Quora Answer: Can You Explain the Need to Separate Religion from the State?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Can you explain the need to separate religion from the state?” 

We can safely say that at any time we have had overt religious values influencing the legislative and judicial process of the state, it has always lead to some form of oppression and corruption, particularly detrimental to minority voices.  There is nothing inherently wrong with religion as a spiritual force.  It has always been good.  There tends to be tremendous corruption of religion when it becomes organised, and a power structure is put in place. 

Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1^st Baron Acton, an English Catholic historian and politician, observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Organised religion does not only grant men power, but the façade of morality, where they imagine they speak on behalf of God. 

As Anne Lamott, the American novelist, correctly said, “You can safely assume that you have created ‘God’ in your own image when it turns out that ‘God’ hates all the same people you do.”  People of religious power tend to disregard god, and make themselves, first, spokesman of the Divine, and later, elevate themselves to arbiters of orthodoxy and morality.  That is very dangerous. 

Theocracies, by their very nature, are inclement to change, and hostile to the idea of freedom of thought and speech.  They manufacture a majority on any issue of doctrine, and invoke the supernatural to crush dissenting voices, delegitimising them as heretics or disbelievers.  That is not the basis for serious dialogue and deep consideration of issues, advances in technology, and discoveries in science.  Since religions invoke the supernatural as a basis of doctrine, inconvenient facts are disregarded. 

Religion works best when it is private belief, and a code of ethics.  It cannot be a basis for much of modern legislation, and policymaking.  The problem with scripture is that we are held hostage to the prism of the interpreter of the Divine Intent.  A person with an occluded heart will see the justification for all his prejudices and biases, and that is most people.  Power structures attract materialists and the ambitious, not necessarily the most ethical.  These are not the people we want, interpreting scripture as a basis for governance. 

The state should be secular in all its branches, whether executive, judicial or legislative.  Policy and legislation should be formulated on the basis of available facts, projections, logic, and sound values.  These are largely common to all humanity.  We can have our own interpretation of scripture, but no one has a right to their own set of facts.  That is the ideal.