The Nominal Separation of Church and State: Difficulties at the Dinner Table

By: Casey Hammond

January 26, 2018

How Does Religion Promote Social Justice?

To the dismay of some of my friends and family, I can never leave politics and religion outside the dinner table. While I was home in Hamilton, Montana over winter break, I decided to begin contacting faith leaders and requesting interviews. There are 39 established churches in Hamilton representing a variety of Christian denominations, including Catholicism and Mormonism. The population of Hamilton is also less than 5,000 people. Consequently, the diversity of faith and its interpretation as such presents the townsfolk with a complex set of values and notions of morality that are of great interest to me. Although the United States Constitution mandates the separation of church and state institutionally, I am not remotely convinced that they can ever be truly kept apart.

Through these interviews, my goal was to better understand the concepts underlining the language different denominations and faiths employ as they speak to their laity directly or inadvertently about politics and policy: where are commonalities, contentions, and diversity, if any. Since theological language and the language of lived religion—i.e. what is actively lived outside the respective religious institutions—are different, the former being esoteric and the latter more experiential, I am curious how each impact communal dynamics in this small rural town in Montana. Reason being, humans are in fact religious and political creatures; in some form, we exhibit behavior that one would classify as either, if not both.

Unfortunately, over the break I was only able to interview two faith leaders. These faith leaders, one a Lutheran hospice pastor and the other a female pastor of a Lutheran congregation, are to married to each other. They expressed that as liberal, mainline Protestants in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America network, their theological and experiential understandings of God are minority ones within Hamilton. Their thoughts and experiences were nevertheless insightful and allowed me to gather more questions for future interviews. I inquired about their work and interactions with their conservative brothers and sisters. They both shared that while they may use the same language to describe their faith as their Pentecostal and evangelical counterparts, the reality of their language, the meaning, is fundamentally different. Thus, interdenominational stances on policy matters vary tremendously; even within such congregations, to no surprise, there are a breadth of partisan affiliations. Both the Lutheran pastors I interviewed affirmed this point: within their church, albeit institutionally liberal, you could find an assortment of partisan leanings. My two interviews, in sum, highlighted that political and religious identities are nuanced in which both are expressed and practiced. I am not surprised, but admittedly I am biased!

Continuing in that same vein, I suspect that when there is a wide spectrum of stances on how morality relates to politics and policy, we may arrive at points of contention and disagreement. This is evidenced by partisan disputes on policies concerning abortion, civil rights, and nuclear weapons. For instance, the Lutheran World Federation, per the Lutheran pastors I interviewed with, consistently lobbies for policies against the death penalty and for responsibly open immigration. But the female pastor further remarked that “At the level of preaching and teaching, we are after morality, and the basic values that lead towards policy.” In effect, these teachings and services can also influence how members of congregations view peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and members of different faith groups. That is, conservative leaders are likely to provide conservative-leaning teaching and services while liberal leaders are likely to do the opposite. Biases, while they can be somewhat contained, cannot be altogether eliminated. This point is clearly true! Think of any past presidential or congressional election: when was religion not brought up in some fashion? Poll data can even display trends in how religious affiliation can—but not always—correlate with political affiliation or voting patterns. If you are not convinced, please revisit the 2017 special election in Alabama. This essay thereby presumes that religious institutions and one’s faith leader, by some measure, have sway on one’s self-understanding relative to topics like morality, politics, and policy by playing critical roles in the construction and delivery of such messages to their laity.

It is my hope that this upcoming summer I can continue interviewing faith leaders and culminate this project with several transcripts that underscore the tremendous diversity of thought and morality even within a small town, perhaps suggesting how these realities have and continue to have an effect on conscious and unconscious social relations. If these truths are evident in such a small community, we can only imagine how these dynamics work in urban communities. Coupled together, it is exceedingly important to consider how interdenominational and/or interfaith activity in a given community, if present, could shape how religious doctrine is interpreted and conveyed to laypeople. No one can deny that the United States is a multidimensional, multireligious, ideologically diverse country, and how we define our relationships amongst one another unequivocally matters. Even so, we must recognize that a myriad of other confounding variables are at play here. I have purposefully omitted how social media, economics, family political associations, racial and ethnic identities, and gender identity (to name a few) could reasonably compete with the influence of faith leaders because the concern of this project is how religious institutions may inform the partisan views of their laity. Our views, respectively, do not form in vacuums; we do not have the capacity to inform ourselves on all subject matters. All things considered, democratic politics are strenuous, which only stresses why projects like this one and efforts to promote more discussion and deliberate, active listening are critical to maintain robust civil societies.

Which is why politics and religion will always be a struggle at the dinner table . . . But I am unapologetic.

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