Chi Alpha @ Stanford

I just fin­ished a fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion of essays com­piled by Os Gui­ness called The Great Exper­i­ment: Faith and Free­dom in Amer­ica. The “Great Exper­i­ment” of the title is Amer­ica itself: a nation with­out prece­dent in its treat­ment of faith.

It made me think deeply. It avoids either of the extreme posi­tions often taken by con­tem­po­rary authors (that the found­ing fathers barely tol­er­ated reli­gion or that they were all Bible-thumping fun­da­men­tal­ists) in favor of a more intel­li­gent view.

The the­sis through­out the book is that faith and free­dom in Amer­ica are code­pen­dent: indi­vid­ual faith requires free­dom, free­dom requires pub­lic moral­ity, pub­lic moral­ity requires wide­spread indi­vid­ual faith.

The found­ing fathers (the major­ity of whom were thought­ful Chris­tians) seemed to think that sep­a­rat­ing the church from the state was a pro­foundly bib­li­cal idea: I have to say that the mes­sage I’ve always taken from 1 Tim­o­thy 2.1–2 is that we need to pray for our rulers to leave us alone (faith-wise). In other words, it seems that sep­a­ra­tion of church and state was God’s idea.

Inter­est­ingly, I was fin­ish­ing this book I came across an arti­cle in Books & Cul­ture about recent schol­ar­ship on this very theme (schol­ar­ship which I ref­er­enced in an ear­lier post­ing)! The arti­cle is titled Why Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State Is Still A Good Idea: Even If It May Not Be What the Founders Had In Mind. I found the arti­cle middling-to-fair, but that’s prob­a­bly because I’d just come from read­ing Guiness.

If you’re curi­ous about the role of reli­gion in America’s pub­lic life, I encour­age you to pick up this book and read through it. You might also want to check out the ear­lier post­ing on an inter­view with Charles Tay­lor about What It Means To Be Sec­u­lar.