Editor's note: Few topics are as contentious today as the role of religion in political debate and public deliberation. Rival positions rely on differing accounts of history, conceptions of "religion" and convictions about the role of the state. Russell Blackford (University of Newcastle) and William Cavanaugh (DePaul University) have both written extensively on this topic, and thus their wide-ranging exchange represents an uncommonly sophisticated treatment of the issues at stake and why they matter.

The Moral Neutrality of the Secular State

Russell Blackford

Throughout the seventeenth century, European civilisation was tortured by religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and other political thinkers of the time wrote against a background of terrible dislocations: the wars of religion, religion-tinged political struggles between great European dynasties, and the ruinous conflict between the British Crown and parliament. The troubled times provided an occasion to rethink the proper relationship between the claims of religion and the operation of worldly (or secular) political power.

Although Hobbes's greatest single work, Leviathan (1651), consists largely of theological analysis to defend his model of the state, its most important line of argument uses entirely secular reasoning. That is, Hobbes analyses the function and operation of the state in terms of human beings' worldly interests. For Hobbes, the state should aim at limited secular goals, such as peace and security, and the kind of material prosperity that these facilitate. It should view religious rivalries as just one more threat to peace. However, he thought, the secular ruler cannot be merely indifferent to religious matters. To ensure that the peace is maintained, the ruler must suppress outward expressions of all religions except one - no rivalry of doctrines can be allowed.

Other seventeenth-century thinkers moved decisively in a more liberal direction. Among these, Locke was enormously influential. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he accepts the Hobbesian analysis, insofar as he sees the state as the result of a social contract and defines its role in entirely secular terms. But he draws totally different practical conclusions. On Locke's account, men and women enter into social arrangements for mutual assistance and defence - against, for example, rapine, fraud and foreign invasions. It is the role of the state to protect citizens from these things.

At this point, his main line of argument identifies a distinction between the proper aims of secular government and those of spiritual teaching. For Locke, the apparatus of the state is directed toward our "civil interests," which he defines as "Life, Liberty, Health, and Indolency of the Body; and the possession of outward things such as Money, Lands, Houses, Furniture, and the like." It is the duty of the secular ruler to provide protection for "these things belonging to this Life." The ruler's remit should not "be extended to the Salvation of Souls."

Locke reached these conclusions from within Protestant Christianity, and his stated reasons for limiting the role of the secular ruler to protecting worldly things include a mix of secular and theological concerns. All the same, the Hobbesian analysis of the state lay in the background, and with it the argument that the essential point of the state is peace and security, and the worldly goods they allow, rather than any spiritual transformation.

By contrast with the state, Locke thought, a church is a free and voluntary society aimed at worship of God and the salvation of those involved. Its only power is of teaching and excommunication, and it has no jurisdiction over those who do not belong to it. Perhaps Locke over-simplifies here, but his main point is a plausible one: religious organisations are focused on otherworldly doctrines and are ill-adapted for the exercise of secular power.

On Locke's account, it looks as if the state apparatus can do a reasonably effective job of maintaining order, protecting citizens and advancing ordinary human flourishing. By contrast, it has no expertise in any otherworldly order of things, in identifying goods that transcend human flourishing, or in assisting with whatever transformations are needed to obtain these transcendent goods. It has no business with the salvation of souls, or anything analogous. Rather than favouring the views of one or other religion, the state should allow them all to pursue their own goals, as long as they don't produce civil harms.

Thus, Locke proposed a functional separation of religion and the apparatus of the state. The state should act for entirely secular reasons, based on knowledge that pertains solely to the order of this world. It should place no reliance on the doctrines of one or another religion. The different religious sects, cults and churches, in turn, should not pursue political power or influence in an attempt to impose their doctrines on the citizenry.

History has been kind to Locke, and I suggest that the model he put forward is plausible, independently of the urgent need for seventeenth-century religious rivals to find a modus vivendi. His arguments are deeper than that, and more principled. I have discussed Locke's arguments in detail elsewhere and conclude that similar lines of argument remain impressive and persuasive even today. They will not appeal equally to all comers, irrespective of their starting positions, but they should continue to convince many people, religious and otherwise. I cannot pursue all the detail here, but I submit that we still have much to learn from Locke's approach.

