Who Separated Church and State?

Friday, July 1st, 2005

Lee Harris asks Who Separated Church and State?, and answers, only semi-ironically, Jesus:

Imagine going to a Roman citizen circa 33 AD and asking him to explain the dividing line between the Roman state and the Roman religion. He would scratch his head in puzzlement. For the Roman, the state was the church, and the church was the state: the same entity performed both civic functions and religious duties. But if you had gone to Galilee at about the same time, you might have encountered a man who taught another doctrine — a revolutionary one.

This man, Jesus of Nazareth, when asked the question whether it was lawful to pay taxes to support the Roman state, replied: ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.’

The religious community, according to Jesus, must have nothing to do with the state — which is why the Romans with their purely civic religion hated so passionately the religion he founded. These new-fangled atheist Christians, instead of permitting their god to be worshipped along side the normal gods of all other peoples, refused to abide by the rules that governed Rome’s civic religion, which was the rule of tolerance: I accept your gods if you accept ours. But these Christians, like the Jews from whom they came, not only refused to accept other people’s gods along side their own jealous god; they didn’t even think that other peoples’ gods were gods at all. At best, they might be demons — but in every case, what other men called gods were not, in the eyes of the Jews and the Christian, worthy of being worshipped. Their motto was not our god is better than your god, but our god alone is god.

Nothing could have been more politically incorrect to the collective mind of the Romans than this bizarre monotheistic fanaticism. For the placing of a god over and above the state, a god who could not be regulated by the priests appointed by the state, what else could this mean than the establishment of a higher and emphatically separate authority than that provided by the state, namely the church — and, naturally, a church that would operate in complete autonomy from the state, in no way dependent upon the state for its survival.

Leave a Reply