[Essay] Auron MacIntyre: You Gotta Serve Somebody
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I'd like to add here, for those who don't know, that this is not a Constitutional concept, although courts and legislatures have sort of incorporated it in an ad hoc manner. Any sensible reading of the First Amendment would conclude that the Government is barred from intruding on religious matters; it does not automatically follow that the religious (or even religious institutions) are barred from civic matters. It is very unlikely that the Bill of Rights was somehow intended to be binding on "church" given that the whole point of the bill of rights was to place restrictions on government actors to the benefit of non-government actors.
"Separation of church and state" has served as a means to exclude people and ideas that are opposed by progressives from the public sphere. No one can explain to me why the moral theories of a Third wave feminists have a place in government but the moral traditions of the Christain West do not.
Moreover, the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" is from a response from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association. One of the Founders was telling the leadership of a radical separatist sect that the government could not influence them, not the other way around.
Jefferson, more than any other founders, was a poster child for Enlightenment thinking. I suspect he would have been happy to see religion and church go the way of the dodo. However, I do think that what set Jefferson and his American colleagues apart from French revolutionaries was their recognition of the danger of the State, particularly one run by the mob. While the French gleefully torn down Chruch and Monarchy and went on a victory lap, the Americans understood that a democracy could suck too. So, while Jefferson probably would have preferred an enlightenment humanist society, he was too smart to think using the state to achieve this goal was a good idea.
Jefferson is a very odd bird with regard to religion. Very devout Deist, he actually came to blows with Paine, because Paine was an annoying
atheisthumanist. Even Madison acknowledged that our form of government requires religious people. "If men were angels..."