Church & State: A Coalition of Conscience & Power

CHURCH & STATE

In Mississippi, a $7,000,000 Government-financed program for retraining unemployed poor, mostly Negroes, is being run through an agency organized by a Roman Catholic diocese. In New Mexico, the $1,261,000 appropriated to retrain migrant workers was granted by the Federal Government to an organization set up by the state Council of Churches. In city after U.S. city this summer, churches played a major role in launching Project Head Start, the preschool training program for underprivileged children. In all, more than 100 federal programs are providing vast amounts of Government money to church-related agencies—and uncounted millions of dollars more will be heading their way as a result of Lyndon Johnson's education and medicare legislation.

In a nation that has staked much—and sometimes too much—on t he hallowed concept of the separation of church and state, the federal funding of projects and institutions with church ties has become commonplace. Whatever happened to the impregnable "wall of separation between Church and State" that Thomas Jefferson "contemplated with solemn reverence"? The answer is that the wall is still there, invulnerable as ever, but that reasonable men have found gates in it that can be opened, yet guarded. Says Presidential Press Secretary Bill Moyers, himself a Baptist teacher: "Separation of church and state meant one thing when government and religion were at cross-purposes. It means something different when they have common purposes."

Abolition & Prohibition. Today, unquestionably, the purposes of religion and government are more common than cross. Los Angeles Jesuit James Vizzard calls this new era of good feeling "a coalition of conscience and power." It marks a new phase in U.S. church-state relations, which has seen, as a National Council of Churches study committee put it last year, "both separation and interaction, harmony and tension."

Despite the fact that America's first settlers were zealous seekers of religious liberty, nine of Britain's 13 colonies in the New World created harmony of a sort by establishing state churches of their own—the Anglican faith in Virginia, for example, and the Congregational in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That kind of "harmony" began to give way during the Revolution, when most of the infant states of the future republic dropped their legal ties to a particular church. Later, Congress formally affirmed the right of free exercise of religion in the First Amendment and clearly forbade the establishment of any one faith.

Even as law courts and legislators were slowly building Jefferson's wall, history created situations where the paths of church and state converged. During the 19th century, for example, the Government subsidized frontier preachers to help pacify—even as they tried to convert—warring Indian tribes. In the Reconstruction era, church agencies were given public grants to assist freed slaves. Moreover, the U.S. came to accept the right and duty of the churches to influence legislation when a moral issue was involved—happily, before the Civil War, in the case of Northern Protestants who fought for abolition, less so later when Prohibition was imposed on the nation largely through efforts of Baptists and Methodists.