Government, politics and religion -- then, now and tomorrow (or maybe next year)

After recently writing about the institution of marriage, it occurs to me to write now about something that should be less controversial, namely the mixture of government, politics and religion.

Yeah, right, like anything these days won't be controversial.

If you had asked me a month ago if this would be a worthy subject for one of these postings, I probably would have replied by saying "It's worthy, but there doesn't seem to be any immediate reason to do so; let's put it on the list for future reference."  Well, the Republican presidential nominating contest has caused the future--or this piece of it--to arrive ahead of schedule.

Specifically, candidate Rick Santorum has recently pronounced--or perhaps he implied, or maybe speculated, or possibly just mused--that he, as President, would intend to link religion and government in America.  It's not clear to me how he would do so, or even if this is going to get amped-up into a major campaign theme.  Other than his reference to personal regurgitation, his remarks in the last few days on this subject seem to be not entirely coherent.  There's a summary of Mr. Santorum's contributions to this conversation on the web site of USA Today, which can be seen by clicking here.  Read it and draw your own conclusions on what he has been trying to communicate, and on the coherence of his message.

My conclusion is this:  Either Mr. Santorum doesn't fully understand the issues that he is talking about, or he has simply been pandering for votes.

If it is the latter--that is, if he was only trying to appeal to a certain segment of the Republican voters in that party's nominating contests--then we let it go at that and hope and expect that the subject doesn't come up again.  All politicians are entitled to pander to voter segments, and most do so at one time or another.  There's no reason to deny that entitlement to Mr. Santorum or any other politician.  The pandering fades into the background as the real business moves forward.  After all, we don't hear much now about Newt Gingrich's remarks on colonizing the Moon as a way of pandering for votes along the Florida "space coast" in advance of that state's primary, do we?

(In full disclosure here, I should mention that I like the ideas of colonizing the Moon, and of exploring Mars and the universe beyond Earth.  But now is not a good time to be talking about these things because the great majority of people in this country have other and more immediate things on their minds as they choose a President.)

If, on the other hand, Mr. Santorum is intending to introduce a new campaign theme, then his remarks so far indicate to me that he has a faulty understanding of the results of a close linkage of religion and government.  So, here are a few related historical factoids to set the stage for any future discussion on this topic.

First, regarding the U.S. Constitution -- it has nothing to say about religion except in the 1st Amendment, which states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . ."  That's all, that's it, there's nothing else there.  Translated into 21st Century American standard English, the 1st Amendment says "America makes no law that will either support or restrict the existence of any religion, and everybody in the country is entitled to participate or to not participate in religious worship."  In other words, we have a secular government.  Individuals participating in the government, or in the governing processes, might or might not embrace religion as a part of their lives, but the government and its processes are secular.

Long before the United States was even a gleam in somebody's eye, religion, politics and government were combined all the time.  In ancient days, most people couldn't imagine any other way to run a country or a city-state or a what-have-you; those who did have an active imagination about such things were typically severely discouraged from engaging in such mental shenanigans by the representatives of the divine powers-that-be.  In the end, such mixing of religion and state usually didn't work out well.  Consider these few examples --

Egypt, c1250BCE -- the Kingdoms of Egypt had been combining religion (Pharaoh, gods, ceremonies, temples) with government (ministers, bureaucrats, military) for at least a couple of thousand years, only to reach a point in time where Pharaoh, et al, had developed a real itch about the monotheistic religion of some undocumented migrant workers ("Israelites") who were resident in Egypt.  The "mono" part of their religion didn't sit well with the god-king Pharoah, who heaped abuses and brutality upon his Israelite slaves.  In retaliation, there followed protracted nasty events, such as plagues and pestilences, that sorely afflicted the Egyptians.  As a result, Pharaoh let those people go, and the Egyptians lost a hard-working labor supply.

Greece and Troy, c1200BCE -- a blind fellow named Homer is famous for chronicling the life and times of the Mycenaean Greek civilization in the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The sightless one surely took literary and poetic license with the facts as he knew them--he lived some five centuries after the events in his stories--but there is plenty of corroborative evidence to establish the reality of the involvement of Zeus, Hera, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Apollo and the full panoply of Greek gods in everyday life, including governing.  Those gods were petty and cruel, and so were their human servants.

Europe, early 1600s -- the Thirty Years' War, an extraordinarily complex conflict of overlapping territorial ambitions, was ignited by the passions of religion that was often incited and sustained by the rulers who harbored those ambitions; it squandered the lives and wealth of a continent.

And, of course, we are all well-acquainted with the failings of the two contemporary bogey-men of religious governments:  the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Taliban of Afghanistan.

It comes down to this:  it doesn't matter one bit what the religion is -- religion and government should be kept separate and apart from each other.  Individually they can be good; but putting them together is setting the stage for a nightmare.