A LOT of water falling from directly above Cambridge had cancelled the Common's second free Sunday rock concert by the time I hit the streets. May 17, 1970: for some, a celebration of Pentecost. A group called Pentecost Action had transferred its celebration from the Common to the First Church of Cambridge, Congregational. I attended with fifty-odd others including Bob Gordon, impresario of those rock concerts and, apparently, like myself, an interested observer

Two and one-half decided that the United States military had housecleaning to do in Cambodia; three days previous to that, Religious Heritage of America had named President Nixon Churchman of the Year for "carrying his deep religious commitment into the Presidency;" and Pentecost Action had called this meeting to conduct an excommunication of President Nixon from Christianity. A young Catholic priest and Harvard doctoral candidated, G. Ronald Murphy, presided with assistance from clergy of several other faiths. After a welcome and prayer, scriptural passages were read, the most material being 1 Corinthians 5:9-13, wherein sanction is given for judging those within but not those without the church: " 'Drive our the wicked person from among you.' "

And so the congregation recited a proclamation reading in part: ". . . our brother, Richard Nixon, by placing personal and national pride over brotherly love, you are separating yourself . . . from the spirit of Jesus Christ. . . Therefore, following our consciences to the best of our ability, we must advise you that by your own act, you are incapable of genuine participation in any Christian assembly or religious service, you are acting improperly in requesting ministers, priests, and rabbis to conduct services for you, and you are not in communion with us. . . In the name of the Lord and of the Christian people. Pentecost 1970."

Traditionally, at such severances, a lighted candle is removed from the gathering, turned upside down, and snuffed out in the earth. This time, however, in token of a hope that the disconnection be only temporary, the candle was simply removed. The assembly ended with Murphy urging everyone to try to have the proclamation read by many regular congregations.

OF THE two orders, religious and civil, one must be theoretically and effectively superior to the other. One of the two must be the underlying, ultimate referent and tribunal. Whenever a society considers a fundamental separation of the two to exist, the civil is necessarily the superior one.

Thomas A. Donovan, Roman Catholic priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., in his thesis, "The Status of the Church in American Civil Law and Canon Law," argues that free religious expression in America (public worship, ecclesiastical property holding, etc.) does not flow from the largesse of the civil order but from divine sanction and radical incompetence of the civil order in this matter.

Twice in New Jersey, however, courts have ordered vitally necessary blood transfusions for a fetus over the religious objections of the mother to such medical practice. The U.S. Supreme Court forced Mormons to abandon polygamy. For example.

The spiritual order enjoys a fundamental independence only when all civil dynamics flow from it in a union of civil and spiritual orders. Its radical freedom lies in the union of the orders. The radical freedom of the civil order lies in its "separation" from the spiritual order. Freedom in union vs. freedom in separation.

In which freedom does life originate? In which freedom is life fulfilled? Does the same freedom answer both questions?

THE FIRST English ladies and gentlemen to arrive in Indian country were not overly burdened with the urge to keep church and state separate. John H. Laubach, in his book, School Prayers: Congress, the Courts and the Public, writes: "The Puritan settlement . . . of Massachusetts Bay . . . established under Governor Winthrop . . . in the seventeenth century sought to join the cross and the sword in founding a new Israel, following the Calvinist model." In 1639, the General Court of Massachusetts summoned Ann Hutchinson, charging that she allowed religiously unorthodox people to meet in her home and air their unseemly doctrines. Part of the transcript of the trial reads:

Mrs. Hutchinson-What law do they transgress?

Governor Winship-The law of God and of the state . . .

Mrs. Hutchinson-What law have I broken?

Governor Winship-Why the fifth commandment.

Ann Hutchinson was banished from the colony. In England about the same time, the concept of the "social contract" began to spread via the ideas of Thomas Hobbs. Hobbs challenged the doctrine of the divine right of kings, declaring that legitimate government is formed by contracting men, and that temporal power is always superior to ecclesiastical power. (Although we remember that over four centuries earlier, the barons extorted the Magna Charta from King John, we do not as readily recall that before the year was out, John repudiated the document and was released from its observance by the Pope. John died the following year, 1216, and the agreement was reissued by Henry III.) Social contract theory was further developed by John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson, who enshrined it in the American Declaration of Independence.