Marc DeGirolami, a distinguished law and religion scholar at St. John’s co-hosts an important law and religion blog clrforum.org with his outstanding colleague Mark Movsesian, and he recently posted an intriguing short essay (http://clrforum.org/2014/06/05/olivier-roy-on-the-closing-of-the-rights-mind/) part of which I strongly disagree. In that post, he calls attention to a New York Times column by Oliver Roy. The essence of the column is that the Christian parties of the right in Europe have secularized and have lost contact with Christian values. At the same time the right is claiming that Europe is Christian – meaning anti-Islam. In the end, the Right’s formal embrace of Christianity gives a blasphemous cover for discrimination.
What aroused my disagreement was DeGirolami’s criticism of Oliver’s column, namely its embrace of the notion of separating church from state. DeGirolami contends that this separation theme has not only been rejected by the current Supreme Court (it has), but also rested on assumptions that were foreign to the European experience: “The notion that the association of politics and religion exerts a corrupting influence on religion may be traced in a direct line from James Madison all the way to David Souter’s church-state dissents. I take it that has not been the European historical experience.”
To be sure, this undeveloped claim appears in a short post. In a way though, this claim is consistent with DeGirolami’s sophisticated commitment to a Burkean respect for the long-standing customs, habits, and traditions of a society. And in fairness, I am sure that DeGirolami would not suggest that such corruption is no part of the European experience. Nonetheless, I think his claim is wide of the mark.
To begin with, Madison’s claim that supported churches become dependent, compliant, lazy, bloated, and corrupt was itself a reflection on the European experience, and criticism of clergy and church corruption was a recurring theme leading up to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. When churches are tied to unpopular and dictatorial governments, there is good reason to regard those ties as corrupt, to doubt their commitment to moral values and to think that these ties erode support for the churches in question. So it seems obvious, as Jose Casanova has detailed, that the Catholic Church did itself no favors when it supported or was perceived to support corrupt Kings of the past, or Franco, Salazar, Mussolini, and Vichy France. Similarly, the Church’s quiescence with respect to Hitler’s Germany undermined respect for the Church. At the same time, when the Church sided with the people against the Polish dictatorship and stood on the side of Irish nationalism, its unwillingness to be tied to the state was regarded as exhibiting strong moral leadership. That prophetic stance resonates even today though other factors have since undercut the moral force of the Church primarily in Ireland.
The factors leading to religiosity or its decline are complicated and controversial, and the decline in European religiosity is palpable. I would not contend that the close ties between religion and the state are the only explanation. After all, those ties persisted for a long time without a decline as DeGirolami observes. I would add that those ties can be helpful. The Church’s ties to Constantine surely enhanced its numbers despite the character of his dictatorship (though as Hauerwas has argued that partnership sapped the church of its prophetic character).
I admit the sociological complexities. But, with Casanova, I do think that various kinds of religious corruption have been a major part of the European experience.
Comments