Church and State in America: Toward a Biblically Derived Reformulation of Their Relationship

This article begins with a critique of the orthodox American doctrine calling for the separation of church and state, especially as this doctrine has been formulated by the United States Supreme Court. This doctrine is simplistic, dualistic, and merely jurisdictional; it is also much too narrowly tied to Hobbesian-Lockean liberal prejudices and their asocial vocabularies. The predominant American religious traditions (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish) are all, at core, biblical, and a biblically derived reformulation of American thinking on church-state relationships would differ from the orthodox tradition in three fundamental respects: (1) far from a “separation” of church and state, these would be seen as partners in a shared world of national moral experience; (2) the religious element in this combination, as much as the political, would be understood in broad, social terms, not merely those of “private conscience”; (3) in their shared world, the specific relationships between church and state would be seen in ongoing, dialectical terms rooted in their necessarily conflicting visions of the nation's past, its problems, and its promises.