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e Evangelical Review of eology and Politics
According to Pierre Manent, much of the
history of liberalism has been the attempt to
escape “decisively the power of the singular
religious institution of the Church…”1 Much
like a beat reporter who knows that controversy
arouses the passions and is much more likely
to hit the front page than the fact that society
as a whole is intact, those who tell the story of
church and state oen tell the sordid tale of
crusades, inquisitions, and witch trials.2 One
1 Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism,
Translated by Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, Princeton
University Press,1995), 114.
2 Leo Strauss framed the discussion of church and state
as a problem. e majority of literature on the subject
works from this perception. is perception of the
interaction of church and state as problematic focuses on
certain correlatives such as civil strife, irrationality, close-
mindedness, and oppression.
result of this has been a push towards strict
separation of religion and state. Whereas
depicting the interaction of church and state as
a problem directs the focus towards division,
power plays, and irrational beliefs, it equally
directs it away from religion’s ability to unify,
encourage charity, demand justice, and provide
hope. It is very rare indeed that one hears the
positive accounts of religion’s interaction with
the state. e purpose of this article is to point
out that much of the legal landscape perceives
religious reasoning as divisive and dangerous.
Further, I propose to show that this need not be
the case. Religious reasoning can be understood
to unify and promote peace. Finally, this article
will show that abandoning religious reasoning
for secular reasoning does not necessarily result
e Principle of Civil Strife
and the Exclusion of Religious Reasoning
from the Public Square
Shannon Holzer
KEY WORDS
| Philosophy | Philosophy of Religion| Philosophy of Law | Religion and Politics |
| Religious Epistemology | Legal Philosophy | Religious Persecution | Ethics |
ABSTRACT
It has been argued that citizens should use restraint in using certain types of reasoning while operating in the
public square. Specically, religious reasoning has been singled out as one that should not be used for the creation
of legislation. ough there are a multitude of reasons for this, one rationale that is oen cited is the claim that
religion is divisive and dangerous. is assumption has become engrained in the legal community, and it has for
the most part gone unchallenged. is article argues that religious reasoning is not always divisive and dangerous.
It oen promotes peace and unity. Moreover, secular reasoning does not always lead to peace, and it has in fact
lead to some of the most heinous violations of human rights in history. Furthermore, to use the avoidance of
potential division and civil strife to exclude certain types of public reason as a guiding principle is too broad. e
principle, if applied universally, would exclude not only religious reasons, but it would also exclude historical,
scientic, and legal reasoning. us, it would be wise to allow religious reasoning just as the other sources of
justication are allowed until certain claims show themselves to be false or in violation of others’ rights. is is
asking for no more than what other sources of justication are aorded.
Vol. 3, 2015, page A1-10
INTRODUCTION
The Evangelical Review of Theology and Politics
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e Evangelical Review of eology and Politics Volume 3, 2015
in unity and peace. e same conicts of which
religious reasoning is accused are present and
oen worse with secular reasoning.
THE COURTS’ PERCEPTION
OF RELIGION
Several court decisions and dissents reveal
how engrained the perception of religion as a
divisive force has become entrenched in the
minds of many in the legal community. is
understanding is not new. In 1943 Justice
Frankfurter’s dissented in West Virginia State
Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette by writing:
e great leaders of the American
Revolution were determined to remove
political support from every religious
establishment. ey put on an equality the
dierent religious sects — Episcopalians,
Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists,
Methodists, Quakers, Huguenots —
which, as dissenters, had been under
the heel of the various orthodoxies that
prevailed in dierent colonies. So far as
the state was concerned, there was to be
neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy. And
so Jeerson and those who followed him
wrote guaranties of religious freedom into
our constitutions. Religious minorities,
as well as religious majorities, were to be
equal in the eyes of the political state. But
Jeerson and the others also knew that
minorities may disrupt society. It never
would have occurred to them to write
into the Constitution the subordination
of the general civil authority of the state to
sectarian scruples.3
For Frankfurter where there is disagreement
between religion and state laws the state wins;
lest there be civil unrest.
