Believing and thinking |
Believing and thinking
The separation of church and state has an unspoken psychological basis: we choose what we believe, but not what we think
by Neil Van Leeuwen & Jacob Eisler BIO
Fryeburg, Maine, US. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
is professor of philosophy at Florida State University, where he specialises in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is the author of Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (2023) and a recipient of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Fellowship. His research has been covered in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times, among others.
is the James Edmund and Margaret Elizabeth Hennessey Corry Professor at Florida State University College of Law, where he specialises in constitutional law and law of democratic process. He is the author of The Law of Freedom: The Supreme Court and Democracy (2023), which won the 2024 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the AALS Election Law Section.
Edited byRichard Fisher
The idea of separating church and state – now entrenched in many modern liberal democracies – is in some ways strange. After all, governments must keep themselves informed and inform their citizens. That’s why they turn to the science of meteorology to predict weather patterns, to economics to understand patterns of growth and decline, and to the medical sciences to improve public health. So why wouldn’t governments also keep close alliances with religious institutions to know what’s going on with God?
Separating church and state appears strange from other perspectives as well. In the historical sweep of large-scale human societies, it’s a relative newcomer, often associated with the United States’ founding father Thomas Jefferson. In 1802, Jefferson asserted the principle of separation in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God … that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
We’re fans of Jefferson’s principle, one of us (Neil Van Leeuwen) being a philosophy professor who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, and the other (Jacob Eisler) being a law professor who regularly attends synagogue. But Jefferson’s letter makes putting the principle into practice sound simpler than it is – as though governments could be entirely hands-off when it comes to people’s beliefs, or ‘opinions’. That, however, can’t be right: engaging with and shaping political, social and other kinds of beliefs is actually a core function of government. Public education guides what people believe about everything from mathematics to history to astronomy. Governments also shape beliefs for policy reasons. If fire department officials learn that people believe a building is safe when it isn’t, they will try to change what people believe about the building’s safety. Belief is also a category of legal interest. If a psychotherapist, for example, believes a patient is a danger to himself or others, the therapist is obligated by law to report that belief.
All this means that Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ can’t sensibly prohibit governments from intervening on beliefs of any type whatsoever. Rather, Jefferson – along with advocates of the principle who came after him – must have presupposed that there is something distinctive about religious beliefs that makes it reasonable to give them a different legal status.
But what is this distinctive thing? Is it that religious beliefs concern God? No, because Buddhism is a religion with its own beliefs, yet Buddhism has no supreme deity. Is it that religious beliefs concern the supernatural generally? No, because many superstitions that aren’t part of a religion concern the supernatural too. Is it that religious beliefs concern morality, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould once suggested? No, because many religious beliefs aren’t about morality, and many moral beliefs aren’t religious. In any case, any system of government must presuppose some moral beliefs – eg, that murder is wrong – to be a government at all. These considerations might make one despair of articulating the psychological distinction of interest – what’s different about religious ‘belief’? – that’s needed to make sense of separating church and state in the first place.
Such attempts at characterising religious belief fail, we think, because they focus on belief contents, or what the believing is about. But since any given idea can be believed in a religious way or not, that won’t work. Our suggestion, then, is that religiously believing is a different attitude from ordinary matter-of-fact believing – a different way of relating to ideas – and that this is what’s distinctive about religious belief. In other words, sacralising an idea is different from just taking it to describe how things are. Furthermore, empirical research in cognitive science and anthropology of religion, along with accompanying philosophical analysis, can help reveal characteristic features of the difference in attitude we’re after. To have specific terms, we call that the difference between religious credence and factual belief. Understanding this difference, we’ll see, helps make sense of Jefferson’s wall of separation, and supports the rationale for separating church and state in liberal democracies more generally.
Whatever they are, ‘beliefs’ come in different varieties. The word ‘belief’ is polysemous – meaning it can refer to a range of different-but-related things – and it subsumes a motley crew: from humdrum factual beliefs (say, about where the ice-cream store is) to superstitions (like those found in astrology), and from moral beliefs about murder to philosophical beliefs about how ‘all is one’. As mentioned earlier, beliefs can also be categorised by their contents (what is the belief about? Is it about politics? Or maybe about a probable scientific theory?) Or by the attitude they embody (how does a person relate to given ideas or contents?) Here, however, we focus on the differences between matter-of-fact believing and religious credence as distinct ways in which people process ideas. There are, of course, more varieties of belief-like attitudes. But we home in on factual belief and religious credence since the differences in those attitudes matter most to the psychology of separating church and state.
Ethnographies of religion, like the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back (2012), feature the........