I don't think the equality aspect of our discussion is going much of anywhere. I obviously have not found a way to make myself clearly understood: I don't remember saying that Mr. Kalb was making equality a war cry, and I clearly acknowledged that the word as a label attaches to legitimate meanings that are completely distinct from the political-liberal concept of equal rights. My assertion that those other meanings are categorically distinct seems to be important only to me: certainly no one has disputed that assertion directly or indirectly.
As far as the break with England is concerned and the subsequent establishment clause, I realize that protestant spin is that religion becomes less subjugated to state thereby. Spin is not fact, though. The reformation and the later Louis's invented a divine right of kings to make church subject to state; to free the state from the church that was its only political conscience with teeth. The result was that church became an official department under the state, and the political checks and balances of Christendom were destroyed. The American establishment clause removes even departmentally legitimate political authority from the church, further subjugating it. So I see the establishment clause as continuous with the exhaltation of state over everything; of the nation-state's emancipation from the formal power of the church as its conscience. On this reading the United Nations as secular papacy is particularly ironic but I think quite accurate.
I don't think the equality
I don't think the equality aspect of our discussion is going much of anywhere. I obviously have not found a way to make myself clearly understood: I don't remember saying that Mr. Kalb was making equality a war cry, and I clearly acknowledged that the word as a label attaches to legitimate meanings that are completely distinct from the political-liberal concept of equal rights. My assertion that those other meanings are categorically distinct seems to be important only to me: certainly no one has disputed that assertion directly or indirectly.
As far as the break with England is concerned and the subsequent establishment clause, I realize that protestant spin is that religion becomes less subjugated to state thereby. Spin is not fact, though. The reformation and the later Louis's invented a divine right of kings to make church subject to state; to free the state from the church that was its only political conscience with teeth. The result was that church became an official department under the state, and the political checks and balances of Christendom were destroyed. The American establishment clause removes even departmentally legitimate political authority from the church, further subjugating it. So I see the establishment clause as continuous with the exhaltation of state over everything; of the nation-state's emancipation from the formal power of the church as its conscience. On this reading the United Nations as secular papacy is particularly ironic but I think quite accurate.