Bodhaka: On the Separation of Church and State

So I just finished reading (quicker than I'd like to, but that's school work for you), this really interesting book by Philip Hamburger called Separation of Church and State. Although perhaps its a little long for light reading (almost 500 pages, omg!)... it wasn't too complicated to understand. Pretty much, what Hamburger's main argument is (spoiler alert!) is that Thomas Jefferson's famous interpretation of the "wall between the seperation of church and state" within the first amendment is just that: an interpretation, created in a letter to a group of Baptists in Connecticut who had written to the sitting president. What Hamburger does, is trace this idea of "separation of church and state" from the 17th through the 20th centuries and what it meant from its anti-clergical and anti-establishment origins (freedom of to practice your own sect of Protestantism), to its anti-Federalist political mobilization by Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans to protect attacks against Jefferson and to target Congregationalist New England, its anti-Catholic agenda in the 1800s, and its official legitimization by the Supreme Court in the 20th Century as a "fact" of the Constitution and the Founding Father's intention (although it clearly wasn't, given the history).

As many of my readings on American religion have done, this book helps me to continuously reconsider the dichotomies that exist in the American conception of religion and its supposed opposing force: secularism. Unabashedly being forever scarred by Catherine Bell's theories of ritualization she establishes in her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (in a good way, I swear!), where Bell suggests that we rethink the idea of ritual not as an object, but rather as an idea in motion: a process of ritualization. It is in this same way, through my critique this past winter of the Journal of Religion and American Culture and even considering this book, I'd like to think of these supposed American religious dichotomies: not as opposing forces, but rather as ideas in motion, constantly creating and recreating each other. I almost think this was the idea that Hamburger was trying to get at (though I could be wrong, I tend to read in my ideas into books). I think just to close out the thought, I'm going to just paste the end of my response paper...it comes to the conclusion of the idea I'm trying to consider and work through (sorry if it repeats what I had said about Bell):

Keeping all this in mind, it seems almost foolish to consider the United States as anything more or less than a Christian nation, and a Protestant one at that. However, still in our modern mythology of our secular-ness, Jefferson’s letter has been mapped upon the Constitutional law, and the intention of our founders seen as a purely secular one. This idea has worked with the dichotomies that also are drawn upon when considering Church/State, such as private/public, religious/secular, and Protestant/Catholic. In his conclusion, Hamburger states that “no state or church can develop its laws and beliefs in a cultural vacuum, separate from the other institutions in society” (489). With this in mind, as well as Hamburger’s entire history of the separation of Church and State, perhaps we should reconsider secularism as a fluid idea as opposed to an objectified one (a la Catherine Bell’s idea of “ritualization”). That if the separation of church and state has never been a static and rigid separation of religion and secularism, of public and private, perhaps we should stop considering secularism as opposed to religion, but rather as working in fluid motion with it: “Ironically even as religion has been separated from politics, politics has become, in a sense religious” (491). Church and state is perhaps not separated by a ridged wall, as Jefferson mused in his letter, but rather a porous wall.