One year later, in the case Prince v.
Massachusetts, Justice Murphy expressed his
perception of religion in his dissent by writing:
3 West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S.
624 (1943), 653.
No chapter in human history has been
so largely written in terms of persecution
and intolerance as the one dealing with
religious freedom. From ancient times
to the present day, the ingenuity of man
has known no limits in its ability to forge
weapons of oppression for use against
those who dare to express or practice
unorthodox religious beliefs.4
According to James Hitchcock, starting with
Everson v. Board of Education the courts
“adopted a consistent view that religious strife
was a danger to the nation and needed to be
controlled.”5 In delivering the Court’s opinion
over state funded transportation of children to
Catholic schools Justice Black wrote:
A large proportion of the early settlers of this
country came here from Europe to escape
the bondage of laws which compelled them
to support and attend government favored
churches. e centuries immediately
before and contemporaneous with the
colonization of America had been lled
with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions,
generated in large part by established sects
determined to maintain their absolute
political and religious supremacy. With the
power of government supporting them, at
various times and places, Catholics had
persecuted Protestants, Protestants had
persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had
persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics
of one shade of belief had persecuted
Catholics of another shade of belief, and all
of these had from time to time persecuted
Jews. In eorts to force loyalty to whatever
religious group happened to be on top
and in league with the government of a
particular time and place, men and women
had been ned, cast in jail, cruelly tortured,
and killed. Among the oenses for which
these punishments had been inicted were
such things as speaking disrespectfully
of the views of ministers of government-
4 Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944), 175-176.
5 James Hitchcock, e Supreme Court and Religion in
American Life, Volume II: From “Higher Law” to “Sectarian
Scruples” (Princeton, Princeton University Press 2004), 49.
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established churches, nonattendance at
those churches, expressions of non-belief
in their doctrines, and failure to pay taxes
and tithes to support them.6
Justice Black’s Old World history is nightmarish
to say the least. If one perceives the history
of church and state in this fashion, one would
conclude that the solution or prevention of such
atrocities would be strict separation. Black goes
on to suggest that the very same horric events
caused by religion came to America with the
colonists. Black writes:
ese practices of the old world were
transplanted to and began to thrive in
the soil of the new America. e very
charters granted by the English Crown to
the individuals and companies designated
to make the laws which would control
the destinies of the colonials authorized
these individuals and companies to
erect religious establishments which
all, whether believers or non-believers,
would be required to support and
attend. An exercise of this authority was
accompanied by a repetition of many of
the old world practices and persecutions.
Catholics found themselves hounded and
proscribed because of their faith; Quakers
who followed their conscience went to
jail; Baptists were peculiarly obnoxious to
certain dominant Protestant sects; men
and women of varied faiths who happened
to be in a minority in a particular locality
were persecuted because they steadfastly
persisted in worshipping God only as
their own consciences dictated. And all
of these dissenters were compelled to pay
tithes and taxes to support government-
sponsored churches whose ministers
preached inammatory sermons designed
to strengthen and consolidate the
established faith by generating a burning
hatred against dissenters. ese practices
became so commonplace as to shock the
freedom-loving colonials into a feeling
of abhorrence. e imposition of taxes to
6 Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing TP., 330 U.S. 1
(1947), 5-6.
pay ministers’ salaries and to build and
maintain churches and church property
aroused their indignation. It was these
feelings which found expression in the
First Amendment. No one locality and no
one group throughout the Colonies can
rightly be given entire credit for having
aroused the sentiment that culminated in
adoption of the Bill of Rights’ provisions
embracing religious liberty.7
is strong language continued to inuence
cases that specically reached for strict
separation.
e Supreme Court utilized the ideas
of separation from Everson v. the Board of
Education in McCollum v. Maryland. e Court’s
majority believed that the “commingling of
sectarian with secular instruction in the public
schools”8 violates the Establishment Clause.
