At the Washington Post's On Faith site, the current debate among religious leaders and civil liberty advocates is about the prominence of religious ceremony on display at formal occasions like the impending royal wedding, despite the growing secularism of English society. The Baptist Joint Committee's Brent Walker chimes in with an important question: how and why did this secularism grow in the first place?
One reason is that established religion – here the privileging of the Church of England – sows the seeds of its own attenuation. State support for religion tends to rob religion of its vitality and, for some, turns it into a mere ceremonial exercise.
This is one reason why I object so strongly to efforts in the United States to use tax dollars to support religious education and church ministries, allow officially sanctioned prayer in the public schools, and tolerate government-sponsored religious symbols.
Indeed. When the institutions of government and those of the church grow entwined, the legitimacy of each becomes questionable, the former in its mission to protect the liberty of all citizens, and the latter in its need to hold accountable the powerful on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised, and to allow the faithful a true decision of conscience free of coercion.
