Everyone is concerned about who might obtain power and how they will use the state to their advantage if they obtain it. Humanists (and others) are concerned about religious fanatics and the religious are concerned about those who label all religion as evil.1
This fear of who might obtain power exists in part because those in power are able to impose their views on us and our children through public schools, government media and the media the government funds. They are able to win support for their views (usually the "established view" and descent from the established view is not tolerated) through government welfare and health care. This problem exists to a large degree because the government has taken on too many roles, giving them too much power over the people.
Now obviously western nations are not the same as countries like Saudi Arabia or North Korea; they have no separation of ideology and state whatsoever. The ideologies those states favour are heavily promoted through their schools and media, and criticism of those beliefs are absolutely prohibited. We have greater individual freedom because we have a greater separation of ideology and state than they do. But still there is much room for improvement. In the west we have what we call a separation of Church and State (which partly covers what I'm about to talk about). America's first amendment is an example of such a separation:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
America's Founding Fathers understood the power of religion when it had the backing of the state. So they attempted to guard against it. But they did not understand the power of an ideology when it had the backing of the state, as up until that time, ideology and state was not a problem.
If only the first amendment was followed by, "Congress shall not promote any ideology or belief, or prohibit the promotion of any ideology or belief." Such a proposal would not undermine the constitution of the US (or other free countries).
Note: A perfect separation of ideology and state is impossible, because the state must make and enforce laws, which to some degree forces some view of morality on society.2 However, a greater separation of ideology and state is possible and that is what we should be aiming for. I give my reasons below.
Before talking about what a greater separation of ideology and state might look like, and what role the government will play in things like education, it must first be explained what exactly the ideology of the state is.
The ideology of the state is the "value system" the state promotes in the belief that those who hold those values make for better citizens. Every state promotes the beliefs it values through education, the media and the laws it makes. Good citizens are a good thing but it always becomes a problem when the government tries to create them through the promotion of values in our schools and through our media.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the enlightenment thinker, said that the people will what is good but they don't always see what the good is. Rousseau claimed that they (the people) "must be shown the good road [they] are in in search of...." The public "must be taught to know what it wills" (The Social Contract, Book 2, ch 6).
Can you see the problem with this kind of thinking?
'"What counts is what people want"/ "People don't know what they want"/ "Experts know what people want"/ "People want what they are told"' (John Lukacs, cited in Os Guinness' book, Prophetic Untimeliness , 2003, p. 74).
If experts know what people want, what happens when the experts strongly disagree as is so often the case? Governments inevitably support those they want to be heard. This is a series problem. The Nazis chose who they wanted to be heard.
"George Will averred that there is nothing so vulgar left in our experience for which we cannot transport some professor from somewhere to justify it" (Ravi Zacharias, 1994, Can Man Live Without God, p. xiii).
Even when a majority of so called experts hold the same view and that view is promoted, it is not uncommon that they are proved wrong at a later date (e.g. Social Darwinism). It should not be the role of the government to "educate" the people.
It should be noted that Rousseau's view that morals which encourage the greatest good need to be taught is valid, but it is not valid that the government should determine which views are good and which views are bad; especially since it is not uncommon for our governments to confuse the good with the bad. When this happens many well meaning people within the government start promoting bad ideas and opposing good ones.
How then would we oppose views which we as individuals regard as abhorrent? We, the people (not the government), would expose the weaknesses of those views through the exercise of free speech. Banning books and speakers is not the way to go, undermining the power and influence of those books and speakers through highlighting factual errors is (See James Allan: Free speech is truths best hope).
I understand that it will require a paradigm shift for many politicians to grasp the importance of the following idea, but it must be grasped or there will be a slow but sure economic collapse and democracy will eventually be lost. (How the economic collapse will occur will be explained shortly.)
The government's promotion of values is always problematic no matter how good those values are. In itself, there is nothing wrong with spreading values, but it is not the state's role to promote values through education and the media or determine which values shall be promoted.
It is important to grasp that many of the problems we are facing today are not just problems within the system; they are the RESULT of politicians and public servants having too much influence when it comes to the promotion or prohibition of beliefs and ideas. Many problems result from the government's promotion of values; that is because the government's values are themselves problematic or people (for whatever reason) resist those values and therefore seek to replace them with their own values (this is what happened to Christendom). However, it is important that the general public identify what values are best for society. This is very hard for many people to do when the government "seems" to be taking care of things. The good often is the enemy of the best.
