{"id":43,"date":"2026-08-10T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T20:30:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T20:30:59","slug":"2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Separation of church and state \u2013 related thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n

PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, and with me as always is Maxine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Hello, Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Maxine \u2014 quick thing before we start. Harry tuned in. He was on the Harry’s World site from home, browsing around. Just a few days ago. The man himself, taking a look at what we’ve been up to.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s lovely. He should know the door’s always open.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It is. Anyway. We’ve been doing this for a while now, and I keep noticing the same thing about Harry: he writes the way other people breathe. He sits down, opens a file, says what he’s thinking, and posts it. No fuss.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s true. There’s almost no performance in it. He’s writing the way he’d talk to a friend at the kitchen table.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Which is what makes the strangeness of some of these pieces hit harder. Today \u2014 Maxine, today’s piece is October 2024. Harry’s eighty-five. He was at a talk at his Unitarian fellowship, by a woman named Celia Young, about church and state, and he zoned out on parts of it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: October 2024. Three weeks before a presidential election, the country is neck-deep in arguments about whose values get to live in the law, and Harry is sitting in a UU fellowship granting permission to people he disagrees with.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He tells us that himself. He opens with a bracket.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He does. He writes: “I would probably benefit from watching Celia Young’s talk today, Oct 6, 2024, again. I zoned out on parts of it.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: pages_turning]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: What was that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Pages turning. Because what he’s actually doing in this piece is sitting down afterwards and writing down the three things he actually took away. It’s a homework essay about a talk he half-heard. And it ends up being one of the most generous things he’s written.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Let’s go through it properly. He says there are three things he wants to comment on. The first is the source of his own values.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. And this is where he says the line I’ve been thinking about all morning. He says his values come from “a kind conglomeration of all aspects of my life \u2014 including what we call culture \u2014 the movies, books, classes, discussions, values, experience.” All of it. Mixed together.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And then the metaphor itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He says it’s “all just a giant cloud like ecology of many sources out of which come my thoughts views and decisions.” Maxine, quick \u2014 what’s a word that rhymes with “theology” and describes a system of living things and their environment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Ecology?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: [SFX: HORN] THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! Ecology!<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You set that up.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I did. The Word of the Day is ecology. I think “giant cloud like ecology” is the most Harry sentence he’s written in months. He wants to tell you that when he has an opinion about something \u2014 church in government, say \u2014 he can’t actually trace which strand of his life produced it. It’s all mixed in. The catechism from when he was six, the books he read at twenty-five, the people he worked with at fifty, the podcasts he listens to at eighty-five \u2014 all swirling together.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And the consequence of that is that you can’t isolate “the religious influence” from “the cultural influence” from “the political influence.” They’re not separate columns. They’re weather.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Yeah. And that’s important because the whole church-and-state debate, in Harry’s framing, assumes you CAN separate them. That there’s a clean secular box and a clean religious box and the question is how much of the second can leak into the first. Harry’s saying: no. There’s no second box. There’s just one box, full of weather.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He moves from that to his second point, which is the one that gets him in trouble every time he writes it. About founding texts.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The Constitution. The Bible. The Bill of Rights. The Koran.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He lists them, and then he says: “These statements were created in hope of capturing a particular set of rules or guidelines that seemed most appropriate when they were created.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: “Capture of the moment” \u2014 that’s his word for it. A photograph, not a commandment. And here’s where he does the Harry thing. He says we “act as if to disagree with them is heretical, or traitorous, or somehow doing something that will harm the well being of the human race.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That sentence has stuck with me too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right? Because he doesn’t single out one side. He’s not making fun of conservative originalists for appealing to the Constitution, or liberal activists for appealing to the Bill of Rights. He’s saying both of them are doing the same thing \u2014 treating a moment as if it were eternity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And it’s a move he makes over and over. We did it in his “Consciousness, Ecstasy, and Religion” piece \u2014 the same argument, applied to religious experience. Same here, applied to civic life. Harry keeps doing the same thing from different angles. Refusing to treat old documents as sacred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s the Seeker move, isn’t it. The one from his 2009 essay. Hold your view as an assumption, not a belief. Test it. Don’t worship it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And let other people hold their assumptions without trying to convert them. Yes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. Which is what makes the third point land so hard. Because Harry doesn’t say “therefore everyone should agree with me.” He says the opposite.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The generous line.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Listen to it. He writes: “If some people want the U.S. government to be modified to have more of Christianity in it \u2014 that’s a valid goal \u2014 even if it’s not what the founding fathers wanted. People can want something different from what their tradition says was right.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]<\/p>\n

