The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment provide: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These two Clauses, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, are frequently in tension. Striking a proper balance between free exercise and establishment has been a difficult endeavor for the U.S. Supreme Court, like walking a tightrope. The proper balance is crucial to our system of government, which must protect the right of religious believers to believe in their religion while assuring that those religious convictions are not established or endorsed by the government.

In his remarks about church and state during a recent trip to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI fell off the tightrope, overemphasizing free exercise at the expense of establishment.

The pope understandably believes that his Catholic faith is true, and encourages his fellow Catholics to believe in that truth as well. During his visit, he encouraged the Catholic laity and Catholic educators to pursue the objective truth of the Catholic faith, which transcend[s] the particular and the subjective, [and] points to the universal and absolute. The pope acknowledged that, in the United States, the secular state and separation of church  and state have protected religious freedom. He is correct; the First Amendment vigorously protects the right of Catholics to believe in the truth of their faith and to worship freely.

While offering some praise for American protection of religious freedom, Pope Benedict also expressed numerous doubts about secularism. The pope fears that, in the United States, secularist ideology drives a wedge between truth and faith, and undermines or even rejects transcendent truth. It is at this point of the argument that the pope’s commitment to religious truth leads him astray. The pope believes that, because Catholicism is true, American Catholics should bring their truth to the public debate, thereby causing a gradual opening of the minds and hearts of the wider community to moral truth. That moral truth, i.e., the universal truth of the Catholic faith, should therefore become the basis of public policy for everyone. That moral truth opposes abortion rights, gay marriage, divorce and cohabitation, as well as materialism and excessive individualism, inter alia. Presumably, following the pope’s suggestion, American Catholics should study the content of the pope’s speeches and then enact their church’s truth into law.

The pope ignores the important lesson that the citizens of the young United States and the framers of their Constitution learned from the religious wars of Europe: civil government should not be based on religious truth. Democratic government depends on shared values and consensus; its attainment becomes increasingly difficult when citizens vote for their own religion to rule. The United States should not be governed by Catholic or Christian truth, or Jewish truth, or Muslim truth, or any religious truth. There is no universal religion; religious truth varies from religion to religion, and cannot offer a common ground for people of all faiths or no faith to live together. The pope is wrong to ask American Catholics to act so that their non-Catholic fellow citizens would be governed by the church’s moral teachings.

The word secular may be part of the problem; the pope seems to believe that secularism is anti-religious, anti-faith and anti-truth. In the context of the American government, however, secular means non-religious, or, if you will, a political or legal form of government. It is this non-religious government that assures the right of all religious adherents, Catholic and non-Catholic, to believe in the truth of their religion. Making religious truth the basis of public policy would undermine that freedom. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reminded Americans in the Ten Commandments cases, [w]hen the government associates one set of religious beliefs with the state and identifies nonadherents as outsiders, it encroaches upon the individual’s decision about whether and how to worship. This would be the result if the pope’s teachings about truth became the basis for the law.

According to Justice O’Connor, [t]hose who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly? As the flourishing of Catholicism in the United States and the joy over the pope’s visit attests, our secular government protects Catholics’ ability to celebrate the truth of their faith by refusing to establish anyone’s truth as law.