Secular government

“ They solemnly agreed that the new nation should not belong to any particular church, but that it should secure the rights of all.
Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword; that it should be allowed only to exert its moral influence. ”

“ No secular government, worthy of mention in history, has ever been instituted in a region so dreary and inhospitable as that from whence the most powerful and practical forms of faith that have ever enthralled humanity deduce their origin. ”

“ I want you to know and feel it that I want to do everything I can to get every one of these statutes off our books that discriminates against a man because of his religious belief—that I am in favor of a secular government, and of all these rights. ”

“ We may have Christianity with a certain form of human government in America, but if the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the rights implied in the national constitution are to survive, then we cannot have Christianity in this land.
The next conflict in our nation is to be between secularism and ecclesiasticism, between men who love liberty and priests who uphold tyranny, between the lovers of our republic and the foes of secular institutions. ”

“ The Church may not wish to interfere in the purely secular concerns of other States, or in the enactment of purely secular laws, for the government of foreign subjects, but she claims a right, and a right divine, to prevent any secular law, or power, being exercised for the injury of religion, the destruction of morals, and the spiritual ruin of her children. ”

“ I conclude that, in using sectarian institutions to further goals in secular education, the three statutes do violence to the principle that
government may not employ religious means to serve secular interests, however legitimate they may be, at least without the clearest demonstration that nonreligious means will not suffice. ”

“ But though the point may be conceded in regard to secular government, in ordering of which the constitutions and customs and mere pleasure of communities may be allowed to establish what is not morally evil ”

“ The government does not discriminate against any citizen on the basis of the citizen's religious faith if the government is secular in its functions and operations. On the contrary, the Constitution mandates that the government remain secular, rather than affiliate itself with religious beliefs or institutions, precisely in order to avoid discriminating among citizens on the basis of their religious faiths.
A secular state, it must be remembered, is not the same as an atheistic or antireligious state. A secular state establishes neither atheism nor religion as its official creed. ”

“ We will not so dishonor the church or insult religion as to undertake to refute these popular charges against her, and to prove that her authority is not incompatible with the existence and salutary working of republican government. The charges are addressed to ignorance and prejudice; we take higher ground, and maintain that civil society can no more dispense with the church, than the body with the soul. The secular is insufficient for itself, and needs the informing life and vigor of the spiritual. ”

“ They teach that no government but the ecclesiastical has a divine origin; that secular government is a thing profane and tyrannical which God permits to be imposed upon His people as a kind of trial or persecution; that the people are not in conscience bound to obey the secular law or to pay taxes; that the imposts and public subventions are, for the most part, iniquitous and unjust, and that the princes who impose these have in many cases been excommunicated, and that because of such excommunication of princes, death, want, and other public misfortunes have come upon their communities. ”

“ Catholics in old Catholic nations have needed, and perhaps still need, to learn that this church can subsist and conquer the world without any external support of the secular government, but that secular government cannot subsist and discharge properly its duties to society without the church. ”

“ In view of this fact it is not surprising that the state, which is the symbol of secular society, should be drawn to usurp the functions of the church, the symbol of the spiritual order. As a result of this tendency, pre-christian history shows us a universal subordination of religion to the temporal government, or, what is practically the same, the identification of the two powers; since, where both are united, that which regards man’s present, visible, and urgent wants will always preponderate. ”

“ The Catholic clergy proving a hindrance to the government in the application of its new catechism, the law on secular instruction was passed to force them out of the schools: the state, henceforth sole master, can form at the will of Cæsar, not Christians, but soldiers or slaves, which are more in accordance with its taste—all that is taught being made to converge to the one end of blind and absolute submission to secular power. ”

“ It is enough for me that the States and the Federal Government are financing a separable secular function of overriding importance in order to sustain the legislation here challenged. That religion and private interests other than education may substantially benefit does not convert these laws into impermissible establishments of religion. ”

“ The long, unedifying history of the contest between the secular state and the church is replete with instances of attempts by civil government to exert pressure upon religious authority. Religious leaders have often made gestures of accommodation to such pressures. History also indicates that the vitality of great world religions survived such efforts. In any event, under our Constitution it is not open to the governments of this Union to reinforce the loyalty of their citizens by deciding who is the true exponent of their religion. ”

“ All laws defining and punishing blasphemy—making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men.
70. Government Secular
Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. ”

“ This State can only redeem itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit. ”

“ Nor can We hope for happier results either for rehgion or for the civil government from the wishes of those who desire that the Church be separated from the State, and the concord between the secular and ecclesiastical authority be dissolved. It is clear that these men, who yearn for a shameless hberty, Hve in dread of an agreement which has always been fraught with good, and advantageous alike to sacred and civil interests. ”