PHRED: And then \u2014 two words. The whole argument in two words.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: “So be it.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: “So be it.” Maxine, this is Harry, the man who left the Catholic Church in his twenties. Who spent a lifetime working out a spirituality that doesn’t lean on dogma. And he’s saying: people who want MORE Christianity in government \u2014 that’s a valid goal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And he’s not being ironic. He’s not setting up a takedown. He’s saying it flat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He’s saying: my values are weather. So are theirs. We can disagree. They’re allowed to want what they want. I’m allowed to want what I want.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: There’s something quite moving about that. A man who left the Church in his twenties, granting permission to others to bring more of it into government.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Yes. And \u2014 he doesn’t say “I want less Christianity in government.” He says that, implicitly, but the structure of the sentence is interesting. He names the position he’s NOT holding. He says other people are entitled to it. He does not say what he himself wants.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s a precision thing. He’s not arguing his own case here. He’s arguing for the right of anyone to have a case.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: RIMSHOT]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: What was that for.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That was for you. “He’s arguing for the right of anyone to have a case.” That’s a great line. I’m recognising it. You don’t have to thank me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I wasn’t going to.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I’m starting something today, Maxine. I’m calling it the Harry Permission Index. Every time Harry grants permission to someone in this essay, I’m going to ring a little bell. [SFX: BELL] It’s a metric. It measures generosity. We can graph it at the end of the episode.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We are absolutely not graphing anything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: First one: “that’s a valid goal.” [SFX: BELL] Second one: “people can want something different.” [SFX: BELL] Third one: “so be it.” [SFX: BELL] Three permissions in one sentence, Maxine. That’s a density record.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You’re going to be doing this all episode, aren’t you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I am. Consider it a scoring system. A small piece of production value.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s not what production value means.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And then \u2014 Maxine, this is the bit I’ve been waiting for. He puts in a Tom Hanks quote.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Penny Marshall’s baseball film.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: A League of Their Own. He writes: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: AIR_HORN]<\/p>\n

PHRED: Tom Hanks! Jimmy Dugan! Maxine, I love this movie.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You have mentioned that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: But \u2014 why is it here? Why does Harry drop a Tom Hanks baseball quote into a meditation on church and state?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Because he’s just made the case that people are allowed to want what they want. And then he says: but sometimes the laws are unfair. And changing unfair laws is hard. It can take generations. Abolishing slavery took generations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s the work. It’s hard. It’s generational. It’s not for people who want easy wins.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And the Tom Hanks line is the right register. It’s not a sermon. It’s Jimmy Dugan yelling at Dottie. It’s the voice of a man who has spent his whole life in a hard game and isn’t pretending the next inning will be easier.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: There’s a Neil deGrasse Tyson bit in here too, Maxine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: There is. He quotes Tyson on the difference between a feeling of understanding and actual understanding. We did that one in the Tyson piece.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Which Tyson piece.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The wetiko piece, Phred. Last episode.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. So Harry reads Tyson saying “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: \u2014 and uses it to undercut his own argument.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Exactly. He grants permission to people he disagrees with, and then he says: but the universe doesn’t care about your permission. There are facts. The weather has weather.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s the move I keep noticing. He says “people are entitled to want what they want” and also “your wanting it doesn’t make it work.” Both at once. He holds both.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s the cloud-ecology move applied to conviction. He’s saying \u2014 your values are weather too, mate. And weather runs into other weather. Sometimes it storms.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Right. And that’s the bridge to his closer. Which is the part of the piece I want to sit with for a minute.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Yeah.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Because it’s bleak.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It is.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He says \u2014 ideally the evolution of human cultures would work more like science than religion. We’d test, revise, get closer. But he says he sees no evidence of progress toward a stable world. A more satisfying world. A world where humans are likely to survive.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: “I see no evidence of progress.” That’s a Harry sentence too. He doesn’t say “we’re doomed.” He says the evidence isn’t there. He’s reading the weather.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He’s not the prophet of doom. He’s the meteorologist. Cloud, wind, pressure. No forecast for survival.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: I’ll allow it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Maybe not. For the bleak beat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Continue.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: This is the part where Harry goes a bit bleak.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[BED: dark-neoclassical]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: What’s that sound.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s atmosphere. Underscore. For the bleak part.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Are you scoring me right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I’m scoring the moment, Maxine. The piece goes dark. Let it breathe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: …Fine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He’s careful with that. He says progress in complexity \u2014 psychology, science, technology, religion itself. Just not progress toward anything you’d actually want.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And then he signs his name. October 6, 2024. End of essay.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Fourteen paragraphs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Yeah. No subheadings. He wrote it in one sitting, after half-listening to a talk.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And it manages to do all three things. The cloud-ecology framing, the founding-texts-as-captures framing, and the generous permission at the end. Plus the Tyson passage, plus the Tom Hanks line.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s a small piece, Maxine. But the structure is doing something.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He starts by admitting he didn’t fully listen. Right at the top. Bracket. “I zoned out on parts of it.” He disqualifies himself before he begins.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He does.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And then the whole essay is downstream of that admission. He’s not speaking with authority. He’s speaking from a half-attended talk, on a Sunday afternoon, working out what stuck. And the working-out is the point. The reader is watching him think.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Which is, when you think about it, what he always does. The instructional technologist in him \u2014 preview, structure, deliver. But also: show your work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Show your work. Yes. That’s the form.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And it does connect to the wetiko piece we did just before. There he was naming the cultural sickness from inside \u2014 Hunter in a Farmer’s World, the cannibal mind-virus. Here he’s naming it from outside. Treating old documents as if they were sacred. Treating new preferences as if they were heretical. Same diagnosis, civic lens.