Justice Frankfurter delivered and partially
justied the opinion on the grounds of religious
divisiveness.
e preservation of the community from
divisive conicts, of Government from
irreconcilable pressures by religious
groups, of religion from censorship
and coercion however subtly exercised,
requires strict connement of the State to
instruction other than religious, leaving
to the individual’s church and home,
indoctrination in the faith of his choice.9
Given this perception of religion as dangerous,
it is no wonder the courts have steered towards
separation.
is perceptual starting point has driven
much of the debate over the use of religious
reasoning in the public square. Is it possible
that religious reasoning may have an acceptable
place in a liberal democracy? e goal of the
following section is to show that the current
7 Ibid., 6.
8 McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948).
9 Ibid
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legal culture does not have to perceive religious
reason as divisive and potentially dangerous.
us, if one wants to relegate it to the private
sphere, she must justify doing so for dierent
reasons.
RELIGIOUS REASON
AS UNIFYING
I pointed out that many scholars and federal
court judges enter into the discussion of
church state relations from the schema of the
theologico-political problem. One problem
that federal courts assume is that religion is
divisive. Divisiveness is not unique to religious
reason; thus, unless restraint is placed on all
divisive sources of justication, to do so only in
religious cases may be unreasonable. is is not
intended to deny that divisions do arise with
religious reasoning. However, this is intended
to show that historically religion has shown the
ability to unify people; and when this is taken
into account, it has a mitigating aect. I am
making the modest claim that religious reason
does not necessarily entail division or danger.
To show this modest claim requires only one
counter example; however, I shall endeavor to
provide more than that.
History lessons are replete with examples of
religious wars, inquisitions, and witch hunts.10
However, history is replete with examples of
10 See Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How
Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts,
and the End of Slavery (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 2003), and God’s Battalions: e Case for the Crusades
(New York, Harper One, 2009). Stark uses these two works
to challenge the portrayal of Religious history (particularly
Christian history) in a negative light. Stark writes the
following about the crusades:
“e thrust of the preceding chapters can be summarized
very briey. e Crusades were not unprovoked. ey
were not the rst round of European colonialism.
ey were not conducted for land, loot, or converts.
e crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the
cultivated Muslims. ey sincerely believed that they
served in God’s battalions.” 248.
brotherhood and charity that have been the
result of religious reasoning and practice. By
focusing on one aspect that is correlated with
religious thought, the courts ignore the greater
picture of theologico-political relations.
On the evening of December 24th, 1914
British troops heard singing from the trenches
on the opposing side of the battleeld of the
western front. ough the lyrics were in
German, the British soldiers recognized the
song as Silent Night. British soldiers joined in
with their enemies from across the battleeld;
thus, the Christmas Truce had begun. One of
the British troops described the onset of the
peace thusly:
ey nished their carol and we thought
that we ought to retaliate in some way,
so we sang ‘e rst Noël’, and when we
nished that they all began clapping; and
then they struck up another favorite of
theirs, ‘O Tannenbaum’. And so it went on.
First the Germans would sing one of their
carols and then we would sing one of ours,
until when we started up ‘O Come All Ye
Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined
in singing the same hymn to the Latin
words ‘Adeste Fidéles’. And I thought, well,
this was really a most extraordinary thing -
two nations both singing the same carol in
the middle of a war.11
e following morning a German soldier
delivered a Christmas tree to the center of the
battleeld known as “No Man’s Land.” Before
long an impromptu armistice broke out in
celebration of the holiday. is peace came
in the face of charges of treason of those who
participated in it. One German soldier who
participated in this treasonous act of peace said,
“It was a day of peace in war…It is only a pity
11 Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett, e Great War: And the
Shaping of the 20th Century (New York: Penguin Books,
1996) 97.
