Apr 16 2008
The Pope on Positive Secularism
“What I find fascinating about the United States is that they began with a positive concept of secularism. This new people was composed of communities and people who had separated from state churches, and they wanted to have a secular state which would open possibilities for all the confessions and all the forms of religious expression. It was an expressly secular state, and it was directly opposed to a state-church. It was secular precisely out of love of religion, for the authenticity of religion, which could be lived only in freedom. Thus we find a state that’s expressly secular, but favorable to religion in order to give it authenticity.” – Pope Benedict, emphasis mine
I often read or hear people talking about the Separation of Church and State as if it were a way of clamping down on religious expression. I suppose some are ignorant of our history. But sometimes it’s obvious that they willfully ignore evidence that the Framers had no such intent. The Founding Fathers had experienced the European model of governments repressing all but state-approved expressions of religion.
The Pope mentioned the new problems in American secularism. No doubt he’s aware of a tendency for secularists to cite Jefferson’s “wall between Church and State” as evidence that Americans shouldn’t allow their religious beliefs to enter the public square.
To the contrary, Jefferson was reassuring the Danbury Baptists (a religious minority) that their religious liberties were an immutable right. According to their letter, the state of Connecticut granted ”religious privileges” to the Danbury Baptists and ”we enjoy (them) as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.”
Jefferson wrote that ”…I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
He said nothing about Americans being prohibited from acting on their beliefs or following their consciences in the public square.
