Democracy: the notion that the ultimate purpose of the government is to serve those it rules. Since time immemorial, this concept has typically been served by a republican system: the people gather to vote on laws which affect them, or candidates who will enact laws that affect them. Other mechanisms have been devised to defend the ideal of democracy; some of these have been good, and some have been bad. Among those mechanisms is the strict separation of church and state. The resolution 'Resolved: Democracy is best served by strict separation of church and state' does not ask whether the state itself is better for having separated itself from the church, only whether 'democracy' is better for it.

As a value, I offer that of the resolution: democracy. As a criterion, I offer governmental legitimacy. I define democracy literally as 'people power' from the Greek 'demos kratos', meaning idiomatically 'the ability of people to rule through the government', 'governmental legitimacy' as 'the ability of a government to fulfill the ideals upon which it is built' -- in this case, democracy -- 'republic' as 'a system of government in which the will of the people is gauged and executed through an electoral system', and 'strict separation of church and state' as 'an absolute legal divide between religion and government'.

There is a great abundance of clear examples for and against the separation of church and state. The Netherlands republic, lasting from rebellion against the Habsburgs in the late 16th century until the general European counterrevolution at the turn of the 19th, would preserve relative democracy without any official separation of church and state. England, the country upon which our republic was modelled, still possesses a state religion lead by the government. But using historical context to prove a point is irrelevant -- for there always exists a counterexample. Instead, the negative will only use the case of Turkey to illustrate a point: that while the republic is served best by the separation of church and state, the interests of democracy and the interests of the republic do not always collude.

In Turkey, the separation of church and state has been an institution since the 1920s. Shari'a -- Islamic law -- was officially abandoned upon the transition to a republican government, and the state was made vigorously secular. Turkey has been called the only strong example of an Islamic democracy. While it is undeniably a strong example of an Islamic republic, the government enjoys little legitimacy with those it serves. When it was established, the Turkish republic represented a strong backlash against every element of the Ottoman empire -- along with the monarchy and Shari'a were removed meaningless articles of Ottoman rule such as the fez and the Arabic alphabet. At the time, the oppressed people of Turkey appreciated these gestures. Several generations later, they seem vaguely absurd to history and the people of Turkey. It has gone through military dictatorship and it has suffered generally low public opinion, and overall this 'republic' has done a very poor job of enacting the will of those it represents. In the case of Turkey, it is clear that strict separation of church and state have lead to a LESS, not MORE, democratic system.

It cannot be denied that, since the first World War, democracy on the whole has been on the march. However, we are now seeing the beginnings of a backlash against the mechanisms of democracy which must not be ignored. A republic requires the strict separation of church and state exactly because of its vulnerability to tyranny, but the only strict requirement of a democracy is equality under the law -- and equal weight given to all opinions. There exist cases such as Iran in which a theocratic, tyrannous government has taken over and violently persecuted the minority in the name of the majority, but this misses the entire point of democracy: that change does occur in the popular will, and that joining the minority must not turn a citizen into a criminal. So long as laws exist preventing the church from becoming its own state -- that there will be no return to the Inquisition -- religion can take its place in the marketplace of ideas and the framework of democracy.

The resolution presents democracy and religion as dichotomistic values, but it fails to recognize this eternal problem: if the will of the majority is for religion, what right does a democratic state have to act against it? There exists none -- and it is for this reason that I urge a vote for the negative.

I will now open for questioning and points of clarification.