The Blanshard Book

1

Now and again there drifts into the arena of public affairs an air of conspiracy and secret intrigue. It is as vague and intangible as the smell in the wind of a smoldering city dump — and as real. This time it blows from a book called American Freedom and Catholic Power by Paul Blanshard. Many reviews have hinted at intrigue by noting that the Nation was banned from New York City public school libraries under Catholic pressure when that magazine carried Blanshard’s articles. One reviewer, last spring, expected the book to be a volcanic eruption, “especially in Boston.” A more recent sidewalk comment reports knowingly that the New York Times refused to advertise the book, and a correspondent in the Rockies takes it for granted that “you cannot buy a copy in Boston.”

All this artificial hush-hush calls up the ghostly vision of furtive American Protestants slinking out of dark doorways with a piece of dangerous underground literature under their cloaks, to be read behind drawn shades where the powers of darkness are best met and exposed. Sales are picking up in this foggy atmosphere, and corner gossip betrays a deep disturbance in non-Roman-Catholic minds. Something is wrong. The inclination is to take Granddad’s “papist" blunderbuss down from over the fireplace, clean it and oil it, and wait for a calling of 1950’s Minutemen of Freedom. But the call does not come, and there remains nothing but the dank wind and the lowering fog.

The publication and distribution of the book have been surrounded with no such secrecy, taboo, or underground technique. Removing literature from public school libraries is a far cry from public suppression; no volcanic eruption has come in Boston; not only are copies readily available in Boston bookstores, but there have been many reviews, and they show a surprisingly dispassionate analysis. Early last summer the national Jesuit weekly, America, carried a series of seven articles dealing with the book, thus giving it wide notice in Roman Catholic circles.

Yet the spirit of privy whispering persists. One suspects it swirls up from the nature and intent of Blanshard’s writing rather than from any connection with reality; for there is something inherently shameful in looking on the naked souls of men; most men instinctively turn their eyes away — or wish they had. But Mr. Blanshard, who writes as an authority, commands, “Look! See! Drag this thing out into the open. Your freedom is in peril!” Could Salem’s shame have been a kindred spirit?

Responsible Protestant leaders have been unable to identify themselves with the spirit of Blanshard’s book. They admit it is heavily and impressively documented; but there is nothing in it which they have not been familiar with in one way or another. Writes the reviewer in Christianity and Crisis: “Evangelical Christians . . . will wish to draw a sharp line between the alarming facts, which this book so accurately presents, and the conclusions which the author deduces from them. . . . Dr. Blanshard gives the appearance of an undiluted secularist, with a naïve faith in the moral impeccability of the ‘social welfare state.’”

Blanshard’s book is only one indication of widespread confusion and concern over the whole question of church-state relationship in the United States, and the Information Service of the Federal Council of Churches warns: “Although we are here chiefly concerned with the Protestant-Catholic phase of the controversy [over church, state, and school], it is important to remember that there is a third party, less easy to define, but by no means negligible. This is the group that has no direct interest in the church, Protestant or Catholic, but is concerned with protecting public education from the church. It is called ‘secularist’ .... in the sense of indifference to religion.” This agrees with the Jesuit evaluation that Blanshard is a “political positivist who regards the State as the unique and absolute source of all rights.” It seems also to agree with Blanshard’s own opinion of his viewpoint, and certainly conforms to my own analysis.

In the present state of affairs, no matter how irritating it may be to lack any positive leadership on national policy in so crucial an issue, the fact remains that none seems to exist. For all his impressive “documentation,”Blanshard does not help to clarify the issue, but seems rather to confound confusion. For example, his whole thesis rests upon the basic assumption that the Roman Catholic Church is a “state within a state, and a state above a state.” But one may well ask, “ What constitutes a state? And what constitutes a church?”

2

A STATE, by general agreement, has control of military and police power. Its task is to keep the peace by power of the sword. It is the greatest and most important authority known to political science — except the authority of God which is expressed in religion. It is the authority of a king, whether the king be elected or whether he inherit the throne. Whatever other powers a state may hold, it ceases to be a state in accepted use of the term when it lacks possession and control of military power.

Now it is true, as Blanshard remarks, that the Vatican does maintain a token military force of comic opera proportions; it is also true that Popes and Cardinals have in history levied and commanded great armies. But to speak of the Roman Catholic Church today as having the military power of a modern state is sheer nonsense.

