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Comment by matrix87 | Hacker News Reader

There's a really good Yale lecture on this, kind of long but interesting nonetheless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcIuAJ-jaSg&t=0

He makes an interesting point in a subsequent lecture on Islam. Because Christianity was persecuted early on and was a distinct entity from the Roman government at first, this is reflected in the beliefs themselves (e.g. "Render unto Caeser what is his" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar), which later contributed to the modern concept of separation of church and state

On the other hand, Muhammad was not only a religious leader but a political one as well The religious framework and political framework were more tightly coupled, giving us the slightly different overlap you can see in Muslim countries even today

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While there's some truth to this, I think separation of church and state is stronger in the western tradition simply because the western empire had no political successor. Had, for example, the Carolingian empire persisted as the new Rome I believe separation of church and state would have been weaker in the west. As another example, the eastern empire did become more of a theocracy as mentioned in the first passage. I think separation of church and state is simply more likely among a constellation of petty kingdoms than it is within an empire.

It is more than a slight difference. It is a radical one and separation of church and state tends to be a lot more successful in countries that are historically Christian than others. Sometimes it may be a matter of law and constitution, sometimes the reality of politics (e.g. the rise of Hindutva in India). Even a lot of secular states (albeit undemocratic ones such as China) control religious beliefs. The one non-western country whose politics I know (Sri Lanka) gives the government a constitutional duty to promote the majority religion (Buddhism). That would be unthinkable here in the UK despite there being an established religion.

This article is very brief. For a more detailed accounts I recommend Dominion by Tom Holland. One of the two non-fiction books I read this year that I learned the most from (the other being Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, but that was narrower in that it helped me understand the US).

I have the feeling that we who've grown up in Western countries with ideas of separation of church and state tend to accept the status quo we've seen at face value, and not question so much whether it really is a separation of church and state.

I'm also from the UK where I think we're fairly proud of our separation of church and state. Then I moved to Germany and found it really weird - the state, to me, is bound to Christianity in a way that I found quite uncomfortable. For example:

    * The state collects a church tax. You only have to pay it if you're a registered Christian (and you can be a Christian without registering) but essentially a portion of your paycheck automatically goes to the church via the state.
    * To become a pastor or priest, or one of certain other religious roles in one of the official churches in Germany, you have to complete an exam set and managed by the state (a Staatsexamen).
    * In schools, Christian children get taught a special Christian course. In fairness, this is again opt-in, but it's again a state-set course taught by state-approved religious educators.

To me, this all feels wildly inappropriate for a nation that claims to have a separation of church and state. But to my wife, this is perfectly normal and a healthy separation between the two organisations. Meanwhile, she's horrified by the ties between church and state in the UK:

    * Many state schools are run by Christian organisations, or have explicitly religious board members. Moreover, state schools are expected to have a certain amount of Christian "collective worship" - typically, this means a children's hymn once a week during an assembly.
    * The state chooses bishops. Typically a shortlist is organised by the church, but the Prime Minister can (and has once in living memory) veto a candidate for political reasons. They are also involved in the selection of candidates, but less so.
    * The state still makes laws directly involving the church. One of the outcomes from the discussion on gay marriage was that, while gay marriage was legalised, the Church of England specifically was banned from performing those marriages, to make prevent issues where people might sue the CoE for discrimination. There are plenty of other more historical laws but this is probably one of the more egregious examples in modern times of the state legislating to control the church.

I think sometimes, growing up in the West, we accept the dogma of separation of state and religion without really asking how true that really is. In reality, Christianity is deeply intertwined with most European constitutions and state apparatuses. We just have a consistent blind spot for these cases, where they're a lot easier to see when viewing from afar.

It’s very simple. Neither Germany nor the UK have complete separation of church and state.

Nor does Finland. Finnish citizens default to having a small church tax deducted from their pay.

Canceling this tax is very easy. I thought the statement to sign might be something like "I don't want to pay church tax because I worship Satan and drink the blood of baby goats", but it is not like that at all. It is very neutral.

To me the point is that very few countries - if any - have true separation of religion and state, because religion is usually culturally embedded in a huge variety of ways. But it's easier to see the ways that the state upholds certain religious practices from the outside, because when you're inside the system, you don't notice that embedding fully.

The US is another good example of this: there is a constitutionally enshrined separation of church and state, but religion figures heavily in everything from money to the processes of Congress. From the outside, the US is a fundamentally Christian nation, but it seems like there are lot of people on the inside who see that differently.

Even in the US, at the time of the constitution, many states had state churches. It was just prevented at the federal level. So it’s entirely possible for Florida to reinstate a state church over Florida and be within it’s constitutional bounds.

The religious status of the people running the state is often enough evidence that the state and the church are unavoidably, mutually overlapping concepts.

> I think sometimes, growing up in the West, we accept the dogma of separation of state and religion without really asking how true that really is. In reality, Christianity is deeply intertwined with most European constitutions and state apparatuses.

