TIME Magazine

Religious Secularism

Posted Monday, Jul. 16, 1956

"The unique relationship between religion, the state and society is perhaps the most fundamental... feature of American religious as well as American political life," says Economist Peter F. Drucker in Notre Dame University's Review of Politics.

"This country has developed the most thoroughgoing if not the only truly secular state... The U.S. is, however, also the only country of the West in which society is conceived as being basically a religious society."

This coexistence of religion, state and society, says Drucker, sharply distinguishes the U.S. from Europe. Even in European countries where anticlericalism is vigorous, Drucker points out, there are still such relics of "establishment" as government salaries for the clergy, government subsidies to church schools or foreign missions, government support for religious instructors in public schools. Only totalitarian countries are really free from these state-church carryovers, and these have merely substituted their state creeds instead.

In the U.S., however, "organized religion plays a part... altogether unknown elsewhere." Church membership (except in the big cities) is taken for granted, community activities center around the churches. "The Girl Scouts meet in the basement of the church, the Parent-Teachers Association in the Parish House... One of the local ministers opens the luncheon meeting of Rotary or the annual drive of the Community Chest... There exists the closest and most intimate bond between the Catholic Church and some locals of the United Automobile Workers or the United Steel Workers, between Protestant churches and some locals of the Rubber Workers, or between Jewish congregations and the Garment Workers locals in New York."

It is basic to the American creed "that a society can only be religious if religion and the state are radically separated, and that the state can only be free if society is basically a religious society." The state can favor no one religious group, but at the same time it must "sponsor, protect and favor religious life in general." This unique arrangement is no guarantee of a religion deeper than the church membership figures. "But it is a foundation—both for a religious people and for a free political order. As such it is the greatest achievement of the American political spirit, and the one on which all others rest."