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Is the State a "Civic Church" in terms of jurisdictional power, or am I overreading this?
Guys, I'm new here, so I'm not sure if this fits, but I've been wrestling with the relationship between the State and religion, and I want to run a thought by you.
We all know this Western ideal: separation of church and state. But after years of living it, watching the news and trying to understand the friction, it seems to me that you don’t get constant, systemic conflict unless two powers are fighting over the exact same piece of "real estate." And that "real estate" is moral authority.
Here is the nuance I want to add, because I know the counter-argument: "The State doesn't care what you believe in your heart; it only cares about public compliance." I grant that completely.
But here is where the jurisdictional land-grab happens: The State doesn't just say, "We have a separate rule for public conduct." It says, "Your religious rule is invalid inside your own institutions, and you must comply with our civic moral code—even when operating your own schools, charities, and hospitals." That isn't two sovereigns coexisting; that is the State asserting ultimate supremacy over religious bodies.
Now, I agree that politicians and judges likely aren't malicious. They genuinely believe they are defending "progress," "equality," or "women's rights." They see themselves as liberators from "archaic dogma."
But functionally, aren't they establishing a new civic orthodoxy? The medieval Church defined orthodoxy and punished heterodoxy. The modern State does the same—except the "sin" isn't heresy; it's "discrimination," and the "punishment" is fines, loss of tax-exempt status, or closure.
Let me give a concrete example, carefully: In Europe, it is generally legal to teach your child at home, in private, that homosexuality is a sin according to your faith. However, if you run a state-funded religious school, the State will intervene to compel the curriculum to reflect civic values over religious ones. The State is not policing belief, but it is policing the public expression and institutional enforcement of that belief.
To me, that sounds less like "neutral arbitration" and more like a rival institutional power asserting its dominance over the moral code. I've read that conflict over legal jurisdiction is the academic gold standard for proving institutional rivalry.
So my ultimate question isn't "Is the State a religion?"—because clearly, it lacks the supernatural elements. Rather, my questions are:
"If the State claims ultimate jurisdiction over moral conduct even within religious institutions, does that make it functionally equivalent to an established 'civic church' in terms of political sovereignty? If so, how can religious groups negotiate this without capitulating entirely?
And isn't the State constantly changing its beliefs? By doing so, isn't it effectively admitting that it was wrong before—and that it will likely be wrong again? That makes me doubt whether it even cares about being objectively right at all, or whether it is just running social experiments on us. And if it is just experimenting, then isn't it essentially messing with society however it wants, without caring enough about the long-term consequences—even if its leaders have 'good intentions'? I mean, the society is pretty polrized in many things.
I think what we're seeing here is modern woke secularism is a religion that has adapted to American law around the separation of church and state, such that it is able to infest the perquisites of religion without being expunged by the court's religious protection pesticides. Wokeness is a religion in the sense of acknowledging an ultimate reality and seeking to answer metaphysical questions about life, the universe, and everything; but it avoids the legal American definition of religion and thus can seek to be enforced by laws and taught in schools and discussed directly in the workplace. It satisfies the need for religion without being a religion.
The separation of church and state fundamentally, but silently, assumed that we all had a church we were leaving behind when interacting with the state. The Founders assumed that each man had religious beliefs, likely a formal denomination, which answered questions about life, the universe, and everything and that we would all lay those disputes aside when interacting within government structures. The assumption was that our public schools would be secular, but that was ok because nobody in the room fully believed in what was being taught in that school, we were all setting aside and sacrificing some separate religious belief and finding common ground in the secular.
Wokies have in essence hacked the system, where Hindus and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and prots and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons* all need to set aside their identity at the door and learn to accept secular stuff they don't actually believe, Wokies seek to impose their metaphysical understandings within the classroom and the office as orthodoxy. "Just being a decent person." Yeah, we're all trying to do that, and we all have different definitions.
This will ultimately require reworking the concept of freedom of religion.
*the Overton window of religious acceptability varied with the Founder in question and the era of the American Republic, Jefferson certainly in his writings at least fantasized about including hindoos and Mohamedans in the range of religions accepted in the land, but Missouri only rescinded the Mormon Extermination Order 50 years ago.
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Separation of Church and State just biases in favour of the first group to come along and convince that their moral values are secular. Ideally you'd seperate that too, in practice nowhere does.
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I agree, states and religions could just be the same kind of thing fundamentally.
The Arabic empire and Islam were at one point one and the same, before splitting apart. The USSR and communism were, at one point, virtually the same. Most communists took their opinions and marching orders from Moscow.
Only ideologies and religions as we know them don't have that territorial dimension of a state, they're not quite so powerful most of the time.