That, however, is not to suggest that his specific and detailed views should be treated as sacrosanct and immutable. Indeed, Locke sometimes failed to take his own reasoning to its logical conclusion. We can go boldly where he held back. Perhaps most notoriously, Locke argues that atheists, Roman Catholics and Muslims must not be tolerated. In the case of atheists, this is because they have no pretence of a religion to rely upon, and also because, supposedly, people with no belief in God and an afterlife cannot be trusted to keep their promises, covenants and oaths.

The first point is not logical, however, given the scheme of the overall Lockean argument. A state apparatus devoted solely to the protection of worldly things would not have a theological reason to persecute atheists, and an atheist need not claim any otherworldly beliefs in order to argue against persecution. All she needs to claim is that the state has no secular reason to persecute her.

Of course, Locke had no experience of a society where atheism is widespread. Indeed, atheism as thoughtful disbelief in the existence of any god or gods was virtually unknown in Europe in 1689. During the seventeenth century, the condemnatory epithet "atheist" was commonly applied to individuals, like Hobbes, who had unorthodox worldviews by Christian standards, but probably believed in a deity of some kind. If any atheists at all existed in Europe in Locke's day, they certainly were not in such numbers as to allow him to draw robust conclusions about their behaviour. In later centuries, atheism became a live option, culminating in the current situation where many Europeans disclaim any belief in gods or an afterlife. This has not caused social collapse in European countries or a breakdown in their legal systems.

By now, the fair conclusion to draw is that atheists are no more likely than anyone else to renege on promises, covenants and oaths (or at least solemn affirmations). More generally, and contrary to Locke's own view, no residual role for religion is required in the Lockean model - you can be a perfectly good citizen, by Locke's own standards, without any otherworldly beliefs. As things have turned out, there is no good reason for persecution of atheists.

Something similar applies to Catholics and Muslims. Contrary to Locke's rationale for their persecution, loyalty to foreign powers has not, generally speaking, undermined the patriotism or good citizenship of either group. I must emphasize, however, that Locke was not being inconsistent or hypocritical in arguing for religious tolerance, and then making exceptions for certain disliked groups. He offers worldly reasons why specific groups are a danger to civil society, and why they must be suppressed by the rest of us in self-defence, with the might of the state acting on our behalf. Within the Lockean model, this is a perfectly legitimate move, even if Locke's actual reasons are not, viewed in retrospect, at all persuasive.

The moral for us, perhaps, is that we should be reluctant to dream up secular reasons for persecutions, however plausible they may seem as we consider them in our armchairs.

The Lockean model of the state tends to defuse the recurrent problems of religious persecution and warfare, while offering an independently attractive explanation of state power. From Locke's own point of view, however, it may actually prove too much. When taken to its logical conclusion, it may have more radical implications than Locke realized or would have welcomed.

For one thing, as it turns out, there is no plausible worldly basis for persecuting atheists, Catholics or Muslims, though there might be a basis to crack down on a sufficiently fanatical atheist community, Catholic prelature, or Muslim sect, if it became a danger to civil society. For another, when taken to its logical conclusion, the model permits far more in the way of "immoral" behaviour than would have been palatable to Locke's opponents or to Locke himself.

If he were charged by opponents with permitting, say, sexual promiscuity, he'd be on shaky ground in denying it. When he touches on this point, he seems to think that there is some good worldly reason to forbid promiscuous orgies - he is mainly concerned that these might be practised by some religious cult or other - but he never really spells out what it is. Perhaps he thinks that sexual restrictions (to the extent of confining sex to monogamous, heterosexual marriages) are necessary for social stability. After all, human societies have invariably imposed at least some constraints on sexual behaviour. But even if this argument was plausible in Locke's time, it is decidedly less so today, thanks to modern developments in hygiene, medicine and especially contraception.

