Judaism and American Public Life: A Symposium

In the half-century now past, the dominant view among American Jews was that religion should be rigorously separated from public life. The more thoroughly secular the society, many thought, the safer it is for Jews. Those who, like Will Herberg, dissented from that view were in a very small minority. Now, however, more Jews seem to be having second thoughts about the relationship between religion and public life. In the 1960s, Orthodox Jews joined Catholics and others in urging public funding for religious schools. The National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA) has been formed as a counterweight to the “strict separationism” of other Jewish organizations on church-state questions. Jewish leaders are increasingly contending for “equal time” and “equal protection” in laws and government programs that encourage rather than restrict the role of religion in public life. Therefore, the editors of First Things recently asked a number of Jewish observers to respond to the following questions: What ought to be the role of religion in American public life, and how has your thinking on this question changed (if indeed it has changed)?

—Editors

David G. Dalin

I strongly believe that religion should play a central role in American public life, that a multiplicity of religious symbols belong in the public square. I am not now (nor have I ever been) comfortable with the liberal Jewish position that religion and public life must remain rigidly distinct. I have never shared the strict separationist faith espoused by Leo Pfeffer (among others) that religious freedom is most secure where church and state are separated and least secure where government and religion are intertwined.

On the contrary: I remain convinced that an American political culture uninformed by religious beliefs and symbols undermines the position of religiously observant Jews, and of other communities of faith, within American society. In their own self-interest, believing Jews should seek and applaud judicial decisions that permit far more, rather than less, accommodation of religion in public life. They should, moreover, applaud the decisions of those courts and judges that have recognized that although certain practices arising out of the requirements of Jewish religious law may conflict with society’s normal practices, these requirements are entitled to reasonable accommodation. (Those judicial decisions of recent years that have affirmed that employers must attempt to make “reasonable accommodations” to the religious needs of employees and, in so doing, have upheld the free exercise claims of Jewish sabbath and holiday observers, are a case in point.) Instead of fighting for the elimination of religious symbols in the public arena, more Jewish leaders ought to be fighting (as some already have) for “equal time” for Jewish symbols, for the “free exercise” of religion through laws and judicial rulings designed to make it easier for observant Jews to uphold the tenets of their faith.

As much, perhaps, as any other church-state question, the issue of religious symbols on public property has generated increasing concern and debate within the American Jewish community in recent years. This concern has derived, in part, from the growing recognition that the triumph of strict separationism as a legal doctrine, with its promise to expunge all religious symbols from the public arena, may actually infringe upon the free exercise of religion cherished by American Jews.

The 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Goldman V. Weinberger is illustrative of this tendency, one too often ignored by liberal Jewish adherents to the prevailing separationist faith. Simcha Goldman, an Orthodox Jew and ordained rabbi serving as a clinical psychologist in an Air Force hospital, wore a yarmulke at all times and contended that an Air Force dress code regulation which forbade the wearing of “headgear” (such as a yarmulke) while indoors infringed upon his First Amendment right to free exercise of his religious belief. The Supreme Court, however, upheld the Air Force regulation, implying that to do otherwise would violate the separation of church and state. The First Amendment’s free exercise protection, ruled the court, did not require the military to accommodate Captain Goldman’s religious obligation. Implicit in the doctrine of church-state separation that the Supreme Court enforced in this case is the assumption that religious symbols such as the yarmulke, while appropriate for private religious devotion in home or synagogue, have no legitimate place in any public institution. The Supreme Court’s denial of Simcha Goldman’s exercise of his religious obligation to wear a yarmulke is, it seems to me, but one recent and especially troubling example of what the Pfefferian ideal of strict separationism has wrought.

Another troubling example has involved the unbending efforts of liberal Jewish organizations to keep religious symbols, such as the crèche and menorah, outside the public arena. Recently, however, the traditional liberal Jewish opposition to the public display of religious symbols has been countered by a growing demand on the part of many Jews for “equal time” for specifically Jewish symbols. With the recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Allegheny County v. ACLU, I believe a new and exciting chapter in the church-state debate may be evolving around Jewish attempts in Pittsburgh and other places to legitimate the display of Jewish religious symbols in the public square.

The cases in question have to do with the constitutional propriety of placing a Hanukkah menorah in front of a public building or in a public park. Jewish opponents of these displays have argued that “since there is no religious need to place sacred symbols of any faith on public property . . . there is no religious need to be accommodated by the government.” Other Jews, including this writer, believe that such a compelling religious need indeed exists. Especially so, as in the Allegheny case, where religious symbols of differing faiths—the Hanukkah menorah and Christmas tree—are displayed side by side. When there are a multiplicity of religious symbols in the public square, the government is not favoring one religion over another but rather is expressing equal respect for all religious faiths. Promoting harmony among religious groups is profoundly different from the “establishing” of one religion that the First Amendment forbids. By giving a Jewish religious display “equal time” with a Christian one, Pittsburgh was showing the very “neutrality with regard to all religions” that the First Amendment was enacted to guarantee.

As a religiously observant Jew, I find this a welcome, and compelling argument that other Jewish believers, of all denominations, should be able to support and applaud. It is my hope, moreover, that this argument may be reflected in a continuing shift away from the strict separationist ideal that has for so long guided (and often misguided) Supreme Court rulings on church-state issues. I believe it should be the shared hope and prayer of religious believers of all faiths that the Allegheny County decision may usher in a new post-separationist era in church-state relations in America, an era characterized by a greater spirit of accommodation of religion by government, wherein a multitude of religious symbols and concerns may help to transform and reshape our public life.

