Don't mention the war! A response to Cavanaugh – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/02/08/3425814.htm
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The medieval church did, indeed, develop a doctrine that temporal authority should be subordinate to spiritual authority. It does not follow that people in medieval times, or during the first stages of modernity, were unable to tell the difference.
In any event, something else seems to be bothering Cavanaugh - perhaps the idea that religions with continued pretensions to political authority should now give them up. It is true that the Catholic Church has been unwilling, historically, to abandon these pretensions; in fact, it has still not entirely done so. Even as it teaches that it and other religious organisations should be free from interference by the state in their internal affairs, the Vatican also maintains that the state should enforce (what the Vatican regards as) the moral law. Thus, it retains considerable vestiges of a theocratic mind-set.
Similarly, as Cavanaugh reminds us, Islam is notorious for refusing to draw a boundary between the domains of religion and politics. In the past, Islamic legal scholars supported the enforcement of Islamic canons of conduct. Thus, secularism, with its insistence that laws be made solely for worldly purposes - essentially to protect and promote our civil interests, independently of any religious teachings - cuts across the traditional aspirations of Islam.
If it comes to that, we can find a good supply of Protestants who think that secularism has gone too far in political toleration of behaviour that they regard as immoral.
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