"Thoughts on Religious Liberty," a paper read at Chicago Theological Seminary; published in XVI McCormick Quarterly, volume 3, numbers 22-32 (1963-03)

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THOUGHTS ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY *
At the present time, in spite of the conflicts aroused by the race issue,
there are more cases before the Federal courts involving church*state relations
than any other problem.   In other countries, too, the finding of new patterns
of satisfactory church-state relationship has come to consume more energy than
almost any other constitutional matter,   The problem we are discussing gains
added complexity for believing men and women by the fact that in few other areas
is there so much oral tradition and racial memory involved.   For two millenia,
and in the most various of situations, the Church has been accumulating a wealth
of experience in church-state relations.   Ivhen we practice the "dialogue with
the past" in this area, and the most vulgar of all errors would be to neglect
the wisdom of our fathers, i^ multiply the complexity of a complicated question
many times over.
the Age of Ideology
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Although the problem is ancient, in a certain sense it has gained a quite
new dimension in the twentieth century. This last half-century, in its spiritual
agony, has produced a new kind of politics - politics which is as different
from ancient despotism as it is from republican forms of government. The "new
science of politics" is ideological, i.e., ouasi-religious in its orientation.1
Former tyrannies, however scornful they might be of the human measure, were
yet subject to the occasional restraint of pope, hierarchy, university, nobility,
bureaucracy, and the power of opposing center's of tradition and mixed sovereignty.
Wherever sub-political centers were suppressed, as in the case of the French Law
of Associations (1792), conservative checks remained. As ^aldemar Curian of
Notre Dame put it,
Montesquieu remarks that religion works as a check in despotic regimes
which do not have any institutional or traditional checks against the
arbitrary actions of the despot. An essential feature of totalitarianism
consists in the disappearance of this factual, though neither legal nor
institutional, limiting power of religious habits and customs. On the
contrary, energies and forces which formerly had their outlet and ex-
/ pression in religion, limiting the old despotic ruler, are now driving
forces behind and in the new despotic regimes of the 20th century. The
totalitarian ideologies replace and supersede religion,
Therefore it may be said that the various forms of totalitarianism - Nazism
and Soviet Communism - are politico-social secularized religions, characteristic of cur epoch. The totalitarian movements and their power replace
God and religious institutions such as the Church; the leaders are deified;
the public mass-meetings are regarded and celebrated as sacred actions;
the history of the movement becomes a holy history of the advance of salvation, which the enemies and betrayers try to prevent in the same way as
the devil tries to undermine and destroy the work of those who are in the
service of the City of God, 2
A paper by Dr. Franklin H. Littell, Professor at Chicago Theological Seminary,
published in XVI McCormick Quarterly (March, 1963) 3:22-32.
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