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The Separation of Church and State According to Rick Scarborough
The blog Texas in Africa has a post about the debate between Rick Scarborough and Barry Lynn held this week at the University of Texas. You wonder why Lynn would even bother, but Texas in Africa takes away from the debate an important insight. |
After giving the context and overview of the debate, Texas in Africa writes:
What struck me most about the evening, though, was something Scarborough said towards the end of the debate. In answering one of the audience questions, he said that he thought the separation of church and state is, on a certain level, an impossibility. Noting that the American government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people, he pointed out the difficulty inherent in separating one part of a person's identity from another. "I am the state," Scarborough said, and although he didn't mean it in the Louis XIV sense, I immediately sat up in my seat and thought, "No, you aren't." "I am also the church," he said. And you can't separate me into two parts.
After the debate ended, after the applause subsided, after an angry athiest yelled his question to the crowd, after I waited to get out of the room and had walked halfway across campus back to my car, it hit me why this bothered so much. Scarborough, I think, has bought into the thoroughly American notion of individualism much more than I have. Not that I am not as individualistic and self-centered as the next American; I am. I want to protect my rights and liberties to do as I choose and to make decisions for myself just as much as anyone else in our society does. I am, for better or for worse, an individualistic American.
But I don't carry as much of that ideal into my patriotism or my faith as, apparently, people like Reverend Scarborough do. For I cannot view the church, the bride and body of Christ, as just me. The church is a body of believers who bear one anothers' burdens, laugh and weep together, and love one another as we love ourselves. I am not the church. We are the church.
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The same is true of the state. I teach my students that the beauty of the American democracy is that no one - no matter how rich or powerful or intelligent or beautiful he or she may be - is above the law. No one. Our democracy works because we treat everyone the same, because an individual doesn't get to determine policy and procedure on a whim. Our democracy works because we participate, because we hold our elected officials accountable to the law and to the voters, and because we do our best not to oppress those whose views are not shared by the majority. The state is not me, it is us. The state is not "I, the person." It is "we, the people."
Scarborough's comments last night helped me to better understand the divide our country faces over the church-state issue. In his view, he cannot separate his personal politics from his personal faith. In a sense, I cannot do that either. But I can treat others as I hope they would treat me, were the situation reversed, by not standing by while religious leaders try to recreate the government in their own image. I can insist that government be fair to persons of all religious persuasions (and of none at all), whether they agree with me or not. I can point to Europe, to the corrupting influence that the co-mingling of church and state has on each, to the nearly-dead state churches of so many countries. I can suggest that this is part of what Jesus meant when he taught us to render "unto Ceasar the things which are Ceasar's, and to God what is God's."
Most of all, I can recognize that "we the people" and "we the church" are not one and the same. |
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