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Notes -
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.
My model of religion and governance (laws, welfare, etc.) overlap but are ultimately different.
Abstractly, both religion and governance are a set of opinions (and speculations, and manners, and practices, etc.) that adherents follow. The difference is that religion is stricter but voluntary, while governance is more flexible but mandatory. Church is between government and individual: both impose their opinions for the individual's own good and that of others around them, but government's opinions are less tailored and more imposed (by consequences and physical force).
In simpler words: Church tells you how to live your life in detail, but there are multiple Churches and you choose one, then can ignore it without much consequence. Government tells you less (broadly-applicable rules, education, etc.) but you only have one, and better listen.
When I imagine government, I imagine things like laws/enforcement against murder and theft, welfare to provide bare-minimum necessities, education that is facts and widely-held opinions (like "don't murder or steal")...things that are widely-agreed-upon or can be justified by widely-agreed-upon axioms. When I imagine religion, I imagine more specific rules ("no sex before marriage"), specific prayers, specific celebrations (Christmas dinner), specific customs (crosses)...that aren't widely-agreed-upon or justified by widely-agreed-upon axioms (instead axioms like "divine beings said so"). Both are important: the lowest-common-denominator provided by government is necessary to prevent anarchy, but not sufficient for human flourishing, because most people need more tailored guidance, and a bit of coercion, than they can provide to themselves.
Everything described before is simultaneously managed by culture (even enforcement, informally). Religion is a culture given structure, while government is the intersection of many cultures, or a large culture, given structure.
Sure, there exist (or have existed) religions with minimal beliefs and Churches that carry out laws up to executing people; and laws that are personal and controversial and governments with minimal enforcement. There are (or were) places where Church is more of a government than the official government. There are Church-government hybrids. This is just how I define Church and government and imagine how they work, based on my perception of them in modern Western nations and how other define them.
When Church and government opinions overlap, the government's take priority. This is obviously true in practice, but also according to this model, because the government's opinions should be strictly more permissive; if Church is right and government is wrong, the government should be more flexible so it permits the Church.
Thanks for your answer—it made me realize something scary, though. You see the State as a neutral floor that permits religion to exist above it. But I actually see it as a moving ceiling. Because the State doesn't just stay at 'don't murder or steal'—it actively redefines what counts as acceptable public morality.
Today it says 'teach our civic values in your schools.' Tomorrow it says 'stop hiring based on your doctrines.' The day after, it says 'publicly stating your doctrine is hate speech.' Over time, that moving ceiling pushes religion out of the public square entirely, without passing an outright ban yet. Doesn't that become a slow jurisdictional takeover? Someday religion may be banned for limiting the State.
It's actually worse than that.
Aztec blood sacrifice is a legitimate religion. How should freedom of religion operate for people who wish to adhere to that religion? The answer, speaking plainly, is that it doesn't and can't, right here and now, not in some hypothetical "someday" far in the future. If we have a significant population that wants to seize outsiders and rip their hearts out, there's no way we're going to be able to coexist with that population long-term. Nor is there any principled distinction between their claim to toleration of religious practice or mine; there is, in fact, no objective definition of "harm", and yet there is no way to maintain society without enforcement against those inflicting harm; this enforcement will be both necessarily subjective and entirely indispensable.
The logic of the First Amendment assumes that the range of religions is much narrower than the observable range of religions, just as it assumes that the range of ideologies and of values is much narrower than the observable range of ideologies and values. When you get out past the borders of the range it was built for, the logic it runs on simply stops working. The fact is that you cannot actually run even a minimally-cohesive society if your population is too values-diverse to cooperate.
The comment above yours is still filtered.
I think your point is the most valuable in several good posts in this subthread. The more pluralist a society becomes, the less classical liberalism works for it. But America of all places is kind of in a bind on that front. A change in immigration policy might help us stop digging the hole we're in, but even that much is outside the Overton window.
