Religion in Government
Posted on December 17, 2007
by: Big Jar
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to a lecture series on European History in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each lecture focuses on the life of some monumental figure during this time period, from monarchs (Catherine the Great) and military leaders (Napoleon), to composers (Wagner) and writers (Samuel Johnson).
Anyway, I was listening to the lecture on Queen Victoria this morning, and the professor prefaced her biography with an explanation of the religious element in Victorian politics. In 19th century England, Jews could not hold positions in Parliament or receive government appointments. This rankled the chops of a Parliamentary Whig named Thomas Babington Macaulay who implored his colleagues to eradicate this prohibition in a famous speech. The professor quoted a portion of his speech, and it made me think a lot about Mitt Romney, the current president, and the collective amnesia of Americans when it comes to the separation of church and state. I’ve had conversations with a few dedicated Christians who don’t understand why a secular government is important. I think Sir Babington sums it up nicely below:
We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief object. If there is any class of people who are not interested, or who do not think themselves interested, in the security of property and the maintenance of order, that class ought to have no share of the powers which exist for the purpose of securing property and maintaining order. But why a man should be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays instead of going to the church on Sundays, we cannot conceive. The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism have very much to do with a man’s fitness to be a bishop or a Rabbi. But they have no more to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, a legislator, or a minister of finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. Nobody has ever thought of compelling cobblers to make any declaration on the true faith of a Christian. Any man would rather have his shoes mended by a heretical cobbler than by a person who had subscribed all the thirty-nine articles, but had never handled an awl. Men act thus, not because they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not see what religion has to do with the mending of their shoes. Yet religion has as much to do with the mending of shoes as with the budget and the army estimates. We have surely had several signal proofs within the last twenty years that a very good Christian may be a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer.
I don’t know if you can consider George W. Bush a “good Christian”, but the irony of that ending sentence certainly doesn’t escape me.
The full speech can be found here.
Comments
One Response to “Religion in Government”
Leave a Reply
Great post. well done.