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The key word in your example is "state-funded". That isn't rival institutional power, that is basic capital command-flow. Very few taxpayers are happy with carte-blanche funding of anything, and few legislators would risk their reputation in such a way. There are some basic parameters of public-interest (I understand that such a term can be twisted, but it remains there in a functional system) that require enforcement (very disrespectful to my imagined Fraud-punk religion where committing fraud is cool).
Much of the contention that morphs the state into a civic church is the morphing of the word "public-interest" to become anything you can imagine, so long as it is dressed in anti-discrimination language (see below for why).
Neoreactionaries have identified the modern civic-religion in the US as having been conceived with the Civil Rights Act which goes far-beyond state-funded entities:
State-sanctioned Racial-districting, private businesses can't freely associate if that includes turning away members of a specific race from their business, neighborhoods cannot limit who purchases homes in an area.
Basically it's the point at which the constitution morphs away from being a limiter on state-power. Now the state can enter and enforce its religion anywhere where a civil-rights grievance can be claimed.
In Europe, the encroachment is a bit more baked-in: For instance, Germany simply outlaws home-schooling outright. This is fairly insane from the perspective of an American: nobody is free to educate their child outside of the state.
Arguably the ability to educate your children away from state-propaganda is a God-given right.
In fact there is the case of a German homeschooling family (The Romeike family) obtaining deferred-status to stay in the US due to state-persecution in Germany. They were initially granted Asylum and then revoked by the Obama administration (An administration emblematic of upholding civic-religion).
The contrast between the traditional limited-government american legal view to grant asylum to such a family vs the civic-religion upholding Obama administration clarifies much: From the traditional american perspective, A victim of state-persecution is offered a lifeline by the US. From the perspective of the Obama administration, offering this family asylum validates apostasy from the German civic-religion which is disrespectful, being a fellow civic-religion.
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FYI, Pangram says this is 100% AI-generated.
Personally: if you're a human who had a human idea and used AI to put it into writing, please write in your own words. Maybe it can be intimidating when people write long-winded essays in perfect prose, but it really isn't necessary to contribute to this site. I wouldn't care even if you wrote broken (human) English.
Why AI writing is bad (even logic/philosophy writing like this) is complex and debatable enough that it would be a great top-level discussion. But at least, don't do it because it's borderline against the rules (yeah, a random comment you had no expectation of knowing being new here, it should really be in the sidebar).
Is that a vibes-based "100%" or does the figure reflect some real confidence estimate? Because the typo+awkward grammar in the very last sentence, if nothing else, seems very organically human to me.
FWIW, I also instantly clocked it as at least partially AI writing. Though I agree that it looks mostly like someone using AI as a helper as opposed to full AI, which is fine by me.
As an example this sentence and the follow-up: "So my ultimate question isn't "Is the State a religion?"—because clearly, it lacks the supernatural elements. Rather, my questions are: ..." This sounds exactly like what Chatgpt would write when I ask it to give me counterarguments to some random idea I had.
I don't mind if someone uses AI, even to produce a full draft of their comment; as long as what they publish is hand-written, or somewhat if they gave the AI a unique-enough prompt that nobody notices.
A big problem with AI is sameness. Echoed by this short blogpost, where someone looks up "100,000 whys" books on Amazon, and all the covers are indistinguishable. 1 of the covers would be interesting and acceptable, 100 are boring and the flaws stand out. Besides desensitization, sameness also leads to model collapse and its cultural equivalent: AI and humans need to experience diverse writing (including bad writing) in order to write better.
This is also why I don't really mind if AI is unnoticeable. Because, if my thesis is true that AI output has inhuman similarities no matter how it's prompted, eventually humans would begin to notice. I say "really mind" because the realization may happen too late, when subliminal desensitization and model collapse have already caused serious problems. But it's an improvement, because right now I see serious problems from AI output that is obvious at least to me.
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I passively clocked it as AI which is why I asked Pangram. Em-dash, "it's not X, it's Y", "here's the XYZ", very short paragraphs; if it had a couple of these tropes I wouldn't guess, but it's full of them.
It also has the high-level AI trope of being overly wordy. My understanding is that the main message is "Separation of church and state isn't fully possible, and the state is effectively its own church, because both church and state advocate and enforce their own morality, and sometimes these moralities conflict". That's one sentence, does the full 32-sentence comment add much else?
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This will be some an half-formed nonsense blatted out 5 minutes before going to bed but I think that one of the major innovations of western civilization, and a major driver of it's success was the development of a bright line distinction between the moral/religious world and the material. IE "Render unto Caesar that which is Ceasar's, and Render unto God that which is God's". It also seems to me that much of [current year] moral and political philosophy is organized around the of undoing this innovation as post-modernism is itself a reaction against the success of Western Civilization.
When discussing modern liberalism the state is best understood as a substitute for religion. Whether any given act is moral or immoral is entirely determined by politics not principle.
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