Nation's cultural discourse enriched by religion

As president of one of our nation's Christian universities, I have a great deal of interest in the flurry and fury of recent public debate on the issue of separation of church and state. I believe it is critical to the health of our civic life in America today, and to the influence we may have in an emerging world, to get this concept right.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of school vouchers in Cleveland. The Washington State Supreme Court rules summarily against the ACLU in its effort to block the use of state grants at private colleges and universities. The Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rules against the Pledge of Allegiance because it invokes the name of God. These are wildly divergent and significant rulings, and I think we are in the midst of a profound, culture-shaping discussion on what role, if any, religion should play in shaping our society.

The concept of separation of church and state grows out of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Basically, the religion clauses of this amendment say that government has no business deciding how religion should be established or practiced, but it has a major responsibility to ensure that religion is freely exercised and expressed. There is a healthy tension here.

But we sometimes imagine the debate has only two extremes. As Jeffrey Rosen said recently in The New York Times: "On the left, there are the separationists, who want to prohibit any traces of religion in public life.... On the right, there are religious supremacists, who believe government can provide direct aid to religion.... " While I do not believe in direct state aid to support religion, nor do I support such things as mandating prayer in public schools, nevertheless, do we really want the other extreme where any trace of religion is banished from public life? Is that what the First Amendment intends? Is that a good thing for our society?

Yale law professor Stephen Carter says "the metaphorical separation of church and state originated in an effort to protect religion from the state, not the state from religion. The religion clauses of the First Amendment were crafted to permit maximum freedom to the religious."

How then did we get to the place where Michael Newdow, the person who sued to remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, thought he could bring a federal suit as well to prohibit President Bush from making any reference to God in his speeches? In this view, if the First Amendment means that something like the Pledge of Allegiance is an act of coercion, it must also mean that those who are religious have no right to speak freely in the public square.

The ACLU brought its case against the state of Washington seeking to disallow the choice of needy students to use a state grant to attend one of our state's private colleges or universities. A number of these institutions are religious, and many of them have religious roots. And so beneath the legal, constitutional surface of this suit, there was a strong separationist bias.

The ACLU seemed to argue, that should any of our colleges or universities be influenced in any way by religious thought, then we are somehow suspect as institutions of higher learning. We must be indoctrinating our students. We are pervasively controlled by a church. We could not possibly think freely, or conduct scholarly business with the highest regard for academic freedom. We had to be secularized before students with grants could be allowed to choose our institutions.

Of course, nothing in these assumptions could be further from the truth, and thankfully in June the state Supreme Court dismissed the ACLU's strict separationist contentions. These private institutions make an enormous contribution to a healthy system of higher education in our state. Most of these schools — there were nine of us named in the suit — have served this state with distinction for over a hundred years. We educate close to 25 percent of all undergraduate students in the state, graduating leaders, providing helpful research and scholarship.

Because some of us have decidedly religious roots, with ongoing commitments to our faith traditions, the strict separationists tried to push us to the margins. Had this happened, the quality of higher education and diversity of public discourse in this state would have been sadly diminished.

Religion is alive and well in the world and in our country. It seems dangerous to me to be indifferent, ignorant, or hostile about the religious dimensions of culture and civilization. If we neutralize our society on these matters, homogenize our culture, or secularize all of our institutions, we just may have very little to say to an emerging world.

Perhaps the courts are signaling a change of direction, and I am grateful. We cannot afford to adopt the view of the strict separationists because we will limit the freedom of most of our citizens, diminish the rich diversity of our cultural discourse, and just as importantly limit our ability to be a force for good in the world.

Philip W. Eaton is president of Seattle Pacific University.