What the "Separation of Church and State" Means and Doesn't Mean

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The ''separation of church and state'' does not mean -- and it can never mean -- separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be ''leaven in the world'' and to ''make disciples of all nations.'' That kind of separation steals the moral content of a society. It's the equivalent of telling a married man that he can't act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won't stay married for long.

I think he [Fr. Richard John Neuhaus] changed the contours of the terms of the debate on church and state in America with that book [The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1984)] in a fundamental way, and he did it in a way that required legal scholars to pay attention. The chief argument reduced to a very brief sentence is that "no establishment" and "free exercise" of religion are not at war with each other. The whole point of not having an established national church, a governmental church, if you will, is to create the free space for the free exercise of religious belief. So the Supreme Court's tendency since 1947 to put "no establishment" and "free exercise" against each other seemed to him fundamentally wrong-headed and a basic misreading of the Constitution. And I think the recent historical scholarship on church-state jurisprudence over the past sixty years has vindicated Richard's prescient analysis.

The separation of church and state does not inevitably lead to, in the memorable words of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the "naked public square." It's when the separation of religion and public life is taken to be exactly the same thing as the separation of church and state that that's the result.

We can have the institutional separation of the state from the Church and her life without having the exclusion of the religion from public life.

But here's the problem: in a culture driven by atheism of whatever sort -- theoretical, practical, high culture, popular culture -- the public square does become naked very quickly unless the Church continues to challenge and say, "No, faith is not the enemy of reason. No, Christianity is not a force for oppression. It is not the restriction of human liberty. It is not the denigration of the power of the mind to explore the world and come to know it."

In fact, the Church proposes, the world is logical, because of the Logos, the Word by whom, through whom, and for whom all things were made. And the Christian faith lifts the mind up to heights that it could not reach by itself and give us the very possibility for coming to understand the world in which we live.

Marcus Grodi:

...It's interesting, when so many people talk about returning the country to the faith of the founding fathers, and there's debates on where they were theologically -- in my perspective, my research, I kind of came to the conclusion that most of our founding fathers were deists at best, and they had no intent to, in any way, have the government establish a religion -- that's what is says in the Constitution -- but almost every one of the founding fathers affirmed the fact that democracy needed religion in the populus.

Paul Schenck:

Yes, what the founding fathers, their position was religious liberty -- freedom of conscience and religious liberty. But it was freedom to worship, not freedom from worship. Not freedom from God; it was freedom to worship God. It was designed to protect an individual's right to worship God and to follow God's will. And so it was never to impose a secular state on its citizens.

Marcus Grodi:

Because that would be the exact opposite of what they intended, because, as I said, Jefferson and Adams both, to their dying day, were probably deists, yet affirmed that they saw that religion was necessary in this Republic.

Paul Schenck:

And in that respect, they hailed back, they were echoing, among others, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the concept, and I think this is another distinguishing mark in the Catholic perspective, is that God created nature, created the world, the universe, the way the whole world operates and moves. Now that nature has been injured, damaged by sin, by human sin, that nature has been injured and damaged, but it is not evil in and of itself. Nature is not evil. Grace builds upon nature, perfects it, improves it. There's a transformation that takes place as God brings about graces in our lives. Then we are conformed more perfectly to nature. And the founding fathers believed this. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote it into the Declaration of Independence. He referred to nature and nature's God. He was hailing back to St. Thomas Aquinas.