Ingersoll & Jacoby (the biographer) on separation of Church & State1:
Ingersoll decried the public religiosity required of politicians in a statement that is just as applicable today as it was then.
At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the centre of the earth; he weighs nothing himself , but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are Catholics with Protestant proclivities, or Christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to do their own thinking.
A candidate’s religious outlook, in Ingersoll’s opinion, should be an entirely private matter. “If we were in a storm at sea,” he said, “with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism.” Ingersoll felt that the churches of his day were becoming politicized and correctly predicted that it would not be long until religious institutions would “divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions.”
To expand on Ingersoll’s first point, we see this even today as the most publicly devout politicians find themselves caught up in scandals of one sort or another. In truth, those who chase power may assume any shape that advantages them in the great race for political power; and those who are consumed with power have no requirement of great morality, merely the appearance of same2. By informally requiring some sort of religiosity, our subjects are permitted to don a cloak that obscures their true nature. Not that in the absence of this religious requirement that they won’t find another cloak, yet this one, I fear, is more potent than most as most devout people are, by the nature of this requirement, ill-suited for detecting the devout-seeming devil in their midst.
The second point leaves me somewhat ambivalent. To my mind, arguing via analogy requires an effective analogy, and while governing may involve tremendous flashes of light and booming, terror-riding demons on occasion, in truth governing and saving a ship in a storm are hardly analogous situations. I think it’s entirely certain that many folks will want to know about a candidate’s religious views in the mistaken belief that a candidate’s views of the supernatural and the afterlife will somehow affect his views on truly issues pertinent to government. Just having to write that sentence compels me to giggle, so, despite the poor analogy, in end I must agree with Ingersoll: a candidate’s religious views should not be of importance to the mature citizen of the United States. Indeed, I vividly recall a television interviewer with a woman during, I think, the 2004 elections, in which she stated that she believed God had selected Bush to be President; in view of the catastrophes of the Bush Administration, both before and after, we can only conclude that God hated, and perhaps still hates, the social conservatives who voted for him and the others caught up in scandal. It’s the only logical conclusion. If the United States is to remain strong, cooler, secular heads must prevail over those who insist on using the prism of religiosity when viewing the policies of government; the aberrations introduced by this prism are, on the evidence, terrible.
