendum just in case the above be misconstrued in our current environment of radicalized discourse.)
And of course, we are a very long way off from that now, and should resist the LARPing impulse. While I’m certainly in favor of working around the margins to return to an older set of constitutional norms regarding the establishment clause, and re-normalizing Christian symbols and texts in public schools in particular, I think we should proceed with caution on this front. Oren Cass is right that America is becoming increasingly post-Christian, and the generally nutty and irresponsible rhetoric of “Christian nationalism” is only succeeding in further alienating your average American. The problems we have to solve right now as a nation are huge and urgent, and many of them are problems that non-Christians could happily join hands with us in solving (e.g., getting porn out of school classrooms) if we can be rhetorically savvy.
Thus, while I’ve unashamedly linked to many of my earlier pieces defending the ideal of Christian public religion in America, I will note that most of my work going forward will be focused on more practically-attainable near-term cultural and political goals.
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