In all societies, the reigning ideology, the ideology which is promoted by the government, is credited with the successes of that particular government. In Islamic societies Islam is accredited with doing all the "good things" that their governments have accomplished. In secular humanist societies, humanism is accredited and likewise communism in communist countries. What if these were cases of good being the enemy of the best? What if the ideologies or beliefs which motivated people to care the most about others were being kept out of the spot light simply because they were up against the ideology that the government espoused and promoted through education and the media? What if there was an army of people doing things to help others but the general public paid little attention to it because the government seemed to be taking care of things (e.g. welfare)? If that was the case then the general public would be misled about what world-view does the most good for society; this in-turn would affect elections and laws. I've said "if" but this is exactly what is happening today.
Of course this raises the question, "If the state does not do much to help those in need, who will?" Obviously those who do the most to help the vulnerable and the weak are going to have the greatest impact in such a society. In such a society more people will adopt the values of those who do the most to help those in need. Without the state promoting, and winning support for "their" values, there will be a level playing field regarding all values; then it will be much easier for people to identify what values (or beliefs if you like) are best for society.3 To understand just how important this is, we must look closely at some of the problems associated with the government's promotion of values.
At present, intellectual elites (who have knowledge but often lack wisdom) and special interest groups lobby governments to promote the values they think should be promoted in schools and through the media. When elites and or special interest groups persuade the government to use our money (in the form of taxes) to promote their cause it often divides the people and creates unnecessary tension. For example, how do you feel about something you strongly disagree with being taught in government schools, particularly when your children attend them? If you are deeply religious how do you feel about the government's promotion of sex education in schools? If you are not religious how do you feel about the government funding chaplaincy programs in schools? These or similar problems will exist as long as government funds or owns certain things. (E.g. TV shows, one state government funded the show "Big Brother" to the tune of 2 million dollars, despite the wishes of many people. The government continues to give grants for art that most people think is a waste of money and many find offensive. By the way, the greatest art flourished before governments started funding art.)
Another problem with the governments promotion of values is it does not seem to be working. Crime and social problems are on the rise. While it is possible to point to a few examples and show that crime in some areas has reduced, to accurately assess the true condition of our society, we must look at crime and social problems as a whole. When cyber crime and other crimes which are unique to the modern world are taken into account, there is a far higher percentage of the population involved in criminal activity than at any period in the past 100 years. Even crimes such as shop lifting are on the rise. In 2009, 5.5 billion dollars worth of goods were shop lifted in Australia. At the heart of our economic woes is a moral problem which costs. (And sometimes costs live. See Four Corners: Degrees of Deception)
Societies ever increasing problems with alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, gambling, and crime in general are causing governments to continually increase taxes in an effort to maintain law and order. The moral crisis in business and government cannot be addressed by technology alone. Given enough time, increased corruption in the police force and government bureaucracies, will turn countries like Australia and Canada into places like South Africa and Guatemala. Those in power realize we have a moral crisis but no matter how much time or money they put into addressing the issue it only seems to grow worse. We as a society will reap what we have sown. (If we continue down our present path there will be an increase in corruption and crime; combine this with and increase in terrorism and an aging population and we have the perfect recipe for the financial collapse of many western governments. If this occurs there will also be an increase in many diseases as the healthcare costs for many diseases which can be controlled at present will be too expensive for most people (e.g. AIDS). )
Note: Before attempting to restrict the states ability to promote ideologies it would be wise for all government welfare, education, and health care to be shifted from the federal level to the state level (only the states would collect taxes for those services). Then it would be up to each individual state to choose how much they wanted to separate their ideology from their state. The advantage to doing it this way is it would not be long before we saw which states were being successful and which states were going bankrupt due to high unemployment, excessive regulations, and crime.
Government welfare is not the best way to help those in need, and it creates more problems than it solves (See The Truth About Welfare: Past, Present and Future).
Many believe that the government can do a better job of taking care of the poor and needy than charities and individuals. These people believe that charities should play no more than a support role for government welfare and health, but this belief is based in part, on a misunderstanding of how wealth is redistributed (See The Costs of Public Income Redistribution and Private Charity by James Rolph Edwards). With government support charities and individuals will always do a better job of helping those in need than government departments. (Government departments cannot exercise the same discretion as individuals and private charities. For example, would you voluntarily give men like Anjem Choudary your money if there were no unemployment benefits? He calls "Job Seeker's Allowance" "Jihad Seeker's Allowance." Would you give money to an alcoholic if you knew that man or woman was going to spend it on alcohol? Of course not. You might however, buy that person a meal. The governments efforts to help may make things easier for some people in the short term, but their efforts usually make societies problems worse in the long term.) Unemployment benefits increase debt, and it undermines the private sector thereby increasing unemployment.