What Blanshard is obviously referring to is a bureaucracy which exercises control over social affairs by administrative skill, common consent, propaganda, wealth, ownership of property, and a grass-roots organization. Such a bureaucracy, however, need not be either a state or a church. It cannot be a state if it lacks final warmaking power. It cannot be a church if it lacks the power of a vital religion which men believe in their hearts. Both states and churches usually acquire such bureaucracies in the course of their existence, yet ultimately neither could stand on them alone. The state must rest on its military power, the Christian church on the power of the Gospel. To call a church a state, or a state a church, merely because both have bureaucracies and because both are responsible for the general welfare is to depart from the realm of sober discussion.

Such confusion of terms, however, is easy in the United States because until very recently this country has been in fact a model political whole in which church and state have traditionally combined in so harmonious a relationship as to encourage most Americans to think of “civil government” as the sum total of agencies by which this society is governed. Neither church nor state has ever usurped the rightful authority of the other in any degree approaching Europe’s tumultuous history, and the American finds it easy to accept his “civil government” as a unit. Not for over one hundred years has he found it really necessary to consider the dual nature of that government. But it has always been a duality and continues to be, however much one may argue to the contrary.

What the Americans who consciously expressed in doctrine and in practice the American principle of separation of church and state meant by it is reasonably certain: they meant that the clergyman, like the shoemaker, “stayed to his last.”Necessarily this also meant that the government was effectively restrained from gradually assuming control of the church as it had done again and again in the long history of Christendom. Whatever the phrase “wall of separation” can be interpreted to mean, there is little doubt that to America as a whole in Jefferson’s day and for a generation thereafter it meant a sign to the state - the military authority of the government — to keep hands off the churches, and for the clergymen to stay out of politics.

As far as schools were concerned, they were not in that day properly a function of the state. Blanshard himself notes: “Virtually all schools in colonial days were church schools, and until about 1825 the religious domination of elementary schools was taken for granted by most Americans.” Sectarian quarrels were stirred up, he goes on, when the public school system was introduced, and clashes occurred when all children were gradually forced into a school system responsible to the state, not to the church.

The quarrels in public schools continue to this day, and increasingly it has become necessary to remove more and more Christian teaching from public schools altogether. The gradual shift in national thinking has completely twisted the meaning of separation of church and state until it is now, in effect, separation of education from the Christian religion. This is not separation of schools from religion, for, as Dr. James A. Pike, chaplain at Columbia University, was quoted in the press as saying, “if you teach no religion, you teach a kind of religion, which is secularism.” Also, right or wrong, it has little to do with what our fathers meant by “separation of church and state,” notwithstanding Jefferson’s support of the public school movement. There has always been considerable doubt as to what Jefferson himself actually meant by his political dogma—whether he spoke as a Christian or as an eighteenth-century rationalist.

There is little doubt, however, as to how Blanshard interprets the dogma. What is not so clear is that his interpretation is of the nature of a particular religious faith. That faith is by no means a “scientific” fact, nor does it rest on long tradition and American experience. His and has been, since its inception, an “experiment,” a “new” doctrine, an instance of “change” and “progress.”

No doubt many an American will resent being told that his whole faith in progress and the progressive separation of church and state, particularly “separation of schools and religion,” is in fact a religious doctrine. It is usually unsettling to discover that such interpretations of life and history rest merely on “faith,” and are not subject to laboratory measurement and experiment. For what a man really believes in his heart to be true he believes, by definition, cannot reasonably be otherwise. He simply assumes that what he holds to be true unquestionably is so.

It is in this dogmatic confidence that Blanshard takes issue with the Roman Catholic Church on the crucial point for all of us: he judges that church to be a sinister threat to the public weal because it “refuses to admit that the Church in the social field is simply one agency within the state.” What Blanshard ignores, however, is that it is on exactly this point, and this alone, that great empires have dashed themselves to pieces against the Christian Church. This is the point at which Christianity has ultimate and final meaning for all nations; this is where an avowal of faith in the Christian God meets its last judgment. All Christian profession, whether Protestant or Catholic, explicitly declares that the church derives its existence and its authority directly from God in Christ, and that it never can bow to the supremacy of the state and still be Christian.

The four Evangelists went to great pains to write in ways that would leave no doubt upon this point. The Gospel writers profoundly believed that the church is not simply one agency within the state, but that it has an authority above the state. The church has so believed ever since. What Blanshard seems to be unable to comprehend is that both Roman Catholics and Protestants accept the Christian view with all the assurance of truth evident in the secularist religion, and with equal, if not greater, experience and reasoning power, and certainly with as much integrity and candor.

