Government is a necessary feature of all complex societies. It must regulate and coordinate a multiplicity of diverse economic, political, public health, cultural, and moral activities...
Government is a necessary feature of all complex societies. It must regulate and coordinate a multiplicity of diverse economic, political, public health, cultural, and moral activities with the goal of coordinating, as best it can, a just, equitable, prosperous, and thriving human population. To understand the complex issue of the relations involving government and religion (traditionally termed those of “church and state”) it is necessary to briefly examine the theory of government itself.
Government is constituted by one group of persons who have institutionalized authority over a larger population, most of whom are termed “citizens.” A common question in political philosophy and philosophy of law involves considering the difference between government and, say, an organized Mafia group who have taken control of a population. Both government and the Mafia group are institutionalized and organized. Both have the power of using force, even lethal force, to coerce obedience to their rules, regulations, and doctrines. Why is one recognized as legitimate government and the other as a criminal enterprise?
The answer has something to do with moral legitimacy. Government claims a moral right to its use of force and coercion that is lacking in criminal organizations. That moral right comes from governments claiming to work on behalf of the common good of all the citizens while also protecting, in some fundamental ways, the rights and dignity of each citizen. Government, therefore, is necessarily a moral concept, leading to the distinction between legitimate governments (those morally justified) and illegitimate governments, such as dictatorships, tyrannies, or oligarchies, that may well be criminal enterprises in which a few use their power over the many to exploit and dominate the many for immoral ends such as unjust power, wealth, etc.
These conclusions are fairly recent in the history of thought about these matters. In much of human civilization going back several millennia, governments were run by regents, emperors, or kings thought to be divinely mandated. Modern democratic theory developed in 17th century writings such as those of Johannes Althusius, Hugo Grotius, or Baruch Spinoza. In their thought, the traditional concept that the king symbolically represents the common good of the population as ordained by God became transformed to the idea that the authority of the ruler arises from the people themselves and is legitimate insofar as the people recognize their rulers and the government as authentically serving their common good.
This view was supplemented in the 18th century by thinkers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant who began formulating theories of individual rights and dignity that were taken to be immune from interference by governmental authority. The authors of the US Constitution were followers of British philosopher John Locke who believed in God-given natural rights known by reason that inhered in human beings prior to society and government (in what he called “the state of nature”). The government, for John Locke, had a limited function. It was created as a “social contract” in which people chose to give up some of their freedoms in order to allow an elected government the authority to protect their property and their natural rights.
Europe was famously torn apart by religious wars during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. At the same time, early modern science was articulating a world system very different from that envisioned by many religious persons in prior centuries. It included a cosmos that ran by itself according to natural laws of motion and energy as summarized by Sir Isaac Newton in his monumental Principia Mathematica of 1687. Newton’s cosmology showed a “mechanical” world in which God’s role appeared to serve only as creator of a gigantic world mechanism that ran by itself according to the laws of motion.
Many founders of the first democracies, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were “Deists,” who understood the role of God in this way. Such influences led the founders of these democracies in France and the United States to posit a strict separation between “church and state.” They wanted citizens to have freedom of religion and not be persecuted by the government for having the wrong religion or for having no religion. They also wanted government to protect the right of people to worship as they pleased without having neighbors of different religions attacking them as heathens or heretics. The first amendment to the US Constitution begins with the words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This tradition of assigning government the task of protecting human rights, including freedom of religion, perhaps culminated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. What are the assumptions behind the UN Declaration? Article 18 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The Declaration claims the rights it enumerates to be “universal.” Where do they come from? God is never mentioned.
Article 1 of the UN Declaration states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The presupposition may be that “reason and conscience” alone discern this list of universal human rights. However, going one step further, the Preamble to the Declaration declares that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Reason and conscience discern dignity. “Dignity” here is usually taken to mean “inviolability,” or having “infinite worth.” Is this an appeal to a religious or spiritual intuition?
My recent book Human Dignity and World Order (2024) explores the meaning of human dignity as referenced by the UN Declaration. It articulates dignity through the work of a number of thinkers who recognize that “infinity” permeates human consciousness and life in multiple ways. It is this that is central to giving us the sense that human life is “inviolable,” that our lives have “infinite worth,” and that human rights are “universal” (as Immanual Kant had already declared in the 18th century). It argues that “infinity” is not a religious dogma but rather a discernable dimension of our human situation that becomes ever clearer with growth in human consciousness across moral, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions. Yet, ultimately, encountering this “infinity” is not merely a result of “argument” or intellectual recognition. We find the overwhelming presence of the depths of the world embracing everything we do, say, or think.
Since the time of Albert Einstein and the development of quantum cosmologies, our understanding of the nature of the world has changed significantly. Deism is no longer accepted by most cosmologists. The world is no longer viewed as a self-propelled machine initiated by a creator God. The world is today understood as an evolving whole in which all things are interrelated and interdependent. The cosmos has produced human beings through an immense evolutionary process that may or may not be understood by an appeal to a God within this process. In either case, humans are no longer separate from the process with a priori “God-given natural rights” but are understood as inseparable from the process as integral to their common humanity as well as the naturally evolving cosmos. This wholeness, again, need not be a mere intellectual paradigm. It can be encountered directly.
