Religion and politics are not a good mix. As history repeatedly teaches us, combining the two spheres harms religion and endangers politics.
For the most part we, as a nation, have learned these lessons. Our Constitution is deeply committed to protecting religious liberty; we have the absolute right to believe and espouse any religious principles that we choose. Yet, at the same time, we have unwritten social norms that suggest that when we rely too heavily on religion in advancing our political agenda, we improperly transgress the appropriate boundaries between church and state. A political actor may have the absolute right under the First Amendment to assert, for example, that God demands that a particular law should be passed or that people should vote for a certain candidate because she will work to enact God’s agenda. But those who present such views can also be justifiably criticized and discounted for overstepping church-state bounds.
Although few have questioned the first part of this dichotomy — the American commitment to religious freedom — some observers have questioned the second part, asking whether social norms militating against religious involvement in politics should be maintained. Notable thinkers, such as Richard John Neuhaus, among others, have powerfully contended that religion should have a more pronounced role in the public square. Permitting religion to have a greater public voice, they argue, would serve to both benefit religion and to enhance the quality of the public debate.
However, there are significant reasons, many of which transcend traditional liberal/conservative or religious/secular divides, that should make us reluctant to abandon the old norms. Let us consider a few.
A first concern is the harm the two spheres cause to religion. The genesis of the notion that there should be a strong separation between church and state does not come from secular sources. Rather, the idea stems from the works of religious leaders such as Isaac Backus and Roger Williams, who believed that intertwining religion and government would only serve to corrupt religion. As those thinkers saw it, immersing religion into the political realm damages religion by sacrificing its integrity and diluting its purity. Further, as Andy Koppleman has more recently explained, inserting religion into politics also degrades religion because it tempts politicians to use faith as a tool for manipulation rather than as a source of spiritual guidance.
A second reason to be skeptical of mixing politics and religion is that the processes of religion and politics are mutually antithetical. Politics, after all, requires compromise. Religion, in contrast, demands adhesion to tenet. The two do not blend.
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A third concern, and one that explicitly troubled the Framers, is the divisiveness along religious lines that arises when religion is inserted into politics. Although the record is far from perfect, the United States has succeeded remarkably well in avoiding the kinds of religious strife that has plagued other nations, a phenomenon that might be explained, at least in part, by the fact that our politics discourage debate along religious lines. But when political actors assert that members of certain religious groups must support particular positions or candidates simply because of their religious group affiliation, the truce among religions is threatened. “Vote for Candidate X because she is Lutheran,” after all, invites the counter response to vote for Candidate Y because she is Methodist, or even more problematically to vote for candidate Y because she is not Lutheran.
Finally, combining politics and religion is highly combustible. As history has demonstrated time and again, a government that becomes the vehicle for one religion is often not hospitable to the faiths of others. Although our country’s vast religious diversity might prevent any one religion from seizing the mantle of the state for its own benefit, the maintenance of a norm against excessive religious involvement in politics provides further buttress against this risk.
All of this is not to say that religion should never be involved in politics. Nor does it deny the historical reality that at times religion has played a critical and beneficial role in some of our nation’s most important political debates, including those surrounding abolition and civil rights. It does suggest, however, that the presumption that religion should not normally insert itself into politics is beneficial not just to the public square but also to the private sphere of individual faith and belief.
William P. Marshall is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
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