Constantine and George II.

It is good practice, from time to time, to step back from the trees and take a good look at the forest. Too close attention to arboreal diversity can cloud one's vision of the larger picture.

As an erstwhile history teacher who has been involved professionally with such matters for over forty years (twenty-five of them as the writer of this column), I can say without fear of contradiction that running through the entire span and breadth of human history are themes involving the complex relations between government and religion, between coercive power on the one hand and belief and practice regarding important issues on the other.

As constitutional lawyer Leo Pfeifer once put it, history is filled with governments using religions as engines of their purposes and religions using governments as engines of their purposes. One might add that history is also filled with cases of symbiotic relationships between religions and governments.

All this was pointed out nicely by historian Paula Fredriksen in her lengthy review of H. A. Drake's new book, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance, in the June 18, 2001, New Republic. Fredriksen argues that Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and then made Christianity the state religion early in the fourth century as part of an effort to deal with political problems. What happened next, she writes:

   The bishops were too powerful to be mere pawns in an imperial game. They
   had a program of their own. Constantine's initiatives [interesting choice
   of words] served only to enhance their power. Constantine wanted to use the
   bishops as one foundation of his empire-wide coalition of moderates, but
   the bishops wanted to use him. They wanted him, first of all, to settle
   issues of internal cohesion. That is, they wanted the emperor to enforce
   party discipline. Thus the very first victims of the new Christian
   government were other Christians--in the view of the bishops, "false"
   Christians, or heretics.

The reign of one of Constantine's successors, Julian, proved, Fredriksen goes on, "what the orthodox themselves had always maintained: that tolerance and Christianity--`true,' orthodox Christianity--were incompatible." After Julian's death, Fredriksen writes:

   The orthodox bishops roared back with a vengeance. Unconflictedly
   re-embracing power, they likewise embraced coercion: tolerance, as they saw
   it, was a creed for losers. ... State and church were now on the same
   page.... And the rest, as they say, is history.

While historical analogies are never exact, one does note something distinctly Constantinian about the administration of the current court-appointed occupant of the White House. He has chosen an attorney general with a Constantinian vision of government employing "religion as an engine of civil policy" --something Bill of Rights architect James Madison warned against in his 1785 "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." George W. Bush favors privatizing tax-supported education to sectarian instititutions. He leans strongly toward imposing on all women the male-dominance-motivated theology of "personhood at conception" espoused by the conservative core of his electoral power base. He apparently plans to stack the federal courts with conservatives unfriendly to civil liberties and church-state separation. His solicitor general, Ted Olsen, who argued the Supreme Court case that handed Bush the presidency, has asked the Court to review and reverse a lower federal court ruling against school vouchers in Ohio.

Finally, in as cynical a move as any dreamed up by Constantine, George II is pushing hard to have government (as I pointed out this past May in the New York Times and elsewhere) force Christians, Jews, and Muslims, through taxes, to pay for what their faiths require them to do voluntarily. As I've often pointed out, Bush's religion-based initiatives would create a growing proliferation of unregulated, unaccountable charities of uncertain efficacy competing for scraps of a shrinking public pie and would wreck the First Amendment principle of separation of church and state.

The above references to Bush administration activities since January comprise only a small part of the picture. The Supreme Court in June gave a green light to fundamentalist proselytizing of elementary school students in their schools immediately after classes end. The conservative U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in June denied Maryland the right to reject tax aid for a pervasively sectarian college. Other church-state news items, both domestic and foreign, are too numerous even to summarize.

To return to our original theme, church-state or religion-government issues have created and continue to create headaches in virtually every country on the globe. Invariably, individuals and religious (and other) minorities suffer to varying degrees when the coercive power of government meddles with religion. All this confirms the wisdom of the United States' founders in inventing the principle of separation of church and state--a principle that benefits individuals, minorities, pluralities, and majorities.

George II and other politicans here and abroad need to be reminded regularly of Benjamin Franklin's wisdom when he wrote: "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not choose to do so, so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, `tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association and executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty. His latest book is Six Stories and Seventy Poems (2001).