By appropriate secular standards concerning the relevant things of this world - such as individual and public health - there might be reasons for the state to take some action to encourage certain kinds of sexual behaviour rather than others. But the best policy for the purpose might involve sex education in schools, the encouragement of "safe sex" and other relatively non-coercive steps, rather than blanket criminal bans of supposedly illicit sexual behaviour - let alone bans on an obscure religious cult's sex rites.

More generally, the Lockean model tends to separate the reasons for state action, not only from religious morality, but also from any traditional morality that does not actually assist in protecting civil interests. Locke could, of course, bite the bullet and accept this point; in strict logic, it does not undermine his model. It is not, however, an implication that would have been welcomed in 1689 by either Locke or his critics. Nor is it a welcome conclusion to modern-day religious conservatives and legal moralists.

In a sense, therefore, the Locke created a ticking bomb: his approach had radical implications for the role of the state in imposing moral legislation. Even today, these are playing out in our political debates. Three centuries after John Locke's death, the Lockean model of the state is philosophical dynamite.

The Wars of Religion, and Other Fairy Tales

William Cavanaugh

Russell Blackford modestly proposes how we might achieve a workable modus vivendi in a world where atheists, Catholics, Muslims and others must all learn to get along. His solution is a familiar one: let's take what divides us - religion, defined as beliefs about otherworldly matters - and privatize it. We can then all agree in public, at least in principle, on merely worldly matters.

Blackford's argument is based on a familiar "Just So" story about European history: once upon a time Catholics and Protestants started killing each other over religion; the secular state saved the day by making religion a private matter; Locke is the hero here for conceptualizing this amicable division, whereby the church would stay out of politics and the state would stay out of religion; and they all lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, this tale does not become more true simply by being repeated. It is a favourite of liberal political theorists - John Rawls, Richard Rorty and many others - but it can't be found in the work of any respected historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

To begin with only the most obvious discrepancy, the secular state did not resolve the so-called "Wars of Religion" - the first state in which church and state were formally separated made its appearance a good century and a half after the Treaty of Westphalia. When the so-called "Wars of Religion" came to an end, the absolutist state was the victor. The way had been paved for the deification of Louis XIV.

If we look to the origins of these wars themselves, further problems with the "Just So" tale arise. Can they really be called "Wars of Religion" if Catholics killed Catholics, Lutherans killed Lutherans, and Protestants and Catholics often collaborated? Holy Roman Emperor Charles V spent most of the decade following Martin Luther's excommunication at war, not against Lutherans, but against the Pope. When the Lutheran princes did take up arms against the Catholic Emperor in the 1550s, they did so with the aid of Catholic France.

The French "Wars of Religion" are full of collaborations between Protestants and Catholics, and the Thirty Years' War - perhaps the most notorious of the "Wars of Religion" - saw Cardinal Richelieu throwing the full force of French might on the side of the Lutheran Swedes, who in turn attacked Lutheran Denmark. While the Calvinist Dutch were helping the French royal forces to defeat the Calvinists at La Rochelle, Catholic Spain was supporting the Protestant duke of Rohan in his battle against the French crown in Languedoc. The Thirty Years' War was, in fact, primarily a contest between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, the two great Catholic dynasties of Europe. Is this what Blackford means by "religion-tinged political struggles between great European dynasties"?

There is no doubt that Protestants and Catholics did kill each other in these wars, sometimes brutally and on a large scale. But the above examples and many more like them (I cite dozens in my book, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict ) raise a question with which historians grapple: were these wars about religion or about political, economic and social causes? Historians vary in their responses.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, for example, historiography of the French wars of the sixteenth century tended to downplay religious factors in favour of class conflict, but since the 1970s there has been a renewed emphasis on religion. The problem with these debates is that there was no relevant distinction between "religion" and "politics" or other "secular" factors in the sixteenth century. Processions of the Eucharistic host, for example, were not purely "religious" but were part of the reinforcement of social boundaries in French society. As historian Barbara Diefendorf says about the French wars, "religious and secular motives were inseparable." As historian John Bossy points out, there was no modern concept of religion in the sixteenth century.

