Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[Angrboda]

I would argue that any society has the right as a society to choose how to govern itself, whether this be a theocracy, a monarchy, a communist state or a democracy.


But on the separation of church and state, I think there are definite problems of ethical consistency in people in the U.S. wanting to mix religion and politics, and there may be good reason to believe that it is actually in their best interest not to do so. I haven't double-checked the numbers, but in a table I read in a book last year, it indicated that church membership in the U.S. had risen from 15-20% at the time of its founding to the high numbers of religious Americans today. Some argue that freedom of religion is actually the cause of the high degree of religion in America. And I think a decent argument can be made as to why this is the case. In any society in which a specific opinion is enshrined as law, whether it be a religious opinion, or a philosophical opinion, or a political opinion, the result is that dissenting or differing opinions are suppressed and suffer. While this may increase the effective power of those who subscribe to the official opinion, it has the overall effect of reducing diversity in the community. As with free speech, when opinions are arbitrarily suppressed, the quality of dialogue and debate in the community suffers; and that diversity is likely any community's greatest strength. In biological evolution, a reduction in diversity reduces the species' chance of survival. In reducing diversity in a society, you reduce its strength because those who would participate in the dialogue in a different voice, will choose not to participate, and those other voices will not thrive, and many will simply die out. So I think it's very likely that when you reduce religious choice to one official religion, all religion suffers. Oddly enough, a strong and well enforced separation of church and state may be religion's best friend, rather than the enemy that religious people often think of it as.

(I know that as a Taoist and Hindu, if a Christian theocracy obtained in the U.S., my ability to openly practice as a Hindu would be suppressed, and bonding and supporting fellow Hindus in community would be difficult if not impossible. Christianity might be strengthened, but the Hindu elements of our society would be greatly weakened and crippled. I suppose in terms of a metaphor, it is substituting the great strength of the fasces for the inferior strength of a single, thick branch.)