The Pitfalls of Believing in Separation of Church and State

Building off of "the God trick," we now interrogate the universal belief in "secularism."

Photo: Getty Images

Hi everyone—we’re back with part two of the excerpt for my thesis project at Harvard Divinity School. Yesterday, I asked us to dive into the cultural norms that we take for granted—using objectivity in the media as an example—in the hopes that, today, we’d be open to analyzing some of our universally accepted, big ideas about religion.

Today, I briefly dive into why “secularism” is more complicated than it actually seems. This is, surprisingly, an easier argument to grasp now more than it was at the beginning of my studies. With the demise of Roe v. Wade all but certain, we’re (hopefully) able to see the ways that religion still plays a big role in our government and politics. I’m now interested in asking: What kinds of power did we relinquish when we assumed that religion could be relegated to the private sector? How did our belief in this universalist claim—that there’s a separation of church and state—lead us to our current moment of religious resurgence?

However, I don’t want to just interrogate the so-called separation of church and state for the purposes of reproductive justice. Secularism is an important cornerstone of America and the West more broadly. It’s how we distinguish ourselves from other nations, and how we assert ourselves as modern and others as backwards. This has led us to believe that Western nations are more progressive (in part, because of their ability to diminish the role of religion in politics) while others are stuck in the past. So if we are now able to see some of the pitfalls of believing in secularism here in America, what can that reveal to us about how we’ve treated other people across the globe—and, most crucially, what we’ve let our government get away with in the name of “progress”?

I bring some of these ideas back to my time in the media, particularly in the coverage of Muslim women at Teen Vogue. This is just a snapshot of a much larger story—hopefully one I’ll be able to tell with more vigor at another time. Tomorrow, building off of this work, we’re going to analyze some bigger “absolutist” claims about religion, like “Religion is the cause of all the world’s violence.” I hope to see you then and, as always, please feel free to comment with your thoughts or any interventions.

2. Our position in the world influences how we view religion, society, and other people in the world—and thus, our version of justice.

Now that we’ve challenged the myth of objectivity and understand the harm of the “default” perspective, our aim in this section is to interrogate the universalist ideas about religion we may hold to be true. First, we’re going to talk about the “separation of church and state,” otherwise known as secularism, and illuminate how religion is not only relegated to the private sphere. Then, we’re going to talk about the power dynamics behind categorizing the world in terms of East versus West, and identify how that warps our perceptions of political and religious “others.” Finally, we’re going to challenge the very construct of religion itself, which is loaded with power dynamics that cannot possibly contain all of the vast complexities and diversities of faith traditions across the world. 

Secularism Is Complicated

So first, let’s summarize the most crucial challenge to the promise of secularism—ie, that by separating church and state, religion became restricted only to the private sector. While it is true that secularization did happen at a specific point in European history (thus resulting in the Church being formally removed from political rule in Europe), it wasn’t so that religion magically dissolved into the private sector and no longer infiltrated politics, culture, foreign policy, bodily autonomy, sexuality, race, gender roles, etc. We don’t necessarily need to look to the past to understand that religion is still very much a part of our politics: see the American political fights over abortion (and the concept of when life begins), gay marriage, or transgender rights to see that, while we are secular in name, religion has never been contained to the private domain. 

Nevertheless, the move toward secularism has allowed the white, Western world to see ourselves as modern—and any foreign land, government, or people that do not embrace secularism as not modern, and therefore, other. Secular nations view themselves as superior to nations that still have religion involved in their governments—even if those cultures’ understandings or implementations of religion and politics vastly differed from the Europeans’. 

The West Created the Concept of The East—And a Lot of Trouble Along with It

The binary of the Eastern World and the Western World is particularly fraught; these very terms imply a separation of identities, borders, and ideologies. It implies that we in the West all believe in one set of values, while the others in the East believe in a different value system. The West assumes that our view of the world and its many diverse people is objective, despite the fact that it is entangled in power and cultural bias. 

Religion played a pivotal role in how the West came to organize the world, as Tomoko Masuzawa points out in The Invention of World Religions. By problematizing the very concept of the term world religions—a phrase commonly accepted by the academy and textbooks across the West, but roundly challenged by modern religious studies scholars—Masuzawa illustrates how our study of religions still implies an orientation towards the West, and therefore, Christianity. 

As Edward Said says in his seminal text Orientalism, “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” Orientalism has several meanings, but for our understanding, it’s best to focus on this particular articulation: “Orientalism is a style of thought” that sought to make clear distinctions between the Orient and the Occident. These distinctions, Said says, have implications that are both ontological (how we exist) and epistemological (how we know or understand things). We didn’t just draw a border or say “we are secular and they are not.” Rather, we built a whole set of assumptions—often deeply misguided, incredibly racist, and overly simplified—about the beliefs, knowledges, and ways of being of people in the non-Western world. “Because of Orientalism,” Said writes, “the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action…European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.” 

