Separation Anxiety

Local blogging gadfly and self-professed "centrist" Flash on why you need to vote for Democrat Patty Wetterling:

... religion needs to take a back seat to politics, or the problems we are experiencing will magnify. Besides, isn't there something in the Constitution about separation of church and state, or does the party in power think the Constitution should be cherry picked for political purposes. I'm really beginning to think they believe that.

I think he's got 'em there. Republicans DO believe in cherry-picking the imaginary Constitutional provisions they wish to ignore (those fascists!)

You do have to respect Flash for the honesty with which he expresses ignorance (although it doesn't stop him from jumping to ill-informed conclusions and political endorsements). To reiterate:

isn't there something in the Constitution about separation of church and state

If only there were some sort of easy-to-access information resource where he could actually read the Constitution and know for sure.

Admittedly, the belief in the "separation of church and state" as a foundation of our government is virulent among the populace (especially among those of us with public school backgrounds). But that phrase, indeed that very concept, is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

Its ascendance in the public imagination starts with a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to some Baptists in 1802 and takes off with a 1948 Supreme Court decision concerning the legality of public reimbursement of transportation costs to parents driving their kids to public and parochial schools (side note - how did they ever manage that without a $77 million levy?) and it's been relentlessly shepherded down our throats ever since by the likes of the ACLU and other anti-religious zealots.

This month's edition of Imprimis magazine has an excellent article on the historical foundations and consequences of the belief by Daniel Dreisbach. His conclusion:

The judiciary's reliance on an extra-constitutional metaphor as a substitute for the text of the First Amendment almost inevitably distorts constitutional principles governing church-state relationships. Although the "wall of separation" may felicitously express some aspects of First Amendment law, it seriously misrepresents or obscures others, and has become a source of much mischief in modern church-state jurisprudence.

Speaking of mischief, this from the Star Tribune endorsement of Patty Wetterling:

[Michele Bachmann's] career in the Minnesota Senate was built on the narrowest of agendas, chiefly injecting her religious values into the public sphere. Her recent testimony to a Brooklyn Park congregation that God called her to run for Congress -- and win -- is an embarrassment.

This condemnation of "injecting religious values into the public sphere" would have been considered laughable to most Americans, until quite recently. In fact, that "injection" was considered by most to be a requirement for participation in the public sphere.

How do you get citizens and the government to behave in responsible manner? Prior to the American experiment, you simply relied on the force applied by dictators and you hoped they were in a good mood. But democracies would have to rely on something else, the morality of individuals. And the source of that, fellow citizens? Hold on to your dribble glasses Star Tribune editorial board - religion! Dreisbach writes:

There was a consensus among the founders that religion was indispensable to a system of republican self-government. The challenge the founders confronted was how to nurture personal responsibility and social order in a system of self-government. Tyrants and dictators can use the whip and rod to force people to behave as they desire, but clearly this is incompatible with a self-governing people. In response to this challenge the founders looked to religion (and morality informed by religious faith) to provide the internal moral compass that would prompt citizens to behave in a disciplined manner and thereby promote social order and political stability.

Believing that religion and morality were indispensable to social order and political prosperity, the founders championed religious liberty in order to foster a vibrant religious culture in which a beneficent religious ethos would inform the public ethic and to promote an environment in which religious and moral leaders could speak out boldly, without restraint or inhibition, against corruption and immorality in civic life.

But in this modern age, that earns you nothing more than the sneering derision from the monopoly newspaper in town. We've come a long way, baby.

A question to the gang at the Star Tribune, if not from religion, where should candidates be allowed to get the values they inject into the public sphere? And how about the Star Tribune editorial board and their injection of things into the public sphere every blessed single day. From where do they get their values? My guess - fortune cookies in the Star Tribune cafeteria.