Tea with Simon Critchley: The Separation of Church and State Is Impossible

“Religion is the basis and Foundation of Government.” That’s something James Madison wrote, in 1785. Except he didn’t really write it—or, rather, he did write those words, but with a bunch of other words before and after “religion,” and the point he was getting at had to do with individual rights, not God in government. It’s the kind of out-of-context quotation that gets passed around the blogosphere by people who want to assert that the Founding Fathers were stateside apostles, who’d been guided to the idea of America by the light of a deep religious faith. Fortunately, for secularists, the quote is a sham.

But what if the religious conservatives are right? What if the secularist dream—a true separation of church and state—is actually impossible? What if politics requires religion in order to function? These are among the questions that the philosopher Simon Critchley works over in his new book, “The Faith of the Faithless,” which takes as its starting point a line that Oscar Wilde actually did write, from the depths of prison: “Everything to be true must become a religion.” For readers of Critchley’s earlier works, this avenue of inquiry may come as surprise. Critchley, after all, has written that philosophy begins in “religious disappointment”—or, more bluntly, “the death of God”—and believes that “the heart of the horror of the present” is the deep entanglement of religion into politics. Nonetheless, he’s concluded, “with no particular joy,” that the two are not meant to become untangled. All political forms, he writes, are best understood as sacred ideas in secular dress.

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