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Online ISSN: 2053–6763
that it was not a decisive peace.”12
During the short time of peace, the two
sides took the time to bury the dead that littered
No Man’s Land. Single graves were shared by
British and German soldiers while chaplains
from both sides shared in the duty of providing
religious rights for the dead.13 e enemy
combatants celebrated a religious holiday
together, sang songs of praise together, and
mourned and prayed together. e celebrations
also included playing soccer, exchanging gis,
and the sharing of meals. On the British line’s
eastern ank Muslim allies red at a Germans
while they celebrated. Once they learned about
that which was happening in their enemies
trenches, they showed due respect to those
celebrating. In this case, the religious holiday
resulted in a short lived peace even between
those of diering faiths.
On September 11th, 2001, four airliners
were hijacked and used to attack American
civilian and military targets. ese terrorists
were motivated by their religious beliefs. e
hijackers’ actions strengthened many people’s
perception of religion as a divisive and dangerous
practice. is is what the prevailing schema
allowed into their perceptual framework. What
religious critics did not perceive for the most
part has gone unspoken.
Later that evening, both houses of Congress
bowed their heads for a moment of silence. One
of the members, who stood in the front row,
could be seen making the sign of the cross. is
moment of silence by one of the three branches
of government was never denounced as a
misuse of governmental authority that might
have a coercive eect on those who watched
it. Nor did anyone cry out that the practice of
12 Malcolm Brown, Shirley Seaton, Christmas Truce: e
Western Front 1914 (Pan Grand Strategy Series, 1999) I.
13 See Vikram Jayanti, e Christmas Truce (e History
Channel, 2002).
religion was what caused the act of terrorism,
thus, Congress should restrain themselves lest
they resort to the same terroristic type actions.
Instead, it was described as “an act of unity.”14
Immediately following this moment of silence,
the two bipartisan houses began to sing God
Bless America. Whether Congress planned to
do this or whether it was reaction to the trauma
that arguably the most diverse city on the planet
had just experienced, Americans as well as
other nations were unied in calling out for
God’s blessing. Both houses were univocal in
believing that something terribly evil had just
been committed, and even the atheists among
them respected their public display of religiosity.
e Christmas truce and the national appeal
to God on 9/11 are not the only examples
of unity that religion may bring. Religion
unies cultures to cultures and individuals to
individuals. When American law permitted
practice of slavery in the southern states, many
Catholic churches made no distinction between
slave and master. ough in civil society the
black man was perceived as inferior to the white
man, while at mass, there was no segregation
between the two races. According to the
church, all were perceived as equal in the sight
of God.15 Many Catholic churches were unied
with other denominations of Christianity in the
abolitionist movement. eir reasoning was
unequivocally religious.
ere was disagreement between the many
congregations and the pro-slavery southerners
who oen used religious arguments to justify
the slave trade. In the south, many slave
owning Catholics resisted the Church’s ocial
14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izb459vJ-8Q.
15 See John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American
Freedom: A History (New York, W.W. Norton & Company,
2003).
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teachings16 concerning the practice.17 However,
as time passed, the churches became more and
more decidedly abolitionist.18 As a result of their
reasoning, the religionists became more unied
in their belief about the nature of humanity
and the moral nature of the practice of slavery.
Catholics in both the North and South were
unied in their denial of the scientic theory of
polygenesis. is was the belief that the black
man was not merely another race, but instead
a completely other species. John McGreevy
wrote:
One Mississippi bishop specically urged
local Jesuits to criticize the “abominable
idea of the plurality of races,” and Savannah’s
Bishop Augustin Verot, a staunch defender
16 Pope Eugene IV, Sicut Dudum: Against the Enslaving
of Black Natives from the Canary Islands, (1435). http://
www.papalencyclicals.net/Eugene04/eugene04sicut.htm.
At the end of this papal bull, the Pope commands the
following:
“And no less do We order and command all and each of
the faithful of each sex, within the space of een days
of the publication of these letters in the place where they
live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each
person of either sex who were once residents of said
Canary Islands, and made captives since the time of their
capture, and who have been made subject to slavery.
ese people are to be totally and perpetually free, and are
to be let go without the exaction or reception of money.
