The Worst Idea Humanly Conceivable

I can understand why people are wary of mixing a religious institution with the institution of the state- it is a combination which has historically proven ruinous to both institutions and also to the people they are supposed to serve. This is why the Founders forbade the Federal government from passing any law respecting or prohibiting any religious establishment. The formal unification of the institutions of Church and State, except in the Person of Christ, is a blasphemy.

On the other hand, they made no effort to separate their personal faith from their ideas on public policy and how they governed. Indeed most of them believed that our Republic could only survive if both leaders and people informed their behavior by religion and morality. That despite the fact that those who governed had far less power than their modern counterparts, because the state was much smaller.

The idea we have these days-  that the people who govern us should act as though there is no God or that He is irrelevant to public policy or governance, is probably the worst idea that can be humanly conceived. Do we really want to give a group of corruptible humans a vast amount of power and tell them "act as though there is no God watching over you. Act as if there will be no eternal accountability for what you do"? 

Between the terrible idea of fusing the institutions of Church and State, and the worst idea humanly conceivable of pretending that the knowledge of God is irrelevant to statecraft, is the classical middle ground advocated by Localism. It is the middle ground between would-be tyrants who use the name of God as an excuse for everything that they themselves wish to do, and the radical secularist who would leave us with the thorough and decentralized, paradoxical, chaotic tyranny which comes from a society which sinks into moral nihilism.

Localism's solutions are subtle, and unfortunately we live in times where many people seize on unsubtle, knee-jerk reactions as "solutions" with little thought or reflection. While slaves can get by with little thought or reflection about the nature of government, in the long run free people can't. Consideration of such matters is inextricably connected to the idea of self-governance. Without a balanced and thought-out view of the role of religious faith in governance we cannot have a complete political philosophy. The second book below in particular makes this clear.