In the medieval period, the religious/secular distinction was a distinction between two different types of priests, those who belonged to orders like the Dominicans and those who belonged to a diocese. "Religion" as we know it was not invented as something distinct from "secular" factors like "politics" and "economics" until about 1700, or well after the so-called "Wars of Religion" are supposed to have occurred.

If "religion" cannot be separated out as the cause of these wars, then the idea that peace was made by the secular state setting religion aside into a private realm becomes suspect. This is so not simply because the blame for these wars cannot be laid at the feet of "religion," but also because the rise of the state was in fact implicated in the violence. Jose Casanova has suggested that rather than call them "Wars of Religion" they should be known as the "wars of European state-building." The key factor in many of the conflicts was the struggle between state-making elites and the forms of local authority - especially that of the church and the lesser nobility - that stood in the way of centralization. As Michael Howard sums it up:

"The attempts by the dominant dynasties of Europe to exercise disputed rights of inheritance throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became consolidated, in the sixteenth century, into a bid by the Habsburgs to sustain a hegemony which they had inherited over most of western Europe against all their foreign rivals and dissident subjects, usually under the leadership of France. The result was almost continuous warfare in western Europe from the early sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth centuries."

In other words, the rise of the modern state was not the solution to the "Wars of Religion" - it was the most significant cause of them.

The invention of "religion" as something inherently otherworldly and separate from mundane "secular" affairs like politics was an important part of the state-making process. If ecclesiastical authorities could be seen as presiding over an area of life that is essentially otherworldly and distinct from mundane political affairs, then the ecclesiastical court system could be shut down, church lands and their attendant revenues could be confiscated, and all kinds of ecclesiastical checks on civil rulers' power could be eliminated. This is, in historical fact, what happened.

The modern religious/secular divide was invented along with the invention of the modern state as the final act in the struggle between civil and ecclesiastical powers in Europe that had been going on at least since the Investiture Controversy in the eleventh century, and arguably since the conversion of Constantine.

Although the ecclesiastical/civil divide goes back to Constantine, the religious/political divide does not. In the medieval period, the civil authority was "the police department of the Church," in John Neville Figgis's phrase. Church authorities did not think that their authority was purely otherworldly, nor that Christianity was essentially about otherworldly concerns. The goal of Christendom was to build a society in which the Gospel permeated every aspect of life, from law-making to barrel-making.

Princes and bishops jockeyed for power within this common vision and, increasingly after the Investiture Controversy, went their separate ways. The idea that the church's area of concern could be reduced to "religion," understood as essentially otherworldly, was a product of the final triumph of civil over ecclesiastical authority in early modern Europe. Locke's big idea that, as Blackford puts it, "religious organisations are focused on otherworldly doctrines and are ill-adapted for the exercise of secular power" depends on the invention of religious organisations that are focused on otherworldly doctrines, which simply did not exist before the era in question.

The idea that Locke was simply sorting out what had gotten muddled by making a proper distinction between worldly and otherworldly - "between the proper aims of secular government and those of spiritual teaching" as Blackford puts it - is wrong. To be fair to Blackford, Locke himself did not think that he was inventing something new either. He wrote:

"the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other."

In fact, though, the advent of the modern state was proving that the boundaries were anything but "fixed and immovable."

The problem with Locke's and Blackford's scheme is not that it is new - there is no point to any nostalgia for the middle ages. The problem is that the scheme is presented as an historical solution that made peace by recognizing the true nature of "religions" like Christianity and Islam, when in fact it came about through a violent process of state-making that distorts Christianity, Islam and other traditions that are run through its worldly/otherworldly dichotomy.

Once the game is rigged along the lines of the worldly/otherworldly distinction, the price of admission for traditions like Christianity and Islam is steep. Locke excluded Catholics and Muslims from his plan for religious toleration because he thought their civil allegiances were divided by their allegiance to foreign powers. Blackford thinks Locke was being consistent in giving worldly reasons for excluding Catholics and Muslims, though Blackford does not think those reasons apply today.