I disagree. It is not complete, nor does anyone pretend it is, but it is far greater and fairer than in western countries than in the rest of the world (such as the examples I gave). Can you imagine the reaction if a British Prime Minister said that the Prime Minister should be a Christian? Or if we started arresting people for belonging to a non-state approved religion? Or parliament passed laws banning religious conversion? Or turned a bling eye to mod attacks on religious minorities?

The first and third in Germany would not bother me as they are opt-in. The second seems entirely wrong.

In the UK I do not find state schools being run by Christian organisations a problem, because it is not discriminatory - there are state schools run by other religions too. Collective worship is a weird law but compliance is not monitored and most schools do not actually do it, singing is not really a act of worship, parents can opt children out, older children can opt themselves out, and in religious schools it is their religion (actually, these are the ones which will have an actual act of worship).

I do agree we should have greater separation between the state and the church of England. On the other hand there are benefits to it. I think C of E bishops in the House of Lords broadens representation in politics beyond the political class (they have a good track record of speaking up for the poor), and even more so as representatives of other denominations religions are included (e.g. two of the last three Chief Rabbis) although not enough IMO.

You seem to have gotten it backwards. "Render unto Caesar" is a passage in Scripture (which the wikipedia article you've linked to mentions), and so it came before the Roman persecution of Christians occurred. From its founding, Christianity made the distinction between secular and religious authority/institution. (There is nothing that says a pope or a bishop cannot also be a king or a prince. They simply have authority in both, analogous perhaps to how one can be a king in one country, and a prince in another, or whatever. But they are two distinct forms of authority, and one is technically subject to the other.)

This separation of the institutions of Church and State is indeed only comprehensible in the prior distinction, but separation is, strictly speaking, a heretical notion. Liberalism (which is a Christian heresy) is merely tolerated by the Church, provided it does not encroach on the authority of the Church and the practice of the faith. If that ends, the modus vivendi is violated, and the truce is broken, and war has effectively been declared on the Church.

With respect to Islam, it isn't that Muhammad was both a political and a religious leader, but that there is simply no distinction between the two in Islam. That's why it makes no sense to speak of the separation of Mosque and State. The only reason you can distinguish between Church and State is because they're both institutions. A mosque is not an institution. It's just a building used for prayer and such. This distinction between Church and State is utterly foreign to Islam and the rest of the non-Christian world.

That separation of church and state was always a factor in middle ages Europe - it meant that power was fragmented between the church and state and was broadly a liability once disasters of the middle ages unfolded. After the rise of Liberalism and the rise of the nation-states that separation became an advantage for European states and a huge competitive disadvantage to theocratic states.

I'm not downvoting you, but I do disagree with your hypothesis.

In Europe religious power was heavily conflated with political power. Rome, through Catholisism, remained the symbol of political legitimacy well into the Middle ages, and into the modern day.

Especially in England where the Catholic / Protestant battle raged one way and other for hundreds of years, determining who should be king/queen, who the aristocracy were, who were worshiping in secret and so on.

In our time we see this playing out in Northern Ireland, where issues of nationalism (English, Irish) are proxied into issues of religion (Catholic and Protestant).

The concept of separation of church and state would happen in the US specifically because most immigrants there were fleeing state-sponsored religious persecution. They wished to create a place of religious tolerance, which alas has been somewhat imperfect in execution.

> which later contributed to the modern concept of separation of church and state

I call this "jumping to conclusions". And I find this idea quite uneducated in history, frankly.

There's a time lapse of almost 1200 years between the fall of Rome and the formulation of separation of church and state.

More to the point, prior to this concept there was the Reformation and the savage and brutal religious wars in Europe during 16th and 17th century.

Separation of church and state came to solve a practical political problem: insane wars.

Yes, there were wars in the Muslim world too. Even some religious ones (Shia vs. Sunis). But, unlike the Europeans, Muslins never cared to create a philosophical theory of the state (perhaps because Gutenberg wasn't Muslim).

> And I find this idea quite uneducated in history, frankly.

He literally linked you to a lecture by a professor teaching his history course at Yale. Disagreeing is interesting, but “uneducated”?

> And I find this idea quite uneducated in history, frankly.

You can write a letter to:

Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University.

    Freedman earned his BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MLS from the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in History at Berkeley in 1978. His doctoral work focused on medieval Catalonia and how the bishop and canons interacted with the powerful and weak elements of lay society in Vic, north of Barcelona. This resulted in the publication of The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia (1983).

    Freedman taught for eighteen years at Vanderbilt University before joining the Yale faculty in 1997. At Vanderbilt, he focused on the history of Catalan peasantry, papal correspondence with Catalonia and a comparative history of European seigneurial regimes. He was awarded Vanderbilt’s Nordhaus Teaching Prize in 1989 and was the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center Fellow there in 1991-1992. During that time, he published his second book, Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (1991).

    Since coming to Yale, Professor Freedman has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in History, Director of the Medieval Studies Program, Chair of the History Department, and Chair of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine He has offered graduate seminars on the social history of the Middle Ages, church, society and politics, and agrarian studies (as part of a team-taught course).

https://history.yale.edu/people/paul-freedman

You might disagree, of course, he appears to be educated in history .. and detailed aspects of christian church history for what it's worth.

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