If this is not done when the een days have passed,
they incur the sentence of excommunication by the act
itself, from which they cannot be absolved, except at the
point of death, even by the Holy See, or by any Spanish
bishop, or by the aforementioned Ferdinand, unless
they have rst given freedom to these captive persons
and restored their goods. We will that like sentence
of excommunication be incurred by one and all who
attempt to capture, sell, or subject to slavery, baptized
residents of the Canary Islands, or those who are freely
seeking Baptism, from which excommunication cannot
be absolved except as was stated above.”
17 See Fr. Joel S. Panzer, “e Popes and Slavery: Setting
the Record Straight,” http://www.cfpeople.org/apologetics/
page51a003.html. Fr. Panzer writes:
“From 1435 to 1890, we have numerous bulls and
encyclicals from several popes written to many bishops
and the whole Christian faithful condemning both
slavery and the slave trade. e very existence of these
many papal teachings during this particular period of
history is a strong indication that from the viewpoint
of the Magisterium, there must have developed a
moral problem of a dierent sort than any previously
encountered.”
18 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 55.
of slavery, later urged the world’s bishops
to denounce theories positing a spurious
“white humanity” and “Negro humanity.”19
It goes without saying that a large portion of
the discussions over slavery included religious
reasoning.
e debate over God’s will and slavery was
not the only consideration that colored the
argument. e Southern economy was bound
up by the practice of slavery. Moreover, the
immediate emancipation of millions of slaves
would ood the south with unemployed and
uneducated citizens. Religious reasoning was
arguing against the strong secular force of
economic necessity. George Marsden writes:
erefore, by the end of the eighteenth
century, with changing views of the rights
of individuals reinforced by revolutionary
ideology, many Americans began to
question the anomaly of slavery. Aer
the Revolution, some churches in both
the North and the South took stands
condemning slavery and slave owning.
However, such stands prevailed only in
areas where the economic and social
reasons for perpetuating slavery were
not strong. Hence, slavery was gradually
eliminated in the North aer the
Revolution. In the upper South, however,
where antislavery sentiment was strong for
a time, both churches and politicians soon
found they would lose their constituencies
if they took a strong stance. In the Deep
South, more economically dependent on
the slavery system, abolitionism never had
a chance.20
When the economic variable was taken out
of the picture, the prophetic voice of religious
reasoning was less likely to be ignored or
relegated to the private sphere.21 e North
19 Ibid.
20 George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture,
2nd ed. (USA, Wadsworth, 2001) 77.
21 In 1854, Senator Mason argued for the silencing of the
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and South’s perceptual experience of religious
reasoning concerning the practice of slavery
became clearer and more univocal as the
economic lens was lied. While racism still
exists in the United States, the predominant
religious and political voices are in unison on
the subject of slavery, that it was immoral and a
stain on American history.
MORALITY AND JUSTICE
As mentioned earlier, scholars and federal court
judges describe the history of church and state
in ways that imply that the inclusion of religious
reasoning with state policy leads to injustice and
atrocities. ough Robert Audi is congenial
to religious reason, he believes that due to
religious wars it is best that religionists apply
restraint when it comes to voting on coercive
policy. I mention Robert Audi specically
because he is a Christian, and that he perceives
issues of church and state largely through the
same schema as many secularists. I intend
to suggest that a schema that broadly paints
religious reasoning as a risk factor for war is
quite possibly a misrepresentation of reality.
First, correlation does not entail causation.22
religious abolitionist movement. He argued:
“…I understand this petition to come from a class who
have put aside their character of citizens. It comes from a
class who style themselves in the petition, ministers of the
Gospel, and not citizens. …Sir, ministers of the Gospel
are unknown to this Government, and God forbid the
day should ever come when they shall be known to it.
e great eort of the American people has been, by
every form of defensive measures, to keep that class away
from the Government; to deny to them any access to it as
a class, or any interference in its proceedings.”
