While sitting around on vacation, I had many flashes of insight, some small and some bigger. This one lies somewhere in the middle. I have no idea what precipitated my thinking about this, but I suddenly began thinking about the separation of church and state in the government set up by America’s Founding Fathers. Many people today complain about how inept our government is. How it’s comprised of an endless bureaucracy, and the inability of the various branches to effectively come together and make things happen. Few people seem to realize though that this was in fact the original purpose of the federalist system of government: to be broken and ineffectual.

First, you have the three branches, legislative, judicial & executive. They each maintain powers against the other branches: checks & balances. The idea is to restrain the excesses of any one group. Then, within the legislative branch, you have a bicameral (two house) system, comprised of the Senate and the Congress. Their membership, organization, and attitudes tend to be radically different. Often they will disagree with one another, and a bill which originates in one will be shot down in the other. Again, this is all by design, to keep any one group from seizing too much power. On top of that the federal system is inherently designed so that this complex dynamic structure is redundant: it exists at the national level, and has a microcosmic replica operating at the state level.

With this elaborate system of checks, balances and redundancy in place, it becomes more and more apparent what the purpose of separating church and state really is: it’s another safeguard against the abuse of power. The church is supposed to be a rival of the state, since it becomes yet another redundant level of social organization and power structures. It overlaps and contends with the state for authority. In fact, it seems like the dynamic interplay of all these competing overlapping social systems is probably a major part of what drives our cultural development. Energy, ideas, people and money are shuffled back and forth between various cultural polarities, creating a constant stream of change.