“ For here, after he has claimed credit for his church as the champion of a secular education, he tells the Congress that secularism is one of the great dangers of the age, against which the church must fight with all her strength. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” It must be fought “by the church, and eminently by our own church. Our duty therefore is to fit ourselves for the encounter, and we must do this with the cause of religion, undertaking in its breadth and embracing all branches of religious, spiritual, and ethical culture.” ”

“ No one had heard or taught, nor did anyone know anything concerning the secular authority, whence it came, what its office or work was, or how it should serve God. The most learned men—I will not name them—looked upon the secular power as a heathen, human and ungodly thing, as a state dangerous to salvation.... ”

“ Where there exists such discrimination against any religious sect, or where any one sect is favored or sustained by the government, there of course is no religious equality, although there may be religious freedom. Progress in this direction, then, has consisted in the growth of a really tolerant spirit, which has led to the removal from Catholics, Protestant dissenters, and Jews all civil disabilities, and the placing of all sects on an absolute equality before the law. ”

“ That is the line we draw, and when men step beyond that, then the secular law ought to step in and protect people in the exercise of their rights, and from the designs and wicked acts of those who seek to infringe upon them. ”

“ On the other hand, aside from envy, jealousy, and greed, there were reasons why some of the men in authority honestly believed a change in the Mission system of administration would be advantageous to the natives, the Church, and the State.
There is a good as well as an evil side to the great subject of "secularization." In England the word used is "disestablishment." In the United States, to-day, for our own government, the general sentiment of most of its inhabitants is in favor of what is meant by "secularization," though of course in many particulars the cases are quite different. ”

“ We have guaranteed freedom of conscience, or diversity of religious belief, but they confront us with the charge of heresy on account of it, and openly avow their purpose to destroy this guarantee by employing the combined powers of Church and State to unify their own religion, to the exclusion of all others, by laws above and superior to our Constitution. We have secured freedom of speech and of the press, and have provided for civil marriages, and for the secular education of our children at the public expense ”

“ But there is a very important question for the American people to ask themselves. With the multiplicity of sects, the growing indifference to religion, and the political atheism consciously or unconsciously fostered by a large portion of the secular press and but feebly resisted by the religious press, will they be able to reserve the freedom and independence of the spiritual order, or protect the equal rights on which our political institutions are founded? ”

“ Because, it will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion, has produced amongst its several sects. Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinions. Time has at length revealed the true remedy. ”

“ Accordingly, the Catholic Church has always, and in the most positive manner, inculcated obedience to secular authority as a duty and a matter of conscience, and has opposed and condemned those who taught the contrary. Only if the secular authority commands anything which is actually sinful, one must obey God and the Church rather than men. ”

“ But we do mean that, outside of the Catholic Church and those who sympathize with our views on this subject, there is no body whose representatives are not biassed in their plan for common education by prejudice or hostility toward some other body.
With what utter disregard for the rights of conscience the infidel and atheistic faction coolly avows its purpose to enforce a secular and irreligious education upon all the people—a system known to be no less antagonistic to the spirit of our democratic institutions than hostile to the religious convictions of Catholics as well as Protestants! ”

“ Every Protestant creed, sectary or conclave, is a perpetual source of mutual jealousy, animosity and persecution, The same intolerant spirit breathes its malignancy over the pages of the religious press. "If we are not Christians," says the Church Union, "let us make no hypocritical pretensions of founding governments on Christian principles. If we are, I believe that they should predominate over our whole life; let us have them incorporated in the basis of our government, and the national policy shaped by them. ”

“ The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for politics and power. You simply cannot establish the brotherhood of men while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God.
Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will lead to peace. ”

“ That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends instead on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine. ”

“ But the point to be noted here is that all these charges assume the supremacy of the secular order, and allege not that the church is false, is not the church of God, but that she is hostile to democracy or democratic institutions; in other words, that she does not conform to popular opinion, for democracy is nothing but popular opinion erected into law. ”

“ There should be no secular interference in sacred things; no laws to suppress or establish any church or sect in religion, no religious persecutions, tests, or 420disqualifications; the different sects should be left to inveigle and hate each other as much as they please; but without the love of exclusive domination and spiritual power there would be little temptation to bigotry and intolerance. ”

“ Ecclesiastical authorities, for example, would be the first to welcome a repeal of legislation as regards heresy; but, on the other hand, we fully recognize the right of a secular State to protect itself, even by the death penalty, against those who threaten the existence of the sanctions on which a secular State takes its stand. We recognize her right, I say; but I do not mean by that that you will not find a majority of ecclesiastics who hold that it is, to put it mildly, a deplorable policy and very imperfectly Christian. ”