Douglas Farrow makes the argument that far from having “separation of church and state,” the modern world has acheived precisely the opposite. By melding the functions of civil society into the state, the state has become de facto, the religion of the society, and one that brooks no opposition. The two major area where this has occurred are the natural family and the religious community.

The natural family unit confronts the state as an entity that claims rights not granted by the state but brought to it—rights the lawful state is obliged to recognize and respect. The religious community likewise claims rights and liberties that derive from a source other than the state, a source that transcends and relativizes the state….

The ascendancy of the state over civil society, which it ought rather to serve, is virtually guaranteed where the state exercises full control over education—particularly if the goal of education, as one professor boldly asserted in a recent McGill forum, is to release children from the control of their parents. In America, one notes, there have long been advocates of the still more radical idea that children should be regarded as the state’s property, to be educated on a compulsory basis according to state needs and requirements. That is a thesis likely to be advanced with renewed urgency as the implications of our declining birthrate begin to be grasped….

the normalization of divorce—one of the most significant features of our contraceptive culture—has ever more deeply insinuated the state into the child-rearing process and so into the sphere of the family. The “great and pernicious error” against which Pope Leo XIII warned in Rerum Novarum has thus gradually become the norm; namely, “that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household.”…

Read it all here:  Touchstone Archives: The Audacity of the State.