Separation Anxiety

David Hollinger

  • The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West by Mark Lilla
    Knopf, 334 pp, $26.00, September 2007, ISBN 978 1 4000 4367 5

‘To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman,’ declares Mark Souder, a conservative Republican from Indiana, ‘and that I will not do.’ Such affirmations of the legitimacy of religion in the civic sphere are increasingly common in the United States, even among liberal democrats stung by accusations of secularist bias. The practical meaning of the separation of church and state has been contested since its enactment in the Bill of Rights. At what point does the First Amendment’s guarantee of the ‘free exercise’ of religion run foul of its prohibition on ‘the establishment’ of religion, and vice versa? These questions matter today, when the population of the United States is much more assertively Christian than that of any other nation in the North Atlantic West. ‘Either I am a Christian or I am not,’ Congressman Souder explains, and, as a Christian, he has ‘an obligation to change things’. The floor of Congress is a good place to act on this obligation.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008 » David Hollinger » Separation Anxiety (print version)
Pages 15-18 | 3591 words