I’ve been a deacon, church school director, lay preacher and served on almost every committee of my Church. I give what I can out of my material resources. I also use this giving as a tax deduction. Hey! I’m not stupid! Yet it would not matter to me whether there was a tax break or not. As Jesus said, “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” This simultaneously declared that the State was about material matters and religion was about spiritual matters, and that we were not supposed to be overly concerned about the material matters.
To give to the Church for a tax deduction from the State quite misses the spiritual point. So would expecting any material aid from the State, whether or not of a “nondiscriminatory” nature as supported by Levin in his chapter “On Faith and the Founding.” Because of this there are a few things I find offensive about people complaining about the “wall of separation” between Church and State. The first is that I don’t need no stinkin’ aid from the State, nondiscriminatory or not, to pursue my faith, my personal relationship with Christ. Alleging that I might even want that does not understand what the Early Church and the foundation of Christianity is all about.
The counter to that argument from a devoted Christian, not lost on Mark Levin, would be that the “wall of separation” means that the State turns it back on Natural Law, morality and faith, which is not what the Founders intended according to Levin. First, I’m not so sure the Founders did not have a similar view as me (or Christ for that matter) on the separation of Church and State. But even if they did the State MUST concern itself with material matters, particularly in a culture were private property and liberty are lumped together as Natural Law. If a “wall of separation” is torn down between Church and State then those material matters invariably infect the Church.
For example, any “nondiscriminatory aid” to religion provided by the State will have the same effect as State aid provided to businesses. The State invariably concentrates resources, and to the extent that the material State involves itself with aiding either business or religion those resources will be concentrated to the advantage of the big boys. When the big boys are favored in a society, whether businesses or churches, you have paternalism, not liberty. Megachurches might love this development, but to the detriment of anything that remotely resembles the structure of the Early Churches. Putting up a “wall of separation” levels the playing field between megachurch (Catholic, Evangelical or otherwise) and Early Church disciples, and helps insure that the devotion to these churches is purely spiritual, purely a moral/altruistic pursuit. More to the contradiction of Levin’s thesis, putting up a “wall of separation” induces greater grassroots religious autonomy that characterizes the smaller churches patterned after the Early Churches. I agree with Levin that the Founders knew what they were doing, but add that fostering decentralized worship was part of their vision.
Perhaps Levin feels that without an allegiance between Church and State that a “wall of separation” hinders, a nation turns to chaos. That would be an entirely consistent Conservative theme. In the traditional Conservative view societies of humans, no matter how small, cannot be trusted to stumble upon moral truths or behaviors on their own. Paternal orders established by elites are needed to maintain moral stability and order, and to bind a nation to the “Natural Law” that justifies paternalism. I disagree with this, of course, but would not fault Levin for misinforming his readers, as long as he also titled his book Stability and Chaos, instead of the misinformed Liberty and Tyranny.
Here is previous background material.
An overview of misinformation principles
A basic understanding of free markets
