Religion’s public role

Today’s readings: Is. 45, 1.4-6; 1 Thess. 1, 1-5; Matt. 22, 15-21.

Jesus’ words about what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God have been a point of reference for an entire civilisation in the political history of Christianity. Today they assume particular significance in the context of an ongoing debate on religion and God in the public square.

Already at such an early point in time Jesus separates the Church from the State and refuses to mix religion with politics. Unfortunately, throughout history we always thought it wiser and more securing for the faith to entrench in various ways the unification of Church and State. Today we have learnt the hard way the lesson that it was not really wise to bring everything, temporal and spiritual, under the same roof.

The alternatives to Jesus’ position have always been the extremes between theocracy, which today is not fashionable even due to the negative currency it gained particularly in the wake of certain Islamic revolutions, or the total banishing of religion from the public sphere, with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens stirring up stories of past wars of religion.

Throughout his ministry Jesus proposes a vision for Christianity. He distances himself from the designation of king. For him the kingdom is elsewhere. It is both in the world and not of the world. It is a kingdom operating in the world but concerned with unmasking the powers that operate in the world, revealing the levels of bondage under which people are living.

This is the real meaning of politics that the Church is called to restore today. In the first reading the prophet Isaiah addresses a similar situation in which Israel found itself. The Persian king Cyrus is reckoned as an agent of restoration in Jerusalem and in today’s reading he is most remarkably identified even as anointed, a messiah.

Isaiah transfers all the authority of the Davidic tradition to this Gentile king because God brings about historical transformation through human agency which, in our case, need not necessarily be the Church. We need to acknowledge this even when we look around us at what religion is going through today. Cyrus, a foreigner for Israel, becomes the carrier of Israel’s most urgent hopes.

This is the lesson Isaiah gives. A lesson long forgotten throughout the history of Christianity since Constantine in the 4th century. What belongs to God has been put in the shadow. It was only thanks to strong prophetic and faithful reformers that Christianity did not succumb completely to politics. Again, as we read from Isaiah, it was Cyrus the Persian king who, in the wake of the peoples’ degeneration, served as catalyst for authenticity in religion.

In modern times Christianity had its final shake with the call of the Enlightenment philosophers and movements. Catholicism is pain­stakingly coming to its senses where the role of religion in the public sphere is concerned.. Unwisely we always thought separating Church and state would be disastrous for religion.

It was true that religion flourished in many circumstances under the security and guarantees of politics. But with politics parting company from religion, the latter was called to stand up and be counted in a culture and society no longer considering God as a given and the human being as a religious being by nature.

Thanks to modern prophets like the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray and to the leading 20th century theologians paving the way for Vatican Council II, the truth that sets us free as Christian believers was finally and officially acknowledged as Church doctrine. With the separation of Church and state, the Church acknowledges religious freedom and the freedom of conscience.

Global religion is an enormous resource for moral value. Religion will not go away and it will not be suppressed. But it should never again suppress in the name of God. The invitation of Jesus can easily be interpreted, as Graham Ward writes in his book The Politics of Discipleship, as a positive heralding of the advent of the post-secular state.