The Separation of Church and State in a Global Context
The separation of religion and state is one of the unique achievements of modern civilization and has come to be practiced in many different parts of the world. Traditionally, many societies were plagued by religious intolerance and persecution. The evolution of the concept of church and state was a radical and revolutionary idea when it was first introduced. Religion and state continue to be intertwined in some parts of the world today. It is essential to reflect on the separation of religion and state as it has evolved and consider how religion continues to impact political factors in the contemporary world (Taylor 2009). Many aspects of the conflicts that have taken place between Western countries and Islamic countries in recent decades can be explained in terms of the contending views of different societies regarding the role of religion in political affairs. Many nations continue to experience religious intolerance in ways that threaten peace and human rights.
The God-Emperors of Antiquity
The history of religious persecution is as old as human civilization. The earliest known forms of religion are represented by ancient cave paintings that depict animal life in ways that have some religious significance. Discoveries of these kinds indicate that these depictions date as far back as the pre-historic era. The earliest permanent human settlements were established in Mesopotamia nearly 5500 years ago, and it was out of these early settlements that the earliest states developed in Egypt and Babylon. Historically, many states would create state cults that were used to provide legitimacy to the ruler. For example, the ancient Egyptians believed that the pharaohs, or Egyptian monarchs, descended from the sun god Ra. The ancient Roman Empire established a state cult that deified the Roman emperor as a god-like being (Kuznicki 2008). The Hindu caste system was claimed to be ordained by the gods. The Chinese and Japanese emperors were likewise worshiped as gods by the subjects.
Monotheism and the Divine Right of Kings
The advent of monotheistic religions challenged the older polytheistic faiths because monotheistic religions could only allow for one god. Consequently, in societies where monotheistic faiths like Christianity and Islam became the norm, the head of state could no longer be worshipped as a god. Instead, the Christian world developed the idea of the “divine right of kings,” which insisted that the king was the rightful ruler of the realm because the king had received his position of authority from God. Islam developed the idea of “sharia” law, a set of codified social laws used to govern Islamic societies. Christianity dominated Western political culture from when the Roman emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion in the early fourth century A.D./C.E. until the period of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century (McGowan 2012). The 1500-year period between the Christianization of Rome and the rise of secular thought associated with the Enlightenment witnessed many unhappy episodes related to religious intolerance and persecution.
Religious Persecution in the Medieval Period
For example, the Catholic Church was supreme throughout most of Western Europe during the medieval period. The Church controlled the artistic life, spiritual life, education, and much of the politics of the time period (Feldman 2009). The Church frequently engaged in the persecution of dissidents as well. For example, in medieval Europe, religious offenses such as blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and witchcraft were typically regarded as capital offenses for which one could potentially be executed. Many famous historical figures, such as Bruno and Galileo, were subject to religious persecution in their time, and others very narrowly escaped such persecution. Interestingly, when the Protestant Reformation developed, after more than a thousand years of reign by the Catholic Church in Europe, the Protestants often created theocratic states that were just as inclined to engage in religious persecution as their Catholic forbears.
Protestantism and Religious Persecution
For example, the leading Protestant theologian Martin Luther called for the persecution of heretics in the same way that the Catholics had engaged in similar persecutions. Martin Luther himself had very narrowly escaped execution at the hands of the Catholic authorities in Germany. Another leading theologian of early Protestantism, Jean Calvin, oversaw the execution of Michael Servetus, who was burned at the stake as a heretic because he opposed the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity in favor of the “Arian” theological framework, which regarded Jesus as having been a being that God created. In the early seventeenth century, the Thirty Years War took place between Protestants and Catholics in Central Europe for political supremacy. Large numbers of people were killed in the process (McGowan 2012). The war resulted in the Peace of Westphalia, an agreement between contending parties that insisted that the king's religion of each realm would be the religion of the realm.
The English Civil War
Religious persecution continued to take place in other parts of Europe. The Huguenots, a Protestant community, were subjected to massacres in France. The English Civil War involved persistent bloodshed between rival Christian factions attempting to gain political supremacy. The civil war in England influenced the philosopher Thomas Hobbes to call for the establishment of an absolute monarchy that would have the power to impose religious uniformity on those being ruled to prevent wars of religion and the resulting disorder and violence from taking place. Because of the constant religious violence and persecution that took place in the name of religion in Europe, reformers began to emerge that called for religious toleration (Temple 1928). An early proponent of toleration was the Anabaptist movement, which emerged from the Radical Reformation. Because of their advocacy of toleration, the Anabaptists were subjected to persecution by other Christian sects.