See Senator Mason, “Statement in the Senate, March
14, 1854,” Right of Petition: New England Clergymen
(Washington, D.C.” Buell and Blanchard, 1854), 5.
22 For an excellent discussion of this see Meic Pearse,
e Gods of War: Is Religion the Primary Cause of Violent
Conict? (Nottingham, England: InterVarsity Press), 2007.
Pearse argues that the major causes of war are cultural and
the desire for more land and natural resources. Given that
culture is correlated with religion, these clashes are oen
mistaken for religious wars.
Religious critics Kramnick and Moore reference
the “millions” of people killed in all the religious
wars of Europe.23 It is true, there were wars in
Europe. However, to refer to the wars that took
place throughout the middle ages as “religious
wars” is perhaps a misnomer. Because of the
high level of integration of religion and society
prior to the reformation, it would have been
hard to make a distinction between church and
state. e church was the center of societal
life. It provided not only a place of worship;
the church was also the hub of the social
intercourse.24 It does not necessarily follow
that because state endorsed religion correlated
with state military action the former caused
the latter. Each military action would have to
be addressed independently to determine what
role religious reasoning played in choosing to
engage an enemy nation. is is especially true
of one of the paradigm cases of religious wars,
the Crusades.
With the above said, it should be noted that
the history of European conict is one of nations
ghting nations and empires ghting empires.
e Crusades do not comprise a single war
but are a constellation of conicts over several
decades are not one war. Each Crusade has to be
judged on its own merit. Paul F. Crawford lists
four myths about the Crusades; one of which,
was “e Crusades represented an unprovoked
attack by Western Christians on the Muslim
w o r l d .” 25 In A.D. 638 Jerusalem had been taken
over, and the Byzantine Empire was in constant
defense of its territories. By A.D. 732 Christian
23 Isaak Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, e Godless
Constitution: e Case Against Religious Correctness (New
York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 76.
24 See R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in
the Middle Ages, e Penguin History of the Church, Vol..
2 (London, Penguin Books, 1990).
25 Paul F. Crawford, “Four Myths about the Crusades,”
e Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and
Opinion, Spring (2011), 13-22.
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territories were under threat of invasion by
Muslim expansion. e original motivation
for the Western Christian Empire’s engagement
with the Muslim Empire was not religious; it
was instead defensive in nature. is defensive
war would have been fought by any secular
government without any religious motivation.
However, given that there was such a close link
to the religions of Islam and Christianity to
their respective homelands, it was hard to make
a distinction between the bureaucratic acts of
government and the theocratic identities of the
people. To this day, many Muslims associate
western countries with Christianity despite
attempts to separate religion from politics.26
Regarding wars stemming from the
Protestant Reformation, the religious
motivations may have been overstated. William
T. Cavanaugh writes:
For the main instigators of the carnage,
doctrinal loyalties were at best secondary
to their stake in the rise or defeat of the
centralized State. Both Huguenot and
Catholic noble factions plotted for control
of the monarchy. e Queen Mother
Catherine de Medici, for her part, attempted
to bring both factions under the sway of the
crown. At the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561,
Catherine proposed bringing Calvinist and
Catholic together under a State-controlled
Church modeled on Elizabeth’s Church
of England. Catherine had no particular
theological scruples and was therefore
stunned to nd that both Catholic and
Calvinist ecclesiologies prevented such
an arrangement. Eventually Catherine
decided that statecra was more satisfying
than theology, and, convinced that the
Huguenot nobility were gaining too much
inuence over the king, she unleashed
the infamous 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day
massacre of thousands of Protestants. Aer
years of playing Protestant and Catholic
26 “Justice and Peace: Because Broken Promises Fueled
Islamic Militancy, the Road to Stability must be Paved with
Good Faith; A Conversation with J. Dudley Woodberry,”
Christian History, issue 74, XXI, 2, (2002), 43.
factions o one another, Catherine
nally threw in her lot with the Catholic
Guises. She would attempt to wipe out the
Huguenot leadership and thereby quash
the Huguenot nobility’s inuence over king
and country.
e St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre
was the last time it was easy to sort out
the Catholics from the Protestants in the
French civil wars.27
At least in this case, it seems that secular
interests played a role in causing strife.