Even the Term “Religion” Is a Construct of Empire

Orientalism helps us understand how the West—with its academy, its museums, its media—came to categorize the world. Other nations, peoples, and customs became subjects of the West, and that “knowledge” then became normative. But, as Masuzawa points out, this also created the study of “religion,” a category that didn’t exactly exist (at least in its Western understanding) across global cultures.

The common definition of religion is fraught and can hardly capture the full range and complexities of faiths, spiritualities, and traditions all over the world. Religion itself is an imperialist construct, one that still orients us towards a Western (read: predominantly Christian) understanding of faith. We cannot just apply our rubric of religion onto other cultures and assume it fits. When we do, we contribute to further erasure and misunderstandings.

As Andrew Wokanse Gray, a leader of the Osage Native American Church, told Smithsonian in a piece detailing the fight for Native Americans to receive religious freedom (which they did not legally achieve until 1978): “The Native American Church is not a religion but a ceremony.” These important distinctions about religion offer a real challenge to how we see other cultures and their traditions. If we’re only seeing them through our eyes, rather than challenging our gaze, how can they ever trust us to see them for who they are? How does this imposition of “religion” onto other cultures contribute to broader misunderstandings of a nation’s people and values? And furthermore, how can those misunderstandings therefore compel our governments and other institutions of power to commit acts of violence?

A Brief Example

When I was reading Said, I thought a lot about how needlessly complicated it was to bring Muslim women’s voices to the fore at Teen Vogue, due to various misconceptions and cultural misunderstandings. When I first started as an editorial director of the publication in 2015, I noticed a website on my timeline called MuslimGirl.com. I did a little bit of digging and found that the website’s founder was Amani al-Khatahtbeh, an 18-year-old girl who was effectively running the entire operation out of her parents’ home in New Jersey. Amani, I figured, was the perfect example of a Teen Vogue role model: a young woman challenging media and cultural conventions, and doing it with the help of other entrepreneurial young women in her community. 

After I reviewed the profile and was finally ready to publish it, the piece was flagged by our copy and research team as “sensitive content” due to its discussion of Islam. (Articles that discussed Christianity or Judaism—including an op-ed in which I condemned Pope Francis for his homophobia—were not similarly flagged.) This meant the piece had to go over my head to a different senior editor at the magazine for a final sign-off.

Two days later—which, in the age of the Internet, is an absolute eternity—I was told the piece could not be published without further edits. My colleague said that the article was missing critical elements about Amani’s work; we had to ask Amani for her thoughts on ISIS, the Islamic State terrorist group. The senior editor felt that, given the “newsiness” of ISIS, it would be important for Amani to condemn their actions up front and distance herself from radical Islam. 

Something about this feedback didn’t sit right with me, so I walked out of my office to discuss it with the newsroom. One of the editors responded: “I don’t understand why Amani should be forced to answer for ISIS when we don’t ask a single white, Christian woman who appears in the magazine to answer for the Ku Klux Klan or other white nationalists.” Her point was and still is salient: The line of questioning was putting Amani on trial for so-called religious extremism, which exposed a journalistic bias. We were implying that we saw Islam, unlike Christianity, as innately violent. 

Muslim women in the mainstream media are constantly forced to show their credentials as “good Muslims” in order to be taken seriously by Western audiences who have no real conception of Islam. Indeed, in order to have her first Teen Vogue profile run, Amani did have to answer unnecessary and embarrassing questions about Islam, and pointed us to our own journalistic malpractice in the process. Islamophobia has a complicated genealogy—one that’s entangled with religious discrimination and racism—but this one, small example is a display of how Orientalism and the cultural allegiance to Christianity bred by secularism persists. In retrospect, it’s easy to recognize this example as racist and deeply troubling, especially with the small strides we’ve made in terms of media representation for Muslim women. These prejudiced views about Islam—even in rooms full of so-called progressive people—absolutely persist.

TL;DR

Said is helpful in summarizing the key message from this section: “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.” Striving for situated knowledge about religion necessarily exposes our own misconceptions and the cultural norms we have internalized as unquestionably true. Coming from a Western perspective, it’s important to acknowledge how the concept of secularism may (1) have deceived us into thinking that religion doesn’t impact the public sphere and (2) have led us into assuming that the separation of church and state is a universal “good” that everyone in the world should emulate. It’s then helpful to understand how the West, to reiterate Masuzawa, separated itself from the rest of the world—and how that aligned our nations with Christianity, even in an abstract form. Our orientation in the West also has infiltrated how we view religions (and, by proxy, religious people) across the globe, even though our assumptions about religion may not be universally true. And because of the West’s powerful role in academia, the media, and global affairs, we also may hold certain assumptions about other faiths and traditions that, in a more situated knowledge, could be revealed as outdated at best, and bigoted or racist at worst.

Previously:
Introduction: Do We Really Want to Give God Away?
Part One: The “God Trick” of Objectivity