The Real Separation of Church and State

Going back to the poverty discussion for a moment, I mentioned briefly that those on the political Right see their job as donating to the poor, rather than taxing themselves.  The fact that they are no better at giving to non-religious organizations that might actually do some good, or that they do give to religious organizations that, typically, do not (or rather, their focus is not on poverty but on a slew of issues of which poverty is simply one), is not widely-known in the political Right.  When I was a member of that, I echoed the party line taught to me by parents and priests - we give, and we give generously, so that we might fight poverty without taxes, because taxes are wrong.

Tax is another place where the power of the self/other dichotomy comes into play.  We see tax as taking money directly out of our pockets and using it for things we never agreed to and don't generally benefit from.  It's one thing when our children need tax money to pay for their education, and an entirely different thing when someone else's children need it.

But it's not only that.  Government in the U.S. suffers by virtue of being a nameless, faceless bureaucracy.  It is the ultimate other.  It holds almost unknown power over us in our daily lives, and has the power to take money from our pockets, send us to jail, get us involved in war, and approve things that we don't like. 

Never mind the fact that it's still ours.

That's one conversation that's noticeably missing from the Right, and it was noticeably missing when I was a kid, too.  The government rarely did anything that directly benefited me, it seemed, but the ways that they fought against me were many and varied:

1. They fought against my values, by legalizing abortion, by protecting non-Christian religions I perceived as "evil," by teaching kids about evolution.
2. They fought against my rights, by enacting gun control, by invading my privacy through DHS (sending agents into a home to take a child away from his/her parents), by invading my right to teach my kids (should I have any) whatever I want, raising them as I see fit (evolution, again).
3. They fought against my pocket, by raising taxes on things and making me pay more of my money for government services and less on my own perceived needs.
4. They threatened to turn over our nation to the United Nations and our Social Security system to credit card companies, thereby heralding the Antichrist and the coming destruction of the world.

No, I'm not kidding with that last one.  It deserves a brief aside:

The narrative I heard throughout growing up was that the end of the world could occur AT ANY MOMENT.  Many "Biblical scholars" studied the Book of Revelation, and determined that the Antichrist would come when the nations of Europe banded together and whittled themselves down to just 10 nations.  Some believed that NATO was the fulfillment of that prophesy.  Some further surmised that the "mark of the beast" was not a literal tattoo on the back of the hand and the forehead, but a figurative one brought about by having to have some specific thing to make purchases.  They saw Social Security as a way to threaten that identity by giving a central government control over a person's identity, and when the government proposed to further create a national ID card and maybe make it even tied into your bank account, those of us who had been hearing these kinds of interpretations of prophesy LOST. OUR. S%#$. 

These interpretations of Scripture make the Bible out to be highly-individualistic - an individual, working against the society, can perhaps not prevent the end of the world, but can save himself or herself from that destruction. 

Also never mind that the Book of Revelation can be interpreted in non-individualistic ways, or that it specifically says,

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll. (Revelation 22: 18-19, NIV)

Those points were more for the amateur Biblical Scholar rather than the professionals whose books are vomited out onto the shelves of Christian book stores.

Of course, there is a lot of individualistic Scripture, and that Scripture gets repeated ad nauseam (maybe such nausea is the cause of the linguistic vomiting I just mentioned).  Some of that Scripture:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2, NIV)
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.  (James 4:4, NIV)

"If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you." (John 15:19, NIV)

These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit. (Jude 1:19, NIV)

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 John 2:15-16, NIV)

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. (Ephesians 6:10-13, NIV)

There are many more.  I include this last one especially to illustrate the narrative - the entire world is against you, and you are literally at war for your immortal soul.  You are called on to save as many people as you can from having their own souls tormented in Hell (their blood is on your hands if you don't), but those who die in the fight are just enemy combatants fighting directly for Satan. 

No, I'm not being hyperbolic.  That's literally how we were trained to think.

"The Matrix" was kind of our joyous anthem - a man who is highly individualistic, who realizes this world isn't "real" and that he can fight back against the dark powers, but who finds that to do so he has to brutally slaughter dozens, perhaps hundreds of innocents on the way.  Those innocents are unimportant, as its the individuals at the top of the fight that matter. 

Consider all of our movies, actually... we always act that way.  The hero goes in and shoots and kills every grunt along the way to the big boss at the end, who may or may not die, depending on whether the hero has to bring him to justice.  The deaths along the way didn't matter - they only served the purpose of getting the big guy at the end.

(Is it any wonder, then, that the deaths of Palestinian children are brushed off as being the responsibility of Hamas, not of Israel?  But I digress...)

So, how did I change?  How did I stop seeing the world in these shades and hues?

It all started with a re-framing of power.  I mentioned my thoughts about race and poverty, but perhaps even those were hidden behind this power structure that insisted that any change in my beliefs was an attack by Satan. 

You see, George Bush Jr. was president.  And under his presidency, we passed The Patriot Act.  Never before has a single piece of legislation so clearly embodied the attack upon individual liberty by an unknown and faceless government that I had been taught to expect was coming before the end of the world. 

It was signed into law by a highly-polarizing president who was supported by the political Right and seemed to be fighting against evil.  And yet, it was clearly evil itself.  He was using evil to fight evil - and that didn't seem like a Christian approach to world politics.  (Never mind the war in Iraq - at that time, I believed the war was necessary to take out an evil tyrant.)

Had I not, perhaps, been undergoing changes thanks to education, this legislation might have made me a hardcore libertarian instead of a leftist.  I think it's this legislation and the "religion" I had been indoctrinated into that we have to thank for the rise of the Tea Party.

I have since learned, thanks to all the changes I've undergone, that there is another way to read the Bible.  Yes, there is evil in the world that we have to fight against, but it's a lot harder to tell the difference between good and evil than I had thought.  But one trick I've learned is this: evil abuses its power to inflict suffering on the powerless.

Since then, I've started reading a different narrative into the Bible.

Before Jesus came into the world, and still now after it, the Jews did not expect a savior to come who would establish a Heavenly kingdom rather than an Earthly one.  They expected a man to come who would rebuild an Earthly kingdom and throw off their oppressors (at this time: Rome).  They expected a rebel.  Instead, we got this guy:

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:15-21, NIV)

Christ came into the world not to fight against the political powers, who, he warned, were in power and could use that power against you, as He said,

"The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.  So you must be careful to do everything they tell you."  (Matthew 23:2-3a, NIV)

But instead, He came to teach us not to abuse others ourselves:

"But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."  (Matthew 23:3b-4, NIV)

That is what the Separation of Church and State means.  It means paying taxes.  It means obeying legal authority.  But when you have power yourself, you do not place burdens on others.  You try to set people free from burdens.  At the very least, you don't place burdens on others.

My life became driven by one simple guiding principle: The world has enough suffering already.  I should act in such a way that my actions minimize the suffering I cause and maximize the suffering I relieve.