SECULAR REASONING
AND WAR
Has secular reasoning minimized the
problems of strife and injustice that comes with
religious reasoning? e answer is no it has not.
ere have been several wars that have been
waged on exclusively secular grounds. e short
essay, e Communist Manifesto, encouraged
revolutions that resulted in the loss of millions
of lives. Georg von Rauch wrote the following
regarding the great communist purge of Russia:
e upheavals were set o by the murder of
a prominent Party member, the Leningrad
Party Secretary, Sergei Mironovich Kirov.
e murder, which occurred on December
1, 1934, started a chain reaction of arrests,
interrogations and executions which found
its climax in the great purge, the Chistka
of 1937-1938. According to conservative
estimates about 7 to 8 million people—
according to others, 23 million—became
victims of this purge.28
While much of the purge had to do with political
enemies, the Soviets targeted the church as
27 William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to
Consume the House: e Wars of Religion and the Rise of
the State,” Modern eology 11:4 October 1995.
28 Georg Von Rauch, A History of Soviet Russian, Trans.
Peter and Annette Jacobsohn, revised ed. (New York,
Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1957), 238.
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Shannon Holzer, ‘The Principle of Civil Strife and
the Exclusion of Religious Reasoning from the Public Square’
© King’s Divinity Press, King’s Evangelical Divinity School
Online ISSN: 2053–6763
well. e communist government killed 28
archbishops and bishops and 6775 priests.
ey also conscated church land, treasures,
and sacred objects. e soviets arrested the
Patriarch and almost all of the surviving
ecclesiastical dignitaries.29
Sixty-seven million Germans embraced
Hitler’s vision to rebuild Germany on the back
of a master race. Hitler’s propaganda tactic was
not religious or intellectual, it was emotional.
Hitler did not want to deliver complex speeches
that could only be understood by the educated.
He believed that by oering both sides of an
argument would result in the ambivalence of
the crowd. According to Randall Bytwerk:
He [Hitler] thought that the average person
is uninterested in complex arguments,
being ruled more by emotion than
intellect. Nazi rhetoric therefore avoided
presenting detailed solution to complex
problems. e eective leader, Hitler
thought, made things seem simple, and
could “make even adversaries far removed
from one another seem to belong to a
single category.” A speaker who attempts
to persuade an audience by a complicated,
developed argument, or by attacking
multiple enemies, is doomed to fail.
A speaker should aim at the lowest
common denominator, speaking so that
everyone in the audience could understand.
“Among a thousand speakers there is
perhaps only a single one who can manage
to speak to locksmiths and university
professors at the same time, in a form
which not only is suitable to the receptivity
29 Ibid., 141-143. Rauch included the following
description of the treatment of religious believers in Soviet
Russia:
“e complete separation of State and Church marked
the beginning of a number of other measures which
thoroughly isolated the life of the Church and excluded
it from public aairs. e clergy were deprived of its civil
rights. Religious instruction of the young was prohibited
in 1921; the Criminal Code of 1926 decreed forced labor
as the punishment for any violation of this prohibition.
e state’s hostile attitude toward religion was clearly
expressed in the new school text books. All religious
literature was banned and parochial schools, seminaries
and monasteries were closed.”
of both parties, but also inuences both
parties with equal eect of actually lashes
them into a wild storm of applause.”30
Yet, while Hitler’s propaganda tactic was
emotional, he used a form of reason that was
common to the general public. Hitler’s public
reasoning was in line with social Darwinism.
