Ferguson, MO and the Myth of "The Separation of Church and State"

When I was a kid, I never walked in the middle of the street. Doing so was disrespectful. You walk on the sidewalks. Follow the rules. (Yup, I’ve always been pretty conservative.)

No surprise, then, when the police approach Michael Brown who’s walking down the middle of a street in Ferguson, Missouri. Maybe an earlier car tried to get by, and couldn’t get around Brown and his friend, so they called the police. At this point, I don’t know.

Brown’s friend says the officer said “Get the f**k on the sidewalk!!”

I wish I couldn’t believe that report, but I’ve seen too many videos of police with foul mouths.

“You have to get tough on crime,” some will say.

Did it work? Did Brown get out of the street? Does a show of force create respect for the force?

I don’t think so.

Call me “soft on crime.”

Since at least the end of World War II, James Madison has been quoted as saying:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves … according to the Ten Commandments of God.

In other words, the American way is not to militarize the police to “get tough on crime.” While contemplating the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, John Adams expressed the same thought:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Both Michael Brown and the police are the products of America’s secular government schools.

America was built on the belief that “Religion [and] morality [are] necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind.” The modern myth of the “separation of church and state” has little to do with the separation of “ecclesiastical bodies” (as Madison called them) and government, and everything to do with the separation of God and Government.
The separation of religion and police.
The separation of morality and Michael Brown.