Things have been pretty hectic, but it is time to get back to discussing the separation of church and state panel. The second speaker was me. As I said before, I was pretty nervous.
The idea behind my talk was to take a philosophical and empirical look at separation of church and state in the United States, framed around the writings on economics of religion by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. That may seem a little heady, but it really wasn’t.
I began by explaining that Smith predicted that participation in religious institutions would likely act like a market, with more government involvement driving down both pluralism and adherence. Examining the veracity of that prediction was the second half of my talk.
The first half began by explaining that Adam Smith was an Enlightenment thinker, out of the Scottish tradition. Smith and David Hume are the names everyone remembers today. Anyway, the United States is right out of Enlightenment thought. Our Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in our constitution are foundational documents that come right out of Enlightenment philosophical thinking.
It is important that Americans consider arguments that come out of Enlightenment principles when looking at an argument for or against something like separation of church and state. It is the philosophical underpinning for our entire political system. You are welcome to reject Enlightenment philosophy, but it takes away a lot of the ground justifying American institutions like the rule of law, separation of powers, and political rights. You might be able to find independent justifications for many parts of the American system of government, but it will be a more circuitous route.
I presented a contemporary approach to Enlightenment political thinking by John Rawls and his Theory of Justice. Rawls died in 2002, but in philosophy that is last week. Anyway, Rawls argued for a role of government as one that provides justice as fairness. Rawls argued that the only government that is valid is one that treats its citizens fairly. The best way to do that, he argued, is through a thought game he called the original position.
To understand this thought game, let’s run it with the question of how a government should approach religion. Picture yourself about to be pushed into a society, but you are going to pass through a veil of ignorance. You don’t know in advance what your religious views will be. You could be a Southern Baptist or a Mormon. An atheist or a Catholic. You could be a man or a woman, a child or an elderly person, rich or poor. You don’t know if you are going to have a religion that is the minority in your community or the majority.
Now, what kind of approach would you want the government of society to take toward religion? I posit that you’d want a society that didn’t play favorites, or pick winners and losers. You’d want a society that lets you practice your faith, without the fear of the government endorsing and promoting another.
The only society that can be ethical with regard to how it treats religion is one that doesn’t pick sides. The best way to do that is to have a strict separation of church and state, much like we have here in the United States. The United States is highly diverse religiously, both within and among sects. The only way it can be fair to everyone is to play favorites with no one.
The second part of my speech looked at the predictions made by Adam Smith. I looked at a variety of published studies on how government involvement in religion affects pluralism and religiosity in modern democratic societies. Smith predicted the more government involvement there was, the less religion a society would have. It turns out this is only half true.
The data does seem to show that religious pluralism is, at least in part, affected by government establishment of religion. This only makes sense. When the government puts forward a state religion, you do get less variety and amount of sects. If, like me, you are someone who believes that having a diverse religious community in a society is a good thing, then you oppose establishment. The second half of the prediction, that religiosity would be affected by government involvement in religion, doesn’t seem to show up in the data. The levels of religious belief seem to be fairly stable.
You get a lot of people talking about the rise of the ‘nones’ or non-affiliated in the United States over the last 15-20 years, but even there you are getting a lot of spiritual-but-not-religious respondents. Those people largely believe in the supernatural. They just don’t associate with a particular church or sect. Non-belief has been on the rise, but it is still only somewhere between about two to six percent, depending on how you ask the question.
There is something in the data that better accounts for religiosity, and that is personal insecurity. Multiple studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between how religious a community is, and how secure people feel, specifically economically secure. Off the top of my head, I can think of two (non-exhaustive) possible explanations for this data. It might be the case that people turn to religious institutions when they feel insecure. In doing so, they bolster their religious beliefs and respond better to surveys about religiosity. Another possible explanation is that appeals to the afterlife offer a balm to allay the psychological distress of dealing with personal insecurity. Religious belief acts as a coping mechanism, and as a modern democratic society becomes more economically equal, there is less need to cope.
I can’t say that I said all of this as clearly in my speech, but I think I managed to get the basic ideas across.