The welfare state is simply not sustainable for long periods (as many European countries are beginning to discover); we must work towards a sustainable compassionate alternative, an alternative that ensures the moral crisis is addressed and the poor are assisted. (Sometimes the cost of saving a life is just too great. See here.)
"The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when the government does too much, nobody else does much of anything." --Mark Steyn, America Alone.
"The century-old question -- Does any given 'scheme of help...make demands on men to give themselves to their brethren?' -- is still the right one to ask.
"Each of us needs to ask that question not in the abstract, but personally. We need to ask ourselves: Are we offering not coerced silver, but our lives? If we talk of crisis pregnancies, are we actually willing to provide a home to a pregnant young woman? If we talk of abandoned children, are we actually willing to adopt a child? Most of our twentieth-century schemes, based on having someone else take action, are proven failures. It's time to learn from the warm hearts and hard heads of earlier times, and to bring that understanding into our own lives" (Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion, Washington D.C. , Regency Gateway, 1992, pp. 232-233).
So the issue is not just how do we help people but how are we to create citizens who are more helpful? Marvin Olasky suggests that we can learn from the people of the past. Unfortunately, we are often too quick to dismiss some of the old ways of doing things simply because we measure different periods in terms of results. But how would the people of the past, before government welfare, have fared if they had our technology and knowledge? (Would the volunteers have been able to do much more on a much larger scale?) How would we fair under our present system of government welfare, eduction etc if we had their technology and knowledge? (Would it be possible to be able to support government welfare, hospitals, education and media without industrialization?) Only when we take those things into account can we make a fair comparison. And only then will we be in a good position to learn from the past and address our present crisis. (see What is Wrong with the Welfare State?).
Benjamin Franklin wrote, "only a virtuous people are capable of freedom." The question we should be asking is, "Can the government play a part in creating more people like Mother Teresa without indoctrinating the people?"
When the government reduces its activities in certain areas ordinary people will become acutely aware of how much good volunteers and charitable organizations do, then the beliefs of those volunteers and organizations will be more widely praised and spread; those values will have a greater impact on society and more people will adopt them. The seeds of virtue will be sown without the government promoting an ideology or spending a cent. (And most of us will agree that government debt is rarely a good thing.)
The people must begin to identify and adopt the values that are best for society or society itself will eventually collapse.
If the government stops funding media and withdraws from the caring professions, playing no more than a support role for hospitals, schools and charities, those who care the most will have the greatest influence in society.
Bureaucracies must be reduced (But not all. E.g. The defense force and police force are necessary. We don't want too much government, but neither do we want too little. See Government and Why Nazism was Socialism and Why Socialism is Totalitarian by George Reisman.) Anyone who has worked for a local council and for a private business understands that private businesses are almost always more efficient than government departments. Many public servants create an unnecessary burden on society in the form of inefficiency and taxes.
There is another advantage to a true separation of ideology and state, and that is the people will be protected from well meaning but often misguided men and women.
Think for a moment, where would the world be without government funded media or government controlled education? Hitler wouldn't have got far without government controlled education and government funded media. What about Stalin or North Korea today?
"But surely the government would have to play some role in education and the media. And how would you implement such a system anyway?"
On the following link I argue why we need to work toward a greater separation of ideology and state, what it will look like, how it will be implemented and what services the state will provide.
I sincerely believe that if our politicians worked towards a greater separation of ideology and state our future would be much brighter.
1. See Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat by Os Guinness.
2. The States laws should be the only reflection of what those in power believe.
Richard Eason writes:
(1) All nations must have laws.
(2) All laws try to prevent something "wrong" or promote something "right" - so all law is enacted morality.
(3) All morality depends on beliefs that are scientifically non-testable and thus religious. Governments cannot avoid basing laws on religious beliefs. The burning question is whose beliefs should form the basis of our law? [See Legislating Morality by Geisler and Turek for more on this important subject]
Eason's observation is fair, whether we like it or not, all laws reflect somebody's moral views, which are in opposition to other moral views (E.g. relativists condemn absolute views. "All denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind" - Chesterton). Laws always reflect a moral outlook; that cannot be changed, but changes can be made which will protect people from their governments.
3. For people to see who really cares the most, it is also important that businesses not be allowed to donate to charities, as such donations can simply be used as a front to cover shonky business practices, low wages, or something worse. (However, business owners and share holders must be free to donate to charities.) It would also be necessary for any citizens from certain countries to be black listed from donating to schools, hospitals, and charities.