Rectifying the Border

By Charles Krauthammer

There is probably no question in American life more likely to set off a political rumble than where to locate the line separating church and state. Raise the subject in the middle of an election year and nothing is more certain to inaugurate a festival of hypocrisy. 1984 is no exception.

No one is exactly sure when the most recent church-state debate began, though it is certain that President Reagan's Dallas prayer-breakfast speech and Walter Mondale's vigorous B'nai B'rith counterattack mark the high points of the current cycle. A low point of sorts was reached when Jesse ("God is not finished with me yet") Jackson declared himself dismayed to find Reagan injecting religion into politics. When Jackson, Reverend and aspiring President, was practically running his campaign out of churches earlier this year, the issue seemed less pressing to him.

Jackson is not the only one suddenly to discover the wall separating church and state as soon as Ronald Reagan and his Evangelical friends began climbing over it. Liberal churchmen and politicians, who for years had nothing but praise for the church's role in the civil rights, antiwar and, most recently, antinuclear movements, have become strict First Amendment constructionists now that abortion and school prayer have turned up on someone else's political agenda.

Why one set of concerns and not another? Why nuclear arms, but not abortion? Last week Senator Kennedy, in a speech that marked his official entry into the debate, explained, "Issues like nuclear arms are inherently public in nature ... the church can persuade an individual not to have an abortion; but the church cannot persuade an individual to restrain the nuclear arms race. By its very nature, this is a choice that belongs to the state." So, "to give effect to the moral values of their creed," it is legitimate for churches to influence the state on nuclear weaponry but not on abortion.

But this is perfect nonsense. By Kennedy's logic, the church may legitimately try to influence the state on off-shore drilling, national park policy and collective school prayer (all "inherently public in nature") and not on help for the poor, racial discrimination or even murder (where "the church can persuade the individual"). To argue that the more collective the issue is, the more right the church has to try to influence public policy, is absurd. If anything, the reverse is true. Such attempts to justify a double standard give sophistry a bad name. Why not admit the obvious? That different churches with different conceptions of morality and different social priorities will try to shape the larger society in different ways, and that one should be wary of offering any argument that dismisses a priori one set of concerns as illegitimate and another as not.

Ever since Locke, a general rule of liberal democracy has been to exclude matters of religious ritual, belief and practice from the jurisdiction of the state. But is any law that derives from religious beliefs an imposition of religion on others? It is true that many who want the state to restrict (in some cases ban) abortion or pornography or homosexuality derive then-views from religious teaching; but many who believe that the state should ban, say, racial discrimination derive their views from religious teaching too. Are they illegitimately imposing their religious views on others? Should they, as opposed to those who derive their opposition to discrimination from secular sources, be barred on First Amendment grounds from influencing public policy? It is not where a belief comes from that marks it as "religious" and thus outside the political arena, but what its content is.

There are, of course, lines that should not be crossed. The current church-state brouhaha involves, indeed was largely started by, two especially ill-advised crossings. The first is school prayer, and particularly the President's recent handling of the issue. The constitutional amendment on school prayer is about as close as one can come, in the American political context, to advocating state imposition of religious practice. Proponents deny this. One fig leaf is that school prayer will be voluntary. But in the universe of the eight-year-old, and certainly in his school life, very little is voluntary: not homework, nor discipline, nor even attendance.

(The legal system, for example, hardly recognizes the concept of voluntariness when it comes to children: a pederast who claims his victim had sex with him "voluntarily" effectively forfeits his defense.)

Another fig leaf is that neither the state nor any of its officers, including teachers, are to write the prayer. Well then, how will the toddlers know what to say? It appears there is to be some kind of rotalional system whereby the Catholic will bring in his prayer one day, the Baptist the next, then the Jew, and so on. This is an exercise not in religion but in anthropology. If public prayer means anything, it means the joining together of individuals in common devotion. This ecclesiastical musical chairs, however, both trivializes religion and offends it, by asking children to join in prayer foreign, perhaps contrary, to their own beliefs.

President Reagan not only advocates school prayer, he calls those who oppose him intolerant. One might argue with equal plausibility that on this issue his opponents are more tolerant: after all, a cardinal principle of toleration is thai Ihe practice of religion should be free and uncoerced, a situation that hardly obtains in the third grade. Many who oppose school prayer support a moment of silence as a serious, denominationally neutral alternative. Is William Rusher, the outspoken conservative publisher of National Review, intolerant of religion because he supports a moment of silence? By questioning the religious, indeed the constitutional, bona fides of his opponents, the President has crossed a line: the line that in a pluralist society divides civil discourse from demagoguery.

That transgression is not the only source of the current church-state battle. Archbishop John J. O'Connor of New York tested his side of the frontier when he declared, "I don't see how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion." At which point Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a Catholic, took the unusual and politically courageous step of challenging the Archbishop. (Last week Cuomo followed up with a thoughtful meditation, delivered at Notre Dame, on the tension between religious and public morality.)

Did Ihe Archbishop go loo far? It is, of course, absurd to tell the church to stay out of politics, if politics is defined as that universe of activity in which people collectively decide what the public good is and how to pursue it. The church teaches moral principles and values, and these inevitably spill over into public affairs, sometimes into actual policy, like civil rights and nuclear arms. But political partisanship--choosing sides in elections, endorsing or vetoing candidates--is another matter altogether.

Partisanship involves the allocation of temporal power. If Thomas Jefferson's famous wall of separation means anything, it is that neither church nor state will try to influence the power relations within the other. And not just for the sake of the state, which two centuries ago may have been more in need of protection. The modern Leviathan looks after itself quite nicely. Today and for its own protection the church ought to be circumspect about too close an embrace of political power. It jeopardizes more than certain privileges, like exemption from taxes. It jeopardizes the church's body and soul: when churches are successful at struggles for temporal power they stand to be corrupted; when unsuccessful, they stand to be persecuted. History and prudence dictate that the ecclesiastical authorities should teach, and leave the question of "who governs" to others.

Still, even two border incursions do not make for all-out war. A little perspective is in order. One gets the impression from the swirl of controversy, from the charges and countercharges in the air, that one side is about to banish the Constitution, the other God. Hardly. The battles of the past few weeks amount not to war but to border rectification.

Moreover, the current debate, if not always enlightening, is healthy. Just as there are cycles of public upheaval and quietude on great issues like nuclear weapons, so too with religion. It is natural that Americans should periodically vent their feelings about so powerful, though often subterranean, an influence as religion. And then agree to retire to their respective churches for a little meditation, penance perhaps, until the next round.

As a major campaign issue, the church-state debate may not have long to live. Neither Reagan nor Mondale stands to benefit very much from prolonging its life. Each has already succored his natural constituency--conservative Catholics and Protestants on one side; Jews, liberal Christians, nonbelievers on the other--and will not gain by further antagonizing his adversaries. The President has already begun to back away, and not before bending a knee at the sacred wall of separation.

And for those who fear that the President will resume his religious crusade after the election, the Democratic Senator from New York had words of reassurance. "I do not think that Ronald Reagan wants to establish a state church," reasoned Daniel Moynihan. "It would require him to attend services more often than he is disposed to do." Moynihan was perhaps trying to make sure that charges of hypocrisy in the current debate do not remain lodged exclusively with liberals. His little witticism, however, points up an important fact: in the U.S. one can hardly speak seriously of the idea of established religion. In America it is the rules that are established; reformers, even insurrectionists, challenge no more than the bylaws. No one, not a President nor an Archbishop, is likely to change that. --By Charles Krauthammer