Americans talk regularly about the need to separate religion from government. This is in the nation’s DNA, and harkens back to the Enlightenment roots fundamental to the thinking of the founders of the country. Thomas Jefferson famously featured three portraits on thee wall of his study at Monticello: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. The Enlightenment was a 17th and 18th-century movement away from religion and toward rationalism and reason.
There was good reason to support this movement at the time. Western Europe (the intellectual home of the American Founding Fathers) had experienced a century of religious wars that robbed the nations of their sons and their treasuries. The Enlightenment suggested that it was not the business of government to answer questions that were unanswerable this side of the grave. I’m simplifying the story here, but the First Amendment to the Constitution of 1787 affirmed the idea that religion and government should not mix.
I’m thinking about this today because of the growing violence in the West Bank and Gaza, as the forces of the Palestinians and Israelis clash and threaten to involve the entire region of the Middle East. This is, at heart, a problem of the combination of church and state. Israel was founded in 1948 as an intentionally Jewish state, as the Holocaust seemed to prove that Jews would not be safe in any country that they did not govern.
The problem, of course, was that non-Jewish people were already living in the area given to Israeli – a combination of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who had lived their for centuries. This map illustrates that history.
The day after the official creation of the State of Israel, displaced Palestinians (mostly Muslim but including some Christian residents of the area) launched an immediate attack on the new state. In succeeding years – 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, and 2023 – war continued, as the region struggled to accommodate two seemingly opposite goals – security for the Jews of Israel and freedom for the non-Jewish residents.
Religion provides the basis for this continuous division. Three major world religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – claim a connection to the area and to Jerusalem specifically. All three faiths are Abrahamic, in that they all descend from Abraham and claim that their faith is the one true faith and thus deserves preferential treatment in decisions about this land.
The resolution of the enduring conflict in Israel focuses on two options – either a two-state solution, in which Jews and Arabs each get their own state, or a one-state solution, in which Jews and Arabs share power in a single state. Both solutions assume a level of good will that isn’t evident in the region, and thus will likely result in continuing conflict.
This is not the only situation in which 20th-century policies attempted to address the connection of religion to government. At the same time that Israel was created by United Nations agreement, another former British colony – India – was granted independence as two separate countries – a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. The partition was violent and bloody, and continuing conflict along the borders has disrupted life on the subcontinent for generations.
These are but two examples of many across the world in which differing belief systems draw governments and people into war, from which no one benefits.
As an aside – British Imperial policy lay at the root of both of these conflict zones. The British Raj controlled the Indian subcontinent for almost 100 years, and Britain was given a mandate to govern the areas previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Someone should write a book about British imperial policy as a source for most of the major problems in the world today. But I digress.
Authoritarians around the world – including the authoritarian wing of today’s Republic Party in the United States – use religion to create loyalty to the government. In the US, this has led to a movement called Christian Nationalism, whose adherents believe that the US was intended to be a Christian country and that public policy should favor the Christian view of reality. The recent events in Gaza and the West Bank have brought forth statements of an even more troubling belief system called Christian Zionism. This essay from a professor of religious studies at Ferrum College provides good information about this phenomenon.
Jefferson and his peers knew from experience that a close connection between church and state was a bad idea. Modern Jews and Arabs in Israel are currently experiencing the disastrous result of a well-meaning policy. Modern Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent have experienced the same type of violence in the past – and Indian Prime Minister Modi is a member of the BJP, a Hindu nationalist political party that prioritizes Hindus and Hinduism in Indian national politics.
As the most powerful nation in the world, the United States has been (and will continue to be) called upon to help resolve crises like this. When American public opinion favors religiously partisan solutions to problems (either at home or abroad) the solutions often generate additional problems.
And the cycle continues.
So true. And I like your digression. That issue has always interested me. I've always believed that Britain made the first mistake in their dealing with boundaries for Israel. Israel made the second mistake in pushing the Palestinians into Gaza, and the Palestinians made the third mistake of having Hamas rule. What a mess. Enlightenment thinking seems entirely too far way for the people of this region.
Amen…