Similarly, government is no longer understood as an arbitrary human creation instituted to keep order and protect these a priori natural rights. Sophisticated contemporary philosophy of law (that began as recently as H.L.A. Hart’s 1962 book The Concept of Law) recognizes the multiple ways in which government enhances and empowers the lives of citizens. Government is no longer simply a coercive force over citizens but is a fundamental enabler of their living successful, fulfilling, and worthwhile lives.
Recent philosophers of law such as Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, and John Finnis, transcend the dichotomy between “natural rights” and the creation of government to protect those rights. Individuals can no longer be separated from society in this way. What we are as individuals is in many ways inseparable from society and other persons. Human rights are therefore not an a priori God-given phenomenon but rather socially constituted from our common personhood—which my work, as noted above, argues is permeated with infinity across multiple dimensions.
Does good government, therefore, require an insight into the “infinity” inherent in our human situation that undergirds universal human rights? Some critics have pointed out that there is a danger in the older “natural rights” perspective. By requiring the separation of church and state (in a radical distinction between the sacred and the secular) it appears to relegate religion to being a merely private matter, a merely subjective orientation that people engage in somehow independently of their role as citizens with a public responsibility to participate in civic affairs and governmental responsibilities. However, the new holism, and the overlapping moral dimensions, make this separation impossible.
Take an example. If my religion as a follower of Jesus Christ motivates me to oppose the state’s assumed right to execute convicted criminals, how am I to proceed in the face of the criticism that I have no right to impose my religious beliefs on others. If I am part of government, I may oppose this practice because I believe God (the divine reality) has prohibited this, and it may be that I cannot help but use my governmental authority to try to stop such practices. In such cases, what would my argument be? That the revelation through Jesus Christ declares the immorality of this practice? Similarly, if I appeal to the “infinity” inherent in all human beings that the government has no right to violate, is this an appeal to religion violating the separation of church and state?
Where does the moral dimension of human life come from? Does it require insights that appeal to something other than limited finite facts? It would seem that the concept of the common good of citizens and the inalienable rights of citizens (which are the responsibility of government to foster and respect) involve a moral dimension of life that substantially overlaps with religion, both personal and/or organized. Is the sense of the infinite dignity and worth of the human person even possible without some insight into a depth beyond empirical facts? Is it really possible to separate church and state as clearly as many theorists would like? Is the secular necessarily a denial of the deep mystery of being that confronts our every waking moment?
Yet just as the theory of law and government has evolved from its 17th century origins to the present (as noted above) so the theory of religion has also evolved. All religious dogmas today are relativized by the power of interpretative and linguistic analysis. Those who continue to cling blindly to dogmas are often seen as religiously immature. Similarly, moral theory has evolved since the 17th and 18th centuries when the doctrine of the separation of church and state was first conceived and implemented in such documents as the US Constitution. How do these evolutionary developments bear on the issue of church and state? Religion, morality, and even government can now be assessed on levels of moral, cognitive, and spiritual maturity attained within each of these areas.
Since the 1980s, thinkers such as Lawrence Kohlberg, Ken Wilber, and Clare Graves have developed the theory of moral and spiritual growth through articulating developmental stages in these arenas in some detail. The complexities of developmental theory can be simply summarized in four basic levels. Human beings begin in (and often continue throughout life) an egoistic stage that puts me and my family and community first before all others. Beyond this, they can become socialized to grow into an ethnocentric stage in which I devote myself to my own culture, religion, or nation all the while assuming that these are superior or more “common sense” than those of the rest of humanity. It is on these low levels that much “fundamentalist” religion exists today (whether Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or Islamic). A policy of separation of church and state is necessary here to prevent the imposition of arbitrary dogmas on the body politic (such as the posting of the ten commandments in all classrooms).
Nevertheless, further growth can bring me to the world-centric stage in which I identify with our common humanity and begin to embrace the unity in diversity of the human civilizational project. And, beyond this, I can continue to grow morally, cognitively, and spiritually toward a cosmic-centric level in which I begin to see myself and human life as the product of a cosmic evolution that is fundamentally related to the very essence of that process. The cosmos has become conscious of itself in us. In some of my past writings, I have termed this level of maturity “cosmic humanism.” Cosmic humanism does not deny the mysterium magnum of existence.
The bottom line is that today governments are responsible to foster moral growth in the population because only a mature population with government by mature governmental representatives can protect both the authentic common good and individual human rights. Moral and spiritual growth must be distinguished from dogmatic religion. But the two are not entirely separate, since religions in their highest manifestations through the centuries have always promoted non-dogmatic spiritual growth, the encounter with the whole, with the depths of being.
If government is to govern wisely, it must not embrace a narrow “secularity” (of the state restricting the church) but rather a “cosmic humanism” promoting world-centric and cosmo-centric levels of maturity which truly recognize and ground human dignity and universal human rights. Just as ethnocentric religion must be overcome through growth, so should ethnocentric nationalism. Perhaps there is a universal spiritual maturity beyond dogma that could combine the contributions of the world’s great religions as well as nation-states to the common good. The ultimate manifestation of this growth would also unite humanity under the rule of truly democratic world law, as, for example, under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. 