Early Advocates of Religious Toleration
Eventually, other religious communities and thinkers emerged, calling for religious toleration. The Quakers were one such Christian community. Baruch Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher who lived in the commercial city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and noted that people of different faiths could peacefully co-exist because of their shared interest in engaging in commercial activity. Spinoza observed that Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side in Amsterdam and refrained from engaging in violence against each other. Because the Netherlands practiced religious toleration, the country’s entire population was sentenced to death en masse and in absentia by the Spanish Inquisition (Kuznicki 2008). John Locke was another English philosopher who sought to address the problem of religious violence and persecution. Locke called for the practice of religious toleration in England, but only among rival Protestant sects as well as Jews.
The Scientific Revolution
Locke believed that Catholics were unworthy of toleration because of their loyalty to the Pope, whom Locke regarded as a tyrant committed to maintaining religious persecution. Locke also opposed tolerance for atheists, whom he claimed would have no moral foundations through which they would be able to refrain from engaging in criminal behavior. However, these early religious communities, philosophers, and experiments in toleration eventually began to form the basis of a broader movement toward religious pluralism. While spearheaded by devout Christians such as Sir Isaac Newton, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century eventually led to the more excellent questioning of established religious dogma by subsequent generations of scientists, philosophers, and theologians. Eventually, many traditional church doctrines came to be criticized, and new religious perspectives that emphasized reason and tolerance emerged (Whitman 2008). Deism was among the most influential of these, and it accepted the existence of a monotheistic Supreme Being but expressed skepticism of miracles and literal interpretations of the Bible.
The Achievement of Separation of Church and State in the Western World
In the late eighteenth century, a series of revolutions took place in the Western world, leading to the eventual separation of church and state. The American Revolution of 1776 led to the eventual establishment of the United States Constitution, which enshrined the concept of religious toleration. The French Revolution of 1789 had the effect of overthrowing France’s traditional Catholic theocracy. Other nations increasingly began to move toward a greater level of religious toleration. England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and others eventually became bastions of religious freedom (Stone 2008). Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, more and more nations began to develop policies of religious toleration.
Of course, there were setbacks in the progression toward separation of church and state. The rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century often involved the large-scale persecution of religious communities. The Soviet Union and other Communist regimes adopted policies of compulsory atheism and frequently engaged in the persecution of religious believers of different faiths. The Nazi regime of Germany engaged in the horrific persecution of Jewish people, which led to the Holocaust (McGowan 2012). However, during the past century, an increasingly more significant number of nations became movements toward greater levels of democracy, and along with democracy came an increased separation of religion and state.
Religious Persecution in the Islamic World
At present, religious persecution and lack of tolerance are most common in Islamic countries. The Western ideal of separation of government and religion has not been as influential in many Islamic nations. While it is undoubtedly true that people of different faiths manage to co-exist in many parts of the Muslim word peacefully, it is regrettably true that religious intolerance is often particularly problematic in Islamic societies. For example, Saudi Arabia is a theocratic regime that allows no other religion than the Wahhabist interpretation of Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabia continues to engage in persecutions for witchcraft, heresy, apostasy, and other religious offenses. Religious violence has plagued many Middle Eastern nations that are predominantly Muslim, and similar violence has also taken place in Muslim countries in South Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa (Esposito 2014).
The Muslim world includes many regions where political reforms that took place in the Western world during the Enlightenment also need to take place in Islamic nations. The violence that currently results in large part from religious intolerance is very costly in terms of human life and the threats that are posed to both political democracy and economic development. It is certainly possible for people of the Islamic faith to practice religious toleration. The Ottoman Empire existed for centuries in a way that allowed significant levels of religious liberty for religious minorities. A core principle of Islam is the concept of the “people of the book,” which teaches that Muslims, Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths should respect each other as children of the one God, Allah (Esposito 2014).
References
Esposito, John L. "Islamic State." The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Feldman, Noah. "Religion and the Earthly City", Social Research, Winter 2009, Vol. 76 Issue 4, pp. 989–1000.
Kuznicki, Jason. "Separation of Church and State." In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, Cato Institute, 2008.
McGowan, Barry, "How to Separate Church & State: A Manual from the Trenches", Hufton Mueller, LLC. (June 2012).
Stone, Geoffrey R., "The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?" UCLA Law Review, 56 (October 2008), 1–26.
Taylor, Charles. "The Polysemy of the Secular", Social Research, Winter 2009, Vol. 76 Issue 4, pp. 1143–66.
Temple, William, Abp. Christianity and the State. London: Macmillan and Co., 1928.
Whitman, James Q. "Separating Church and State: The Atlantic Divide", Historical Reflections, Winter 2008, Vol. 34 Issue 3, pp. 86–104