Here I am about to do something terribly heretical. I am a thoroughly involved supporter of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Center For Inquiry, and the Secular Student Alliance, which all have support for church-state separation as a major plank in their platforms. And I think it’s pretty clear that this idea, at least in the currently popular and promoted interpretation, is incoherent.

The claim I’m taking aim at is this: Governments may promote claims on a wide variety of subjects, but not religion.

The difficulty with that thesis is this: religions make claims on a wide variety of subjects. Therefore, a government that goes around freely promoting claims on a wide variety of subjects is almost guaranteed to implicitly promote some religious commitments in the bargain.

This is an abstract argument, but it becomes very pressing in the face of specific cases. Before I talk about those, though, a second point: this idea is just plain weird, as its played out in the evolution-creation wars. In that context, it’s key alleged consequence has been “it is unconstitutional to tell religiously-motivated lies.” But why should this be unconstitutional when no one, to my knowledge, is proposing making it unconstitutional to teach jingoistic lies? If a school board were to institute a policy requiring that things like the Mexican-American War, the Indian wars, WWI, and Vietnam all be discussed in a highly misleading way so as to protect an idealized image of America, no one could sue on grounds of constitutionality, at least not church-state grounds. Some legal scholar might think up some other grounds, but I doubt such other grounds exist or else we wouldn’t be so reliant on the chruch-state argument in the evolution controversy. Why should this be?

Now buckling down to a specific example: Two months back, PZ noted a gay student support group had gotten in legal trouble because they went around saying some religions are more tolerant than others. PZ presents this as merely a reason to dislike church-state separation. But there’s actually something stronger suggested by this conclusion: schools shouldn’t be supporting tolerance for gays at all, because that contradicts some religious views. The only principled way to get out of this is to insist that the constitution allows the government to say that some religions are wrong in spite of preventing it from saying any religion is right. If we look at this from the point of the intent of the founders, it’s very doubtful: some were skeptical of orthodox religion, but none of them were that anti-religious. Probably they would have found such an idea so ridiculous it never would have crossed their minds; if it had no doubt there would be an explicit prohibition.

Ed Brayton has a similar example involving evolution and religion. Unlike the gay case, this one wasn’t successful, but only because of taxpayer standing grounds. Ed himself dismisses it as “absurd” since it only described what religions say about evolution. But this is one of those things that makes the author’s intent unmistakable even when it isn’t explicit. It’s the sort of thing that would appear on the GRE (which I’m studying for right now) with a “author suggests” or “implies” or “would probably agree” in the question, the question-writer feeling confident that the question left no room for subjectivity.

However, some of the worst examples come from the super-vocal proponents of theistic evolution. One line (which I can’t find a source for off the top of my head, would appreciate one in the comments) is that Intelligent Design must not be taught, because it contradicts the religious beliefs of liberal protestants. Supposing this is true, how can it possibly argued that teaching evolution is acceptable in spite of the fact that it contradicts the religious beliefs of conservative protestants?

Similarly, get a load of these quotes from Ken Miller, as complied by William Dembski. Dembski Tells his readers: “ask yourself where is the ‘theo’ in Miller’s ‘theoevo.’” As much as Dembski gets wrong on other things, he’s got a point here. The quotes indicate God had nothing to do with evolution, and indeed one asserts the truth of materialism. This clearly contradicts even many religious views of the relatively evolution-friendly sort. Contra Evolved and Rational, these really do seem to be denials, not mere failures of mention. And there’s no principled reason to make a scientific policy of never denying this but merely leaving them out. Should scientists say, of phlogiston, that they merely leave it out of their theories, rather than denying it exists? The alternative is just denying that the claim that God had a hand in evolution is a religious belief. The problems with that have been done to death by Dawkins’ writings and on the blogs, so here I’ll just say it ignores the reality of actual religions.

In spite of all this, there’s still room to argue that church-state separation is a good pragmatic measure, given the current religious landscape, even though it is impossible to apply consistently. But I won’t talk about that now–though I’ve got a post planned which will try to draw together that with related worries, so stay tuned.