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Introduction: Religion and Liberal Society
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19099 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1991 |
1,001 Words |
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Throughout most of human history--and prehistory--there has been little differentiation between the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the temporal. The very distinction between these two vital facets of human experience would seem artificial and strained to many societies of the past and some of the present. As human societies became more complex and the division of labor more specialized, king and priest became two roles rather than one, though a close alliance usually continued between them. This alliance was fed by the prevailing assumption that the stability of the realm depended upon a strong identity of interests between the exercise of earthly power and the inculcation of ultimate meaning that legitimated it.
Only in fairly recent times, and mainly in Western societies, has the innovative thought emerged that people could be loyal subjects without also being faithful believers in the religion of the ruler(s), and it did not attain actuality in practice without centuries of bloodshed, which in some places still continues. Roger Williams was one of the first, not only ta ecxpress this redial notion, but to put it into practice in the New World, one of the really significant institutional inventions on the planet. He wrote in the seventeenth century:
There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society. It hath fallen out sometimes, that both Papist and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges--that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks, be forced to come to the ship's prayer or worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they have any. I further add... that notwithstanding this liberty, the commander of this ship ought to command the ship's course, yea, and also command that justice, peace, and sobriety, be kept and practiced, both among the seamen and all the passengers.
Roger Williams organized a colony in the 1640s based on these principles in what is now Rhode Island, and a century and a half later the United States of America came into being on the same continent with a Constitution and Bill of Rights predicated upon the disengagement of the civil compact from the faith covenant--a radical experiment, still in progress, that has been widely imitated. Today in the Western industrialized nations it is generally accepted--contrary to the received wisdom of the ages--that religious diversity will not necessarily
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