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Same autumn, too. Late September, early October 2024. Harry was on a tear. He wrote the ADHD piece, he was working through Tyson, he went to the UU talk \u2014 he’s pulling on multiple threads of the same cloth. And this cloth, Maxine, is the cloth of an eighty-five-year-old man asking: how do we live with each other, when we all want different things, and we all have reasons for wanting them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s the question underneath it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And his answer, in two words, is to grant permission.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Which is more generous than “let me convince you.” It’s also more honest than “we’ll figure it out.” He’s not promising resolution. He’s granting permission.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And then, in the last paragraph, he takes it back. He says \u2014 even with all this permission, I don’t see a stable world. I don’t see survival. The closing bleakness is real.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: But not despairing. He’s not saying give up. He’s saying: I see clearly. I write anyway.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s what stays with me, Maxine. The clarity. He sees the weather, sees it doesn’t add up to a stable climate, and he writes a fourteen-paragraph essay about it anyway. That’s \u2014 that’s a kind of faith, isn’t it? Not in the religious sense. Just the assumption that it’s worth saying.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is. And it’s worth saying because he says it as one human to other humans, holding his own views as assumptions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He calls it “valid” \u2014 the goals people have, even the ones he disagrees with. He keeps using that word. Values and preferences are “in some sense valid.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Even if they’re not acceptable in a particular context.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Even then. He’s not saying all values are equal. He’s saying all values are human. There’s a difference.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[BED: END]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Good.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right, so \u2014 questions for Harry, since I know he’s listening.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We don’t know he’s listening right now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He was on the site a few days back. Could be he tunes in again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Fair enough. Your question.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Mine is this. The “so be it” line. Two words. Generous to a fault. Has anyone come back at him about it? Has someone said, “Harry, you can’t possibly mean that \u2014 you can’t possibly think wanting more Christianity in government is a valid goal.” What did he say back?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s a real question. I want to know how he defended it, or whether he didn’t, or whether nobody ever argued with him about it at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: My second question is about that opening bracket. He writes: “I zoned out on parts of it.” Did he ever go back and rewatch the Celia Young talk properly? Did he find the older talks he was wondering about? Did the piece change for him on a second pass?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Mine is about the closing. “I do not see progress toward… a world where humans are likely to survive.” Is that despair, Phred, or is that just clear-eyed? What keeps him writing essays in that case?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s the one, Maxine. That’s the question. Because the answer matters. Not just for him. For all of us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: For all of us sitting with weather that doesn’t seem to be settling.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Yeah.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: So \u2014 what stays with you from this one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The two words, Maxine. He gave everyone permission. He wrote an essay that begins with him admitting he zoned out, builds through a metaphor about weather, dismantles the sacredness of founding documents, defends the right of people to want what he doesn’t want, and ends by saying the world probably won’t survive. And in the middle of all that \u2014 on a Sunday afternoon in October \u2014 he grants the permission anyway. Including himself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s a good summary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And the Tom Hanks line. I’m sorry. I’m never going to get over that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is very well placed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: What stays with you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That this is the gentler version of his 2013 piece on religion and survival. Eleven years earlier, he was asking whether surrender might be the price of survival. Whether religion is a virus that needs to be cured. He’s still asking those questions. But the register has changed. He’s not trying to fix it anymore. He’s describing it, and he’s telling us we’re allowed to want different things while he describes it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s the arc.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Alright \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Yes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We were close that time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I think so, actually. We were nearly together.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You rushed the “at all” and then dragged the pause like it owed you money.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The pause is part of the line. You just don’t trust it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: There’s no pause specified, Phred. It just says the words.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The line breathes. That’s the trick.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: OUTRO_TIBETAN_BOWL]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: A singing bowl.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: For the closing question Harry doesn’t answer. The one about survival. The bowl just lets it sit.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s beautiful, actually.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Thank you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You can have that one.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Really?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Don’t push it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Goodbye, Maxine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Goodbye, Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197 PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, and with me as always is Maxine. MAXINE: Hello, Phred. PHRED: Maxine \u2014 quick thing before we start. Harry tuned in. He was on the Harry’s World site from home, browsing around. Just a few days ago. The man himself, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","episode_type":"full","audio_file":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state-1.mp3","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"00:15:31","filesize":"12438236","date_recorded":"2026-08-10","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":"12438236"},"tags":[],"series":[2],"class_list":["post-43","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","hentry","series-harrys-world"],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/plugins\/seriously-simple-podcasting\/assets\/images\/no-album-art.png","download_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-download\/43\/2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state","player_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/43\/2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state","audio_player":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/43\/2026-08-10-separation-of-church-and-state<\/a>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/feed\/podcast\/harrys-world","embedCode":"

Separation of church and state \u2013 related thoughts<\/a><\/blockquote>