Friendly and Hostile Separation
Scholars have distinguished between what can be called "friendly" and "hostile" separations of church and state. The friendly type limits the interference of the church in matters of the state but also limits the interference of the state in church matters. The hostile variety, by contrast, seeks to confine religion purely to the home or church and limits religious education, religious rites of passage and public displays of faith.
The hostile model of secularism arose with the French Revolution and is typified in the Mexican Revolution, its resulting Constitution and the Spanish Constitution of 1931. The hostile model exhibited during these events can be seen as approaching the type of political religion seen in totalitarian states.
The French separation of 1905 and the Spanish separation of 1931 have been characterized as the two most hostile of the twentieth century, although the current schemes in both countries are considered generally friendly. France's President Nicolas Sarkozy at the beginning of his term, however, considered the current scheme a "negative laicite" and wanted to develop a "positive laicite" more open to religion. The concerns of the state toward religion have been seen by some as one cause of the civil war in Spain and Mexico.
The French philosopher and Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafter Jacques Maritain noted the distinction between the models found in France and in the mid-twentieth century United States. He considered the US model of that time to be more amicable because it had both "sharp distinction and actual cooperation" between church and state, what he called "an historical treasure" and admonished the United States, "Please to God that you keep it carefully, and do not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one." Alexis de Tocqueville, another French observer tended to make the same distinction, "In the U.S., from the beginning, politics and religion were in accord, and they have not ceased to be so since."
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Famous quotes containing the words friendly and, friendly, hostile and/or separation:
“It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Their rebukes have never made me angry, because I have always wondered why they did not rebuke me more. They should have. Their friendly praise has been one of the sweetest, most warming things in my life in the theater. I do go on the stage unafraid of them and with love in my heart for them.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I was the one who was working to destroy the one thing to which I was committed, that is, my relationship with Gilberte; I was doing so by creating, little by little and through the prolonged separation from my friend, not her indifference, but my own. It was toward a long and cruel suicide of the self within myself which loved Gilberte that I continuously set myself ...”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)