What Blackford does not see is that Catholicism and Islam did not fit into Locke's scheme for religious toleration precisely because they had as yet refused to define themselves as religions. Catholics did not accept the ideas that what they were about was essentially otherworldly and that therefore their temporal loyalty should lie with the king who had swallowed whole the church in his realm.

As for Muslims, it is often commented today that they make no distinction between religion and politics. In the West, this is seen as evidence of their perversity. As John Esposito comments, to call Islam a "religion" is already to mark it as an abnormal religion, precisely because it does not "properly" separate religion from politics and otherworldly from worldly concerns. But to regard Islam as an abnormal "religion" is to regard as a neutral descriptive term what is in fact a term laden with Western ideological baggage. Islam is not abnormal for refusing to separate the worldly from the otherworldly; as Robert Shedinger comments, the true historical oddity is not the "politicization of Islam" but the "religionization of Christianity."

Blackford seems to think that it is simply obvious that Christianity and Islam are about otherworldly doctrines, and we can all come to agreement in principle on merely mundane matters like public policy about sex if we treat them as questions of hygiene and public health. But Christians and Muslims and many others do not think that sex is merely about hygiene. Fine, says Blackford, just don't try to impose that view on others. But beliefs about the telos of the human body and the ends of human sexuality - and therefore the ends of human society - are not neatly cordoned off into spiritual, and therefore private, concerns.

In Blackford's world such lofty talk can be set aside in favour of "appropriate secular standards concerning the relevant things of this world." But for many people, sex education that is merely about plumbing is not sex education at all. Blackford does not seem to grasp the possibility that for many people the "spiritual" aspect of sex is not just something that is added on top of the "physical" aspect of sex, such that one could profitably set aside the former and just talk about the latter.

None of this is to say that Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu views about human sexuality or any other issue should necessarily prevail in a pluralistic society. It is rather to say that in a truly pluralistic society people should be free to be themselves, to talk about what they see as the true ends of ordinary life without cordoning off their deepest convictions.

We have bought into the idea that we cannot disagree about fundamental matters without violence. I see no reason, historical or otherwise, why this should be so. In a democratic and pluralistic society, people should be free to give any reasons for their positions that they see as significant, even if such reasons are theological.

Society would be much freer if secularists dropped the idea that their reasons alone are "worldly" and therefore fit for public consumption. It would be much more refreshing if atheists like Blackford just abandoned the pretence of neutrality and said that they find many Christian ideas batty. Then we could perhaps have an interesting conversation about the ends of human life and best political ways to attain them.

Christians and Muslims and Jews and others could put forth thoroughly "worldly" visions of a flourishing human life with a transcendent dimension. And it could become apparent that atheists and other secularists also have their own visions that are not merely "worldly" and mundane, but offer a comprehensive worldview that is not essentially distinct from the worldviews they would exclude from public discourse.

Don't Mention the War!

Russell Blackford

Though William Cavanaugh dismisses talk of wars of religion in early modern Europe as mere "fairytales," he demonstrates no such thing. It is true, of course, that we run a risk of simplifying complex historical events whenever we try to describe them and assess their significance. This certainly applies to the tumultuous struggles that took place in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, involving churches and religious movements, ambitious rulers and great dynasties. That, however, is hardly unexpected.

Cavanaugh makes fun of a simplistic story in which wars between Protestants and Catholics were resolved by establishing secular states in Europe. Such a story would, indeed, be a gross distortion of what actually happened. More specifically, it would contradict the well known facts: as Cavanaugh says, "the secular state did not resolve the so-called 'Wars of Religion' - the first state in which church and state were formally separated made its appearance a good century and a half after the Treaty of Westphalia."

Furthermore, the controlling principle of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, was not that of separating church and state, but, rather, the maxim cuius regio, eius religio - that is, the local religion would be that of the local ruler. Although some rights were given to Christian minorities to practise their faiths, these were limited and were a far cry from Enlightenment or contemporary ideas of secularism or religious freedom.