In his book From Darwin to Hitler, Richard
Weikart pointed out that while “Darwin was a
typical English liberal, supporting laissez-faire
economics and opposing slavery,”31 the political
demagogue Hitler made use of Darwinism to
convince his citizens that killing millions of
people was justied.32
Beyond justifying acts against public
enemies with Darwinian ideas, Hitler:
…removed some of his [religious]
opposition by falsely accusing churchmen
of treason, the, or sexual malpractices.
Goebbels, the propaganda minister,
insisted that those trials be published in
detail in newspapers, thus parading lurid
details about known ministers, priests, and
nuns. Priests who warned parents against
letting their children become a part of the
Hitler Youth were subject to blackmail.
us Catholic priests, nuns, and church
leaders were arrested on trumped-up
charges, and religious publications were
suppressed.33
30 Randall, L. Bytwerk, “e Magic of the Spoken Word:
e National Socialist Approach to Rhetoric,” Landmark
Speeches of National Socialism, ed. Randall L. Bytwerk
(College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 2.
31 Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary
Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York,
Palegrave Macmillan, 2004) 3.
32 is is not to say that Darwinism is sucient for
Nazism; however, it may be argued that it is a necessary
condition to justify the types of acts committed by the
Nazis against their enemies. By this I mean to say that
the Nazis justied their treatment of Jews, Gypsies, and
the handicapped on grounds that these groups were less
than humans or at least malformed and detrimental to the
advancement of the species.
33 Erwin W. Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross: e Revealing Story of
How the Cross of Christ was used as a Symbol of the Nazi
Agenda (Chicago, Moody Publishers, (1995) 114.
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e Evangelical Review of eology and Politics Volume 3, 2015
Hitler believed that one was a German rst and
a Christian second.34
I used the examples from communism
and German fascism for three reasons. First,
both of the above wars were undergirded by
philosophical assumptions that would pass
as secular reasoning in the eyes of the United
States federal courts.35 Second, these two
examples both shared a commitment to the
silencing of the Religious voice in matters that
conicted with state policy. ird, by widening
one’s perceptual scheme one can see that theistic
reason does not necessitate war and that it may
even be necessary for justice.
It goes without saying that divisiveness and
civil strife should be avoided whenever possible.
However, the principle that requires sources of
belief that cause or result in civil strife should be
separated from statecra proves too much. To
suggest that if the source of one’s political beliefs
may be divisive or dangerous, one should refrain
from using it would cut disciplines such as
history, law, and science out of public discourse.
e truth is that there is not one source of belief
about the most important issues in life and
government that is not potentially divisive and
dangerous. us, the principle of civil strife is
too broad. e answer then may not be in the
exclusion of religious reasoning from the public
square; but instead, it may in the use of all
sources of justication to promote unity, peace,
and well-being. Inasmuch as religious beliefs
can be useful to these ends, there seems to be no
34 See John S. Conway, e Nazi Persecution of the
Churches 1933-45 (London, Weidenfeld &Nicholson,
1968) 15. Conway wrote that Hitler’s intentions were to
rid Germany of Christianity. Hitler stated that “making
peace with the church won’t stop me from stamping out
Christianity in Germany, root and branch. One is either a
Christian or a German. You can’t be both.”
35 is is not to say that public reason leads to communism
or fascism. I am only showing that what counts as public
reason in American federal courts was used in these two
instances of mass violence.
reason to exclude them from the discussion.36
Shannon Holzer
Shannon Holzer received his Ph D. from Baylor
University in Religion, Politics, and Society.
He currently teaches Logic, Philosophy,
and the New Testament at Houston Baptist
University and Ethics at Houston Community
College.
36 See Shannon Holzer and Jonathon Fuqua, “Courting
Epistemology: Legal Scholarship, the Courts, and the
Rationality of Religious Belief,” Oxford Journal of Law and
Religion, Vol. 3, No 2 (2014). In this article my co-author
and I defend the rationality of religious reasoning in the
public square and its role in public reason. Whereas, this
current article shows that religious reasoning should not a
priori be le out of the discussion based on the assumption
that its inclusion will necessarily lead to civil strife.
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