What happens when separation of church and state is dissolved, when the church becomes the state?

We don’t have to wonder because history has centuries of experience with monarchs and despots claiming divine rights and demanding that all under their thumb adhere to their “faith” and hordes willing to kill or die to keep that faith. But only a couple of hundred years have passed in which citizens have had the freedom to follow their own faith or no faith.

I’m thinking that Thomas Jefferson might have been recalling the Salem witch trials when he coined the phrase “Separation of Church and State” and when George Washington wrote to the congregation of Touro Synagogue in 1790: “to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance – but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”

The chipping away of the wall separating church and state was obvious with the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, which basically allowed a soulless corporation to claim a religious conscience in order to be waived from its obligation to subsidize a woman’s contraception, as required under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This court has been more brazen in requiring the state of Maine to spend public money on parochial school and then to defend a coach who prayed on the field.  The decision paved the way for teachers, coaches and others to lead their impressionable charges and use their power and authority, in Christian prayer, overturning decades of rulings prohibiting school prayer.

I just got back from Europe where nations have histories going back more than 1,000 years, not 250 years. We are an infant nation in comparison. What is notable is Europe’s constant state of war, mainly over religion or rather that was the justification, with monarchs claiming their divine right to have life-and-death control over their subjects. And the sheeple fell for it!

Turning everything into a religious war was recognized as a great tactic to keep political power 50 years ago in our ostensibly “We the people” democracy, too. That was the first time that women’s reproductive freedom (and antagonism to the Equal Rights Amendment) was adopted by the Religious Right to strip away voters from the Democratic Party. (What is common to fundamentalism of all stripes is oppression of women.)
White Supremacists used Christianity to justify slavery and Indian genocide (heathens are savages, nonhumans, after all).

Immigration and labor policies were turned into religious wars – have you noticed that the only immigrants Attorney General Andrew Palmer deported in the 1920s were Jews (like Emma Goldman), notably because Jews were leading the fight for unions and workers’ rights? It’s why the revered auto industrialist Henry Ford was such a rabid anti-Semite, using his newspaper to publish the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which fomented the myth of a Jewish cabal taking over the world. That screed has resurfaced in QAnon (Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish lasers). You can see the tactics of religious bigotry as an instrument of political power in the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s new exhibit, “The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do.”

It’s why capitalists and evangelists made common cause to turn climate change into a religious crusade, similarly with masks and vaccinations to mitigate a deadly pandemic: to use blind faith and unquestioning acceptance to keep their own economic power and political control.

Orthodoxy is used to perpetuate caste systems and inequity. Karl Marx (a German Jew) hit it on the head when he called religion the “opiate of the masses”– the means by which people are supposed to be content with their miserable lot, expecting to claim their reward in the after-life.

Former President Trump overturned the law that kept tax-exempt religious centers from using their power over congregants to politicize the pulpit (while also cozying up to Neo- Nazis and giving permission and legitimacy to political terrorism). So you have evangelicals basically equating Democrats with Satanists and threatening their congregants with damnation.

“You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation,” declared Global Vision Bible Church Pastor Greg Locke, who called Hillary Clinton “a high priestess in the Satanic church,“ The Tennessean reported May 20. Evangelical Christian Pastor Perry Stone claimed Democratic lawmakers “have demons in them,” Newsweek reported.

If anyone doubts America’s slide to White Christo Fascism, consider this:

In Tennessee, a court ruled in favor of a tax-supported Holston United Methodist Home for Children, which deemed a Jewish couple unfit to foster a child. Why unfit? Because they were Jewish.

“In January 2020, Republican Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill effectively allowing Christians the ‘religious freedom’ to discriminate against whomever they deemed non-Christians,” Daily Kos reported July 7. “The bill was designed most obviously to allow Christian organizations to discriminate against LBGTQ+ parents but had the added bonus, in Holston United Methodists’ eyes to discriminate against other religions as well.”

Ohio State Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur (R-Ashtabula) advanced a bill that would require teaching “both sides” to the Holocaust. (In case you forget, the “Final Solution” was state-sponsored mass-murder on an industrial scale. What would be the “other side”?)

Meanwhile, the Jewish Federation of San Antonio had to suspend all formal Jewish gatherings following a warning by the FBI, the Express News reported.

“A new wave of right-wing candidates is explicitly aiming to promote Christian power in America, with many mixing religious fervor with conspiracy theories, and even calling for the end of separation of church and state,” The New York Times reported. (See: The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: “We Are Seeing Them Emboldened,” July 8)

The separation of church and state was a “myth,” Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor, declared. “In November we are going to take our state back, my God will make it so.”

And the radical, extremist, reactionary Christo Fascist Supreme Court majority seems eager to comply.

How long before employers and universities are again allowed to exclude non-Christians from jobs, college, housing, country clubs? It wasn’t too long ago that was A-OK and if the Christo Fascists Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have their way, they will selectively pick that history to justify religious “preference.”

“Like all Americans, American Jews rely on the separation of church and state to ensure our freedom of religion and our freedom from government involvement or coercion in our religious practice. Separation of church and state is essential to our democracy and to the well-being of our society,” said Temple Bethel of Great Neck’s new senior rabbi, Brian Stoller, in an email response.