During my seminary years, I served at a parish whose founding families had famously been thrown into jail in the early 18th century for refusing to pay taxes to support the local Congregational church, which was—and remained until 1818—the official, established church of Connecticut. This week’s events have reminded me of those early struggles over the relationship between church and state. First came Friday’s decision in which five Catholic justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, then Monday’s decision allowing a public-school football coach to lead players in prayer after games at the fifty yard line, then the Wednesday-morning quote from Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who—speaking at a church service on Sunday—said: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church… I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”
It’s one thing to declare that “the church is supposed to direct the government.” The question is—as it has always been—“Which church?”
You know as well as I do that “The Church” doesn’t agree on much, let alone enough to “direct the government.” Boebert’s own religious views are… idiosyncratic, to say the least. (Only last week, for example, she joked that Jesus “didn’t have enough [AR-15s] to keep his government from killing him.” I’m not one to accuse people of heresy willy-nilly, but… yikes.) If my church directed the government, I imagine Lauren Boebert would hate it. Kids would learn in school that God makes some people queer, and loves them as they are. Coach Kennedy would be out there chanting Evensong after the Big Game. City Hall would be full of stained glass windows, and not one of them would show Jesus holding a gun! And if Lauren Boebert’s church directed the government, I’m thinking I would probably hate it, too. And that’s exactly why the First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion: because in a world in which no church can direct the government, many churches can flourish.
I found it particularly ironic that she made her remarks while speaking at Cornerstone Christian Center, which describes itself somewhat generically as a non-denominational Christian church. Like most non-denominational churches, it’s part of the broad tradition of Baptist and evangelical free churches with little structure or hierarchy beyond the local congregation. In other words: it’s exactly the kind of church that the New England Puritans would’ve banned, back when the church really did “direct the government” in these parts. (If you don’t believe me, just ask Roger Williams!)
We Episcopalians exist in a very funny place regarding the separation of church and state. On the one hand, we’re the close spiritual cousins of the still-established Church of England, whose Supreme Governor is Queen Elizabeth II, whose bishops sit in the House of Lords, and whose Book of Common Prayer can only be amended by an Act of Parliament. On the other hand, we are explicitly not the Church of England — our distinctive church structures of elected vestries and bishops and representative Diocesan and General Conventions originate from the post-Revolutionary effort to find some way of organizing a non-established church in an independent state. While disproportionately represented among the roster of presidents and the 20th-century social elite, we are and have always been a minority religion in America.
The Church of England remains established. But even by the time of the Revolution, it had significantly scaled back its understanding of what its establishment meant. Religious dissent, at first punished, had become tolerated, and this was not a warm-hearted decision to embrace religious pluralism. It was the inevitable result of more than fifty years of civil war and strife, during which the English government was overthrown multiple times in multiple different religious conflicts between different groups of Christians struggle to exert their power over the government. A Puritan Parliament overthrew and executed King Charles I. Episcopalian royalists succeeded in restoring Charles II. A “Glorious Revolution” overthrew his Catholic son James II in favor of the Protestant William and Mary.
Even in a uniformly-Christian country, which ours is not, when “the Church” can’t agree on its own business, it has no business trying to exert its power over the government. And the attempt by one faction of Christians to codify their theology through the law can only end in violence and persecution.
Just go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ask those Baptists what they thought.