However, nothing in my original proposal, to which Cavanaugh is responding, told this simplistic story. I doubt that John Rawls or Richard Rorty tell it, either, but their writings will have to look after themselves. In my case, I mentioned the seventeenth-century turmoil in particular, but I made no claim that any of it was resolved at the time by introducing secularism. What I did claim was that it provoked such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to reconsider the role of the state, and particularly the relationship between state power and religious teachings. I then argued, rather sketchily, that Locke's views remain relevant and useful today.

In my book Freedom of Religion and the Secular State , I expand on the arguments I made above, but I also caution against simplistic narratives. As I point out, the violence had complex causes, and we cannot lay the blame for such devastating episodes as the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War solely on the Christian churches. During this period, powerful aristocratic dynasties such as the Bourbons and Habsburgs sought to enhance their power and the governments of Europe intervened as and when they saw opportunities for political or economic advantage, or where they feared disadvantageous outcomes. Not surprisingly, Realpolitik often trumped spiritual allegiances, leading to such events as France's crucial actions in the mid-1630s.

All that granted, however, we should not whitewash the involvement of churches, religious movements and leaders in the large-scale violence across Europe that followed the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, churches and their leaders battled for both theological and worldly dominance, and any narrative that downplayed this would be a tawdry exercise in historical revisionism. Even Cavanaugh mentions that professional historians have moved in recent decades towards a greater emphasis on the role of religion in the French Wars of Religion, after flirting for a time with analyses more in terms of class struggle.

Nothing in my argument depends on the simplistic narrative that Cavanaugh calls a "fairytale." It is, however, clear that seventeenth-century thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were deeply troubled by the experience of religious strife within the British Isles and on the European continent.

All that aside, Cavanaugh is correct that the medieval church nourished grand ambitions. It aspired to build a society in which Christian doctrine and practice pervaded all aspects of life within European Christendom. Accordingly, it did not recognise a separate realm of political matters that should lie beyond its control. Furthermore, it was used to getting its way. I am, of course, well aware of this, as was Locke.

It does not follow, however, that religion was "invented" only around 1700, and that there could thus have been no wars of religion prior to that time. Philosophers, courts of law and others have defined religion for their various purposes, and the Christian faiths of medieval and early modern times most certainly meet these definitions, necessarily vague and indicative though they are. For example, the churches emphasised doctrines about otherworldly beings (God, angels, Satan), offered spiritual transformations, conducted spiritually significant rituals and spelled out associated canons of conduct.

All Cavanaugh can legitimately argue is something like this: it was not until about 1700 that the European churches lost some of their aura of authority in such domains as statecraft and economics, and, to an extent, retreated into a non-political role. For the sake of argument, let's assume that is true. Cavanaugh certainly cannot mean that the rival churches did not exist prior to 1700, and so were incapable of taking part in power struggles before then, or that they were not religious bodies as that idea is ordinarily understood.

What he does not point out - though it's obvious enough - is that the churches were better situated to play a role in violent power struggles before they lost, or surrendered, their political authority. It is not at all mysterious that the major wars of religion in Europe took place before 1700: that is exactly what we should expect. Surely the churches could not have taken part more dramatically in such wars after they began a retreat from worldly politics. Thus Cavanaugh's main argument for the revisionist proposition that there were no "Wars of Religion" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is breathtakingly illogical.

The medieval church gained its aura of political authority from its claimed moral and epistemic superiority. This, in turn, derived from its claims of access to knowledge revealed by God. Despite its political pretensions, the church's essential reason for existence, right from the beginning, was to teach the gospel message of the resurrected Christ and the remission of sins.

Cavanaugh may dislike the word "focused" (which was mine, not Locke's), but Locke was well within his rights to question whether the claimed expertise of the rival post-Reformation churches in spiritual matters translated into competence in protecting worldly interests such as those in life, physical health and property. Locke was also within his rights to question whether competent protection of worldly interests required an imposition by the state of the correct theological doctrines, whatever these might be.