That's one of the fundamental questions on the American right at present: Does classical liberalism necessarily produce a level of pluralism it cannot survive?
Fixed.
Speaking for myself, straightforwardly, obviously, unavoidably, yes.
Classical liberalism as it is commonly understood and described is built on axiomatic assumptions about the possible range of human values, and those assumptions are observably wrong because the observable range of human values is significantly wider. You can track the obvious cross-sectional ways in which those assumptions have decayed by degrees across our entire society over time, and how our institutions and social structures have decayed with them.
Classical Liberalism increases tolerance. Increased tolerance creates values-diversity, and then values-incoherence. Values incoherence creates conflict, which reduces tolerance. Perhaps this cycle can be retarded or bypassed in some ways or in some circumstances, but certainly classical liberalism cannot do it because it cannot even begin to adequately frame the problem. It believes tolerance is a moral precept, axiomatically, but Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept.
Absolutely. Classical liberalism doesn't account for evil, which is understandable since it's the little-autistic-kid-asking-why-not of political ideologies[0] (and why people who aren't autistic little kids, at least at heart, tend to run into trouble with it). The whole 'life/liberty/pursuit of happiness' thing is a pretty clear example of this; for evil women, pursuit of happiness involves oppressing men, vice versa, and etc. for any combination of ingroup and outgroup you like.
In other words, it's an ideology for/by Abel, and as such doesn't put much effort into protecting itself from Cain (or at least denies his ability to do wrong... and really, if Cain should murder him, what Abel has done is generally pleasing to God; what horrible afterlife consequences should he fear? Would it not be a sin for Abel to devote resources to self-defense against his brethren rather than his normal business?).
This cycle is usually retarded/bypassed by having so many resources that the limiting factor on their exploitation is manpower.
Or "$", for short.
You'll note that the pattern of classical liberalism within Western Great Powers tends to come with a new frontier and new technology to exploit it. This means that the population of those countries can get out of PvP mode (zero-sum) and go into PvE (positive-sum) mode, and once that happens, the people spec'd into PvP- the existing power structures- get pushed out because it's harder to rent-seek under these conditions. The US, for most of its history, has spent most of its time in PvE mode, and it shows- all of its cultural memes (including classical liberalism itself) are predicated on the PvE worldviews.
In a PvE environment, you actually can say "just build your own" and it not be in bad faith (and when PvPers say it today, they can't say it decoupled from the concept of PvE being the ideal- more proper snobs, stereotypically the Brits, have a different response to this; Americans will interpret this response as "no, because you're a nigger", because that's what it means). Values-incoherence is not something that can really be stopped if the ruling elements of a population wanted to[1], because if they did they'd be outcompeted by their enemies (internal or external) that did allow it.
Economic contractions, however, push the population towards PvP. Institutions become more powerful, rent-seeking becomes more important as a way to maintain personal wealth [which is where purity spirals come from, and in extremes, will cause the population to sell itself into more and more intense forms of slavery just to get a meal]. Values are mediated by those that still have resources, or can amass them, and those people would really hate if some other system that proved their values were wrong emerged (or allowed anyone the means or motivation to get around their resource monopolies)- hence why they wage holy war on them.
[0] As opposed to paternalist politics; these can be either mother-privileging (progressive) or father-privileging (progressive boogeyman/traditional). This is also what I'm generally trying to get at when I say "trads and progs are the same just with a different gender valence" and point out that liberalism and progressivism are very different things. One might even notice that paternalist politics are obsessed with fighting deontological evils (as a means to assert values-coherence); liberals only really have the consequential one (and as such can't assert values-coherence; "correct" is not a political identity).
[1] The one major exception to this is China, who declined to send colony ships anywhere specifically for this reason. What developed in the New World would fundamentally not be China any more, and unlike Europe they could afford to do this- they had everything they wanted at home. Which would remain true right up until they got curb-stomped by the English, and that was evidently only temporary.
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