Blurring the Line of Separation: Education, Civil Religion, and Teaching about Religion

Americans need to be reminded that the separation of church and state, the delineation of the political from the religious realm, is not the inevitable outcome of man's natural predisposi tions. Since separation seems to Americans to be not only the correct arrangement but also the obvious one, they tend to assume that it is simply the natural order of things. It strikes Americans as puzzling—indeed a problem needing explanation—that some societies have gotten matters so unaccountably turned round as to confuse politics and religion. The testimony of anthropology and history, however, points in the opposite direction. It is the American arrangement and the American assumptions that need explanation, for the natural tendency of primitive and archaic man was to think of religion as permeating every aspect of life, including the political. Work, play, communal activities, and decision making were all invested with a sacred character; every thing was enswathed in the numinous presence of the gods. Among historic peoples, the tendency to amalgamate the religious and the political has expressed itself repeatedly and in a multi tude of different forms from the sacred kingship of ancient Egypt, through Robespierre's Republic of Virtue, down to the present day theology of liberation.1