As an aside, European thinkers prior to 1700 certainly understood such well-worn distinctions as that between spiritual and temporal authority. This distinction can be found in Christian writings dating from long before Constantine involved himself in church affairs - early in the fourth century and certainly long before 1700. The medieval church did, indeed, develop a doctrine that temporal authority should be subordinate to spiritual authority. It does not follow that people in medieval times, or during the first stages of modernity, were unable to tell the difference.

In any event, something else seems to be bothering Cavanaugh - perhaps the idea that religions with continued pretensions to political authority should now give them up. It is true that the Catholic Church has been unwilling, historically, to abandon these pretensions; in fact, it has still not entirely done so. Even as it teaches that it and other religious organisations should be free from interference by the state in their internal affairs, the Vatican also maintains that the state should enforce (what the Vatican regards as) the moral law. Thus, it retains considerable vestiges of a theocratic mind-set.

Similarly, as Cavanaugh reminds us, Islam is notorious for refusing to draw a boundary between the domains of religion and politics. In the past, Islamic legal scholars supported the enforcement of Islamic canons of conduct. Thus, secularism, with its insistence that laws be made solely for worldly purposes - essentially to protect and promote our civil interests, independently of any religious teachings - cuts across the traditional aspirations of Islam.

Secularism will most certainly have different impacts on different churches, sects and religious individuals, but that is because churches, sects and individuals differ in the degrees to which they maintain theocratic ambitions. The idea of secular government may be a bitter pill for whichever theological systems still claim political authority. In that sense, but that sense only, secularism is not neutral - and no one is hiding this.

At the same time, secularism mandates government neutrality in the sense that governments should not attempt to impose on their citizens any particular theological or anti-theological view of the good life. Secularism is not inherently atheistic, and it should go without saying that Locke himself was not an atheist but a Protestant Christian.

Contemporary advocates of secular government do not urge the persecution of any church or sect, though we do, generally speaking, argue that the churches and sects should obey the laws applying to others ("generally speaking," because there are good worldly reasons for some accommodation of religious sensibilities, and for limited exemptions from the secular law).

Thus, I am unimpressed by Cavanaugh's plea that I give up my "pretence of neutrality" - there is no such pretence. It is clear in what sense I (along with many other people, both religious and non-religious, who advocate secular government) am neutral. It is also clear in what sense secularism is not neutral in its impact. It is not neutral in its impact only because some churches and sects are more eager than others to shape the law and public policy in their own image.

Cavanaugh muses (on what basis is left unclear) that I don't "seem to grasp the possibility that for many people the 'spiritual' aspect of sex is not just something that is added on top of the 'physical' aspect of sex, such that one could profitably set aside the former and just talk about the latter." By all means, let those "many people" talk as much as they like about such matters as the alleged telos of the human sex organs, and perhaps they might persuade others to abandon, say, their use of the contraceptive pill. I am not denying anyone her freedom of speech.

Likewise, many other people might laugh at such "batty" (Cavanaugh's word) documents as the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae , which forbids artificial birth control. I am all for interesting (not to mention satirical) discussions of encyclical letters. However, I do ask that public school teachers, while actually teaching in their classrooms, neither praise the deep wisdom (if it has any) of a document such as Humanae Vitae nor devote any lessons to mocking its (possibly) batty qualities. Fortunately, most religious believers - including most communicant Catholics - do not regard the esoteric reasoning of Humanae Vitae as an appropriate basis for lawmaking in modern liberal democracies.

More generally, many Christians, Muslims and religious believers of other stripes are content enough to live in accordance with their own metaphysical and moral beliefs, while permitting others considerable latitude to do likewise. On this approach, the state should play a relatively limited role in keeping the peace and promoting our worldly well-being. If that's insufficiently neutral for Cavanaugh, I'm afraid I'll never please him. So be it, for you can't please everyone. With some things, in fact, you shouldn't even try.

Refusing the "Religion of Secularism"

William Cavanaugh

From the title of Russell Blackford's response, I can tell that we agree on at least one thing: Fawlty Towers was a brilliant television series. I suspect we agree on a few other things as well, such as the wisdom of the separation of church and state - but before we get to the agreement, there are some misunderstandings that need to be cleared up.

