Part II: A Convert Mulls a Different Kind of Separation of Church and State

This time: the poison of politicized faith.

In my post from last week I talked through my current struggle between what Christians are called to believe and the silence among some Christians about cruelty done in the name of Christianity.

This post is a bit broader, arguing that believers of all stripes should work really hard to protect their religious values from political partisanship. This isn’t the same thing as arguing that your religious values are separable from your political values, which doesn’t make any sense. Rather, if you have deeply held religious or spiritual beliefs you should work hard to not define them in terms of partisan or secular symbols.

I’ll start though by saying that I’m not 100% confident about everything I’m working through below. Precisely because the values and goals of religion and politics are so intermingled, I don’t think there’s a clear line we can point to in terms of what constitutes too much interference.

That being said, I do feel relatively confident that any true religious believer should feel somewhat politically homeless most of the time. That's because religious belief (actually principled belief of any kind) doesn't fit well into any particular partisan bucket or culture war buzzword.

And that's precisely the struggle many of us have right now. As radical moderates, we know that life involves tradeoffs. The puzzle for many religious believers is how to weigh the different tradeoffs in values that our binary political structure creates, particularly in a time of increasingly extreme binary thinking and polarization.

It's precisely because principled religious belief doesn't fit well within our binary partisan boxes that religious believers need to be really careful NOT to politicize their religion for the sake of polarizing political beliefs.

This is something both sides are clearly doing, and both religion and politics are the worse for it.

The Standard Case for Church-State Separation

Most contemporary westerners are familiar with arguments for the separation of church and state. Most liberals and progressives see clearly the harms that religious belief can bring to political life:

Religious belief can become uniquely coercive when combined with political power. Religious belief tends toward simple and clear-cut doctrines that don't fit well with the complexity of policy, which can lead to policy rigidity. Religious belief struggles with pluralistic approaches to belief, at least internally. And because it creates strong in-groups, it also has strong potential to create out-groups and animate tribalism. Too much religion in politics has the potential to undermine democratic legitimacy, particularly in pluralistic societies where large minorities—or even majorities—don't agree with the dominant religion.

At the same time, many people (including most conservatives) are also aware that religious belief can be a source of strength to pluralistic societies:

Religious organizations can provide an external critique of state power, as they did during the Civil Rights Movement. They can provide powerful civil society alternatives to various state programs, covering when states fail or simply choose not to engage. The LDS and Catholic Churches, for example, provide humanitarian relief around the world that dwarfs the contributions of many developed countries. Ideally, religious belief helps form virtuous citizens who are law-abiding, productive and self-sufficient, and who contribute to their communities. Across the board, people who are active in a religious community are happier and healthier than their non-participatory counterparts.

Of course, religion isn't necessary for any of these benefits, but it helps because it serves both as a set of values distinct from political propaganda and as a powerful mobilizing and organizing tool that helps align people's beliefs and actions.

Protecting Religion From Politics

What people on the left and right appreciate less is why mixing politics and religion is actively bad for religion itself. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I’ll lay out a few below:

Religious principles are (or should be) simple. That doesn't mean they're simple to execute (far from it). But ideally you should be able to distill what your religion commands of you into, say, ten commandments. Or, to take Jesus at his word, into two commandments.

Politics is, by definition, messy. Particularly pluralistic politics. Modern politics requires weighing and balancing not only a diversity of values, goals, and principles, but also deciding how to allocate precious resources of time, money, manpower, and various other goods.

Politics muddies simplistic religious principles. Politics forces people to take a side, thus violating religious principles that are based on universality or communion across differences. By adding coercive force to the power of belief, politics creates dangerous incentives that make people more vulnerable. Intermixing politics and religion too closely prevents religion from holding power accountable.

Just as religious differences can animate tribalism within political communities, politics too stokes internal division and polarization within faith communities. This entails a loss of communion among religious believers and encourages fragmentation within houses of worship.

In both cases, when we mix religion and politics we risk both becoming tools for the other. Religion becomes a tool to be wielded by political figures and politics provides fodder for religious extremists who amplify the worst of the culture wars to sow fear and division.

MAGA Hats and #BLM Flags

A few years back, the (largely white) Zen Center I grew up in decided to fly the #BLM flag as a sign of solidarity with Black Americans. Those who disagreed expressed concerns, but otherwise remained silent once it became clear that the majority was passionately in favor.

But those dissenters are worth thinking about. None of those dissenters believed that black lives *didn’t* matter.

Their concerns ranged from the fact that the topic was deeply complex, that it didn’t have anything (at least not directly) to do with Zen practice, that instead of making a final decision choose to hoist the flag actually opened the community to additional questions and additional conflict: don’t #bluelivesmatter? What about a Pride flag? What other kinds of symbols do we need to affirm in the face of various kinds of injustice, now that we’ve planted this flag here?

The decision also drove a political wedge into a community that had, thus far, mostly avoided politicization and polarization. Those dissenters now felt the strain of political disagreement inside the walls of the Zen Center just as everyone felt it outside. What was once a sanctuary from politics had now taken a side.