In Blanshard’s thesis one can detect the acrid odor of burning flesh, and smoke from torches of the Ku Klux Klan. His cry sounds ominously like that of the mob before Pilate: “We have no king but Caesar.” It was precisely because they refused to admit that the church was merely a department of state that Christian martyrs died in ancient Rome. American dissenters who colonized and founded this country were in dissent at home, not against Rome, but against churches established, maintained, and supported by the force of law in their own countries. Exactly the same point is at issue today in Czechoslovakia where the Communist government is attempting to form a church that will acknowledge subservience to the state. It was the quarrel in Hungary, involving Lutheran Bishop Ordass as well as Cardinal Mindzenty, and was the story of German Christians under Adolf Hitler.

The whole history of church-state struggles in Christendom involves refusal of the church to submit to emperors and kings and admit that its right to exist depended upon the pleasure of the state. Extreme Protestants have a great deal more in common with their Roman Catholic brethren on this point than appears on the surface.

Protestants may well fear that the Roman hierarchy is too willing to compromise in this matter, too eager to become entangled with the bureaucracy of the state — with the result that they may he unable to resist the power of the state. Whatever the validity of this fear, it does not seem to be one shared by Blanshard. He rather accuses the Roman Church precisely because it will not compromise. Protestant criticism of the hierarchy, when sound, declares it is not Christian enough; the secularist fears it because it is too Christian.

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UNDERLYING all the confusion is the greatest of all human passions — the passion for wholeness of society, free from divisions, “walls of separation,”class warfare, religious strife: a passion for oneness. This passion Blanshard shares with the Christian, and the loftiest motive behind his work is this hunger for a united people.

To recognize this, however, is not to allow the validity of the way he seeks to find unity: the viciousness of nationalism is too well known in our time, and the various movements toward wholeness of the entire world are too vigorously supported to be overlooked. The international character of the Roman hierarchy seems wholly in the spirit of the age and the demands of the time: Protestant and Orthodox churches are reaching the same direction, most notably in the World Council of Churches but also in sectarian world organizations of the Congregationalists, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Evangelicals, and others.

The militant secularist — unless he happens to be an international communist - is out of the running with a simple doctrine of self-sufficiency of the state. And since most men become conscious in one way or another of God, it is unlikely that any secularism can long exist: man’s passion for wholeness goes beyond wholeness of his neighborhood, his nation, his world; he craves wholeness of the universe, harmony with “Nature, Man and God,”as the late Archbishop William Temple of England expressed it in the title of a book.

A man’s religion is reflected in what he assumes to be true in life. It determines his standard of values as to what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false, what is to be desired and what is to be avoided. A nation’s religion is reflected in the standard of values commonly accepted by the whole. The role of its chureh(es) is to give meaning to that standard, to promote the common faith, to preserve it from one generation to the next, and to transmit the judgment of experience from one generation to another.

The public school system - which is really the point at issue in the United States as well as in Czechoslovakia — was established 125 years ago as a means of realizing a particular kind of unity in America. Blanshard’s greatest service will be to point up the intensity of passions involved in the public school, and it may well be that the publishing of his book at this lime will force men of broader vision to re-examine this chosen path to unity. It may well have been overemphasized and have turned into a bone for dogs to fight over. It may be, in the long run, that church schools bring peace and unity by giving each dog his own bone; there is a well-placed faith in unity through diversity rather than regimentation and uniformity.

Meantime the fundamental American policy of separation of church and state remains sound. It needs only careful agreement as to the nature of the functions of each; for civil government consists of both in a mystical union, not in the elimination of one or the other. As for the specter of the Roman Church raised by Blanshard, it looks quite different to the Protestant Christian than it does to the secularist.

Protestant Bishop Norman B. Nash of Massachusetts is reported in the press as telling schoolmasters; “Both Protestants and Catholics are better off in this country because of the existence of the other. Both have contributions to make to national life, and that is part of the strength of Christianity in this country.”And Protestants have done rather well, Mr. Blanshard, at resisting religious uniformity. You have little to fear from either Catholic or Protestant unless you arouse a spirit of anti-Christ, in which case we no doubt will all meet the same judgment of God together — the kind of judgment that fell on Hitler’s Germany, if you need to have illustrations. It came upon the just and the unjust alike, but woe to him who forced the issue. I pray the wind from your book will soon change and blow from a new direction.