Caleb Anderson: The Dangers of union of sacred and state

The encroachment of faith systems into the secular state represents a fundamental threat to rational policy design, and civic equality. History teaches that when sacred belief is merged with state power, it inevitably erodes the objective, evidence-based reasoning required for effective governance, replacing policy deliberation with dogma, and dogma's inescapable consequence ... the marginalization of dissent.

In the contemporary context, the push for incorporating indigenous belief systems into modern governance risks the erosion of rational policy. While recognizing indigenous rights may constitute a necessary correction to historical injustice, the elevating and embedding of spiritual, or mythological, worldviews into policy undermines natural justice and the neutrality of the state.

Pantheistic beliefs have been seeded throughout our laws, and in directives to the various agencies of state, without public consent, with the complicity of a sympathetic media, and with little thought to the precedents this might create. This is enabling agendas that are antithetical to democratic principles. It invites self-interest.

When public policy shifts from being informed by empirical data, to being shaped by cosmological "mythology" or spiritual tradition, evidence based policy is undermined. Universal human rights are marginalised (with the emphasis on universal). Arguments in favour of policy outcomes lose both coherency and legitimacy. The infusion of ancient myths, or indigenous spiritual narratives, in public policy deliberation, undermines confidence in government.

Polices become forever subject to agenda, excessively malleable, and impossible to measure.

This, in turn, and inevitably, produces a cynical, disinterested, and suspicious, citizenry, as the lines between historical fact and story become blurred, and reality and fabrication are merged.

The merging of faith and state, whether through a traditional religious power, like the medieval papacy, or a modern, romanticized approach to indigenous beliefs, corrupts the core function of government. True public policy requires the separation of personal belief, and religious faith, from the public interest, allowing for an evidence-based approach that can change based on new evidence—the opposite of dogma.

A state that cannot separate its public policy from sacred mythology is a state that has lost its ability to think rationally, it has lost its way. This is a recipe for instability, corruption and social unrest. If history teaches anything, it is that the merging of religious systems of belief with the business of the state, always leads to corruption and, if left to its own devices, to persecution.

The domains of religion (faith) and state must each be respected, but they must remain separate, as history so amply testifies. Barely removed from the Papal persecutions of the middle and later middle ages, the American founders knew, as did their populace at large, and as evidenced in the First Amendment Establishment Clause prohibiting a government established religion, the price when religion and state merge.

The covid experience bears ample testimony, as do other "national emergencies", of just how quickly dogma displaces reason, and of how rapidly the agencies of state, and institutions of "reason", can be weaponized.

Further, the Maori and Green Parties are more cults than political parties. That a good number of New Zealanders support these parties is further chilling evidence of the appeal of cultic mysticism over reason, and of its propensity to infect government.

Our government, not alone in the West, is enabling, often through ignorance, inaction, or fear, the progressive erosion of a system of government that, while imperfect, has been demonstrably superior to any alternative history can furnish ... and that saw separation of faith and state as imperative.

We would do well to remember that while history may appear to change, human nature does not, and that reason is a precious gift and and a bulwark against the unimaginable.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.