Whether it’s MAGA hats at church or the #BLM flag my Zen Center flies outside, the injection of political, partisan, and secular symbols into spiritual spaces immediately undermines those spaces, whether we recognize it or not.

One major danger of this kind of signaling is that as much as it welcomes some kinds of parishioners, it clearly signals to others that they are not welcome. And it does so not on the basis of the religious and spiritual beliefs that rightly distinguish traditions from one another, but on the basis of something exogenous and deeply divisive on its own.

Communal Worship Crosses Partisan Lines

At best, going to church or temple means an escape from the secular world. It’s a place to commune with God and with our fellow believers or, in the Zen Center’s case, to try to empty your mind altogether.

The very concept of communion—with each other and with God—is shattered by the zero-sum divisiveness that politics encourages.

When we allow politics into our faith homes, we unknowingly polarize them, fragment them, and rip at the very foundation of their existence. They exist, after all, to remind us that there is a better world after this one; that the ugliness and chaos and self-interest of politics is not, in fact, the world that God or the universe or whoever else wants for us.

And of course, the more that we politicize and polarize our houses of worship, the more people will sort themselves into religious communities, not based on their religious belief, but based on their political commitments. Without even realizing it, we replace the universal and transcendant with the partisan and worldly.

It has a created a vicious cycle where politics polarizes religion and then polarizes religious communities further polarize politics. The more we intermingle the two, we risk ending up with coercive theocracy or, more likely in our pluralistic liberal nation, fragmentation, schism, and increasing toxic polarization as we continue down the never-ending path of sorting every social and civil interaction by political purity test.

Our churches, synogogues, Zen Centers, and mosques are increasingly defined by secular symbols, their overarching religious principles overshadowed by partisan concerns.

None of this means that houses of worship can't or shouldn't uphold their beliefs, but they should uphold those beliefs in religious terms and not in secular political ones.

A New Evangelization Through Witness

Christians need a new form of bearing witness to their values that remains separate and distinct from (and above) the political fray, relying not on force, but on the ancient practice of bearing witness. Christ simply sat and shared meals with tax collectors and prostitutes. He didn't attempt to force others to join him or lobby for laws requiring it. Neither did he overlook sin nor explain it away as an inevitable consequence of structural injustice.

He simply bore witness to God's incredible mercy by loving the imperfect humans around him—every single one, without exception.

I believe strongly (though other Christians may disagree) that this kind of witnessing should avoid political alignments whenever possible. This doesn't mean remaining silent about cruelty, but it does mean not mixing Christian symbolism with partisan symbols, whether #BLM flags, MAGA hats, Pride flags, Israeli or Ukrainian flags, or any other political markers. This isn't a judgment on these symbols themselves, but rather a call to keep Christian (and other religious) values pure and bear witness to those values unmixed with secular slogans that carry heavy partisan weight.

Much of the failure I see in modern Christian life stems from aligning the cross—the universal symbol that unites Christians—with secular and political slogans that necessarily divide people. I wish more Christians would stand up and declare, without any political or partisan spin, that Jesus stood with the weak and vulnerable. That he shared meals with sinners and loved his neighbors as himself. That his sacrifice for us requires our own sacrifices—especially sacrifices of our tribal loyalties for the greater good.

Those are Christian values and we can appeal to conservative, progressive, and libertarian believers when we appeal to our shared beliefs as Christians. But when we link those universal beliefs to partisan slogans, we fracture the agreement we otherwise might have gotten. And of course, we make our spiritual homes a bit less home-like for everyone.

We don't need to connect the dots between our religious belief and any particular political platform. And indeed, we shouldn't, precisely because doing so creates misalignments and conflicts of interest down the line.

How We Do It Right

I’m not sure how to do this in practice all the time. It’s admittedly not easy to know when and how to call out

But the key thing for religious believers is to get our values right. We need to first ensure that we have a solid and stable base of values to think about the world, whether those values come from religion or secular humanism or somewhere else.

Only then can we wade into the toxic cesspool of partisan politics, because we have the moral equivalent of a kind of hazmat suit. Our deeply held principles can and should protect us and also guide us as we navigate the world of self-interest, logrolling and spineless or even occasionally principled compromise.

The next time someone advocates for the separation of church and state to protect politics, religious believers should remember that the stakes are even higher for our religious communities. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of man are never fully compatible and were never meant to be.

It’s up to us to decide, in our own lives at least, which comes first.

Your Turn

As I said, I’m still thinking a lot of this through. What did I miss? When should religious believers weigh in on partisan or policy debates? How can we do so without fragmenting our religious communities, without undermining our own religious values, and without animating tribalism? Have you seen it done well? I draw a tentative distinction between bearing witness (sharing meals with sinners) with partisanship (secular symbolism and catch-phrases). Does this distinction apply beyond religion? Where do you see tension between direct service/witness and systemic advocacy? How might radical moderates approach this balance? (This is a broader question about social change that I’ve been pondering lately.)

I would love to hear from you in the comments! And if you like this or my other work, please share!