Blackford is right that, in his original argument, he did not explicitly claim that the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were resolved at the time by introducing secularism, which was a much later development. But he must have had some reason for beginning his piece with the tale of the religious wars. The heroes of the piece are Hobbes and Locke, who were "deeply troubled by the experience of religious strife." The solution Locke and Blackford offer to the problem of religious strife is secularism, the privatization of otherworldly religion so that public policy may deal with purely mundane matters.

The idea that I challenged in my response is not that Christians and Christian churches were involved in these wars. Of course they were, and it marks a severe failure of Christians to be faithful to the gospel admonitions against violence. What I challenged was the idea that the cause of the violence was "religion," understood as an essentially otherworldly impulse that had illegitimately gotten mixed up with mundane concerns.

In Locke's telling of the tale, the solution to religious strife such as that found in the sixteenth and seventeenth century wars was for the church to give up all its worldly concerns to the state. In actual historical fact, it was the aggrandizement of the emergent state's power over worldly concerns against the church and all other local forms of authority - the nobility in particular - that was the primary cause of the violence to begin with. This is the key point.

Blackford is puzzled by the idea that religion could have been "invented" in this period. Surely the distinction between spiritual and temporal authority, or ecclesiastical and civil authority, was important to Christians long before? Indeed it was. What was new in the early modern period were the distinctions between religion and politics and between religious and secular. In the medieval period, kings had liturgical functions, and religio was a virtue that applied to all human activities, not a separate otherworldly area of life cordoned off from more mundane concerns. When the religious/secular distinction came to be employed in the later middle ages, it marked the distinction between two different types of clergy, not between clergy and kings.

The point of this is not to say "there was no such thing as religion, therefore there were no religious wars." The point is this: the idea that the church's responsibility was for something called "religion," which is essentially otherworldly, is not just the way things really are. This idea is an invention of the early modern period. It is an invention that facilitated the rise of the sovereign state by making it appear obvious and natural that the civil authorities should enjoy a monopoly of power over worldly concerns. And it was the aggrandizement of state power which was the primary cause of the violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is hard to do justice to such an argument in this sort of online forum, but I have argued this in exhaustive detail in my book The Myth of Religious Violence . What I try to puncture in this book is the Whiggish narrative that assumes, against all the evidence, that the modern state's monopoly on violence has made the world a more peaceful place. In modernity, Christians and others learned that they should be willing to kill for the nation-state, while Christianity is a private, otherworldly, concern.

As a Christian, I am glad for the separation of church and state; I do not think that church authorities should wield coercive power. On this Blackford and I undoubtedly agree. But to applaud the separation of church and state is not necessarily to accept the separation of religion and politics, or the privatization of Christianity to otherworldly concerns. It is precisely because I believe in the "politics of Jesus" - to use John Howard Yoder's phrase - that I oppose violence, especially nation-state violence, today.

In the United States we face a secular state, armed to the teeth, that frequently goes to war to defend "freedom" and other secular ideals. The secular state I live in is often no less ambitious in domestic affairs. Blackford rejects the idea of state imposition of Christian or Muslim teachings on contraception, as do I. At the present moment in history, however, such an imposition is not even remotely possible. What is real is the Obama administration's determination to force faith-based organizations - like Catholic charities - to provide artificial contraception to their employees regardless of any beliefs that such practices are wrong. The administration's position is based precisely on the kind of argument that Blackford makes: only secular reasons like health and hygiene count when the issue is a "worldly" one. Religion is essentially otherworldly and religious reasons should not matter when it comes to public policy.

The trivialization of Christianity and other faiths is thus accompanied by the "religion of secularism" that Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart warned about fifty years ago. That is insufficiently neutral for me, and it ought to be even for atheists like Russell Blackford.

Russell Blackford is Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State and Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies.

William Cavanaugh is Research Professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University, Chicago. He is the author of The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict and Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church.