David G. Dalin, an ordained rabbi, teaches American Jewish history at the University of Hartford. His book From Marxism to Judaism: The Collected Essays of Will Herberg, was published last year. The editors of First Things thank Rabbi Dalin, a member of the First Things Editorial Advisory Board, for his help in planning and organizing this symposium.

Marc D. Stern

The jumping-off point for this symposium is the contention that Jews are “increasingly contending for ‘equal time’ in law and government programs that encourage rather than restrict the role of religion in public life.” Both the poll evidence and the evidence of organizational behavior belie the existence of such a shift. No Jewish organization supported the Equal Access Act, which wrote the equal time principle into law and allowed religious students a platform from which to inject religion into the public high school environment. None supported giving creationism equal time with evolution. None supported ending the special status religious individuals enjoyed under the Free Exercise Clause in favor of a new rule that treats religious and nonreligious citizens equally.

There are good reasons for the Jewish community’s refusal to adopt equality as the overriding principle for defining religion’s public role. Shortly after the Supreme Court upheld the equal access law, fundamentalist and evangelical groups announced campaigns to spread the gospel in the public schools. Describing the decision, one group dedicated to encouraging that effort has written, “God has opened up a huge mission field. Our missionaries to this field must be our high school students. They can reach their generation for Jesus.” Equality that encourages such activity is no boon to Jews.

Some Orthodox groups have sought to ensure “equal treatment or encouragement of religion in public life.” That is surely true of the Lubavitch’s campaign to erect menorahs at government sites, or of its support for moments of silent prayer, or, for the broader Orthodox community, support for aid to parochial schools. These efforts represent the voice of, at most, 10 percent of American Jewry. And the fact is that even within Orthodoxy there are sharp and deep disagreements about the wisdom of these efforts, of which only Lubavitch’s really represents a desire to increase government involvement with religion. The rest of the Orthodox community is motivated by the very different principle of equality, or sheer necessity, not any independent judgment about the desirability of increased public involvement with religion.

In short, if there is any wholesale shift of Jewish opinion on church-state issues from a separationist point of view to an equal treatment or greater involvement point of view, it is not yet visible. It would indeed be startling if Jews were seeking to inject religion into the public life of the nation when for American Jewry as a whole religion has less significance than ever.

This is not to say that equality is not a religious clause value for most Jews. There is a unanimity that synagogues cannot be denied benefits accorded churches. Almost certainly, had the Supreme Court given unqualified approval to the display of crèches, Jews would have demanded equal treatment for menorahs. That demand would have represented not the view that it was healthy for government to be involved with religion, or that the public square needs greater input from religion, but the bedrock view of Jews that they should not allow themselves to be treated as second-class citizens. Equality between religious and nonreligious, however, is simply not the only, or even the most important, value for American Jews.

The substantive question posed is what ought to be the role of religion in American public life. That question could mean three different things: it could refer to the problem of church-state relations—prayer in the schools, religious holiday observances, and the like. The current rule has on the whole served the Jewish community well. Beyond such pragmatic considerations lies an ethical one: it is right that in a society as diverse as this government should not inject itself into religious matters. And it is hard to see any great benefit to religion from the use of opening prayers. In God We Trust, or other ceremonial notations of religious influence. Such events only trivialize religion, contributing a patina of piety, not its reality.

Or the question posed might be whether the government ought to be especially tolerant of religious practices by exempting them, if at all practicable, from restrictions imposed by laws of general applicability. Here, the situation has been unsatisfactory ever since the Supreme Court’s “peyote” decision (Employment Division v. Smith) which held that the Free Exercise Clause did not mandate such accommodation. The organized Jewish community was for many years not sufficiently interested in the problems of the religiously observant. If Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg is correct in describing the Jewish community as increasingly divorced from any substantial religious impulse (a description I believe to be correct), this lack of interest is hardly surprising.

But what I suspect the question means is yet a third thing: whether religious leaders ought to inject their religious views into political debates over the secular issues confronting society. Jews of all stripes in fact do just that: Orthodox Jews in the name of halakha. Reform Jews under the rubric of the prophetic tradition. Even secular umbrella groups such as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Committee invoke the Jewish tradition as justification for involvement in public affairs. Aside from a few early hypocritical denunciations of the religious right (and occasional critiques of anti-abortion activists), the Jewish community as a whole has not challenged such activity, even when it disagrees with the substance of what is said.

It is not at all clear that this involvement under the rubric of religion produces very much or has significant impact on the real world. Despite the celebratory claims of Allen Hertzke in Representing God in Washington: The Role of Religious Lobbies in the American Polity, I do not believe that American religious groups have any large impact on issues other than legislation directly affecting the religious community as such. At most, religious advocacy gives moral legitimacy to policy urged on other (secular) grounds. On rare occasions that may be significant, but these cases are only a small percentage of the matters in which a religious voice is heard.

There is uncertainty within the Jewish community over how far religious leaders should go in advocating religious positions. May they use religious language? What are appropriate means of speech? What claim do ministers have on their adherents, whether legislators or government officials? Governor Cuomo, and before him President Kennedy, insisted that the answer was easy—that other than in their private lives, the clergy had no claim to control the action of public officials.

That answer has the advantage of simplicity and of avoiding religious warfare and quasi-theocracies. But it also means that public officials must be religiously schizophrenic. Still, it seems advisable under present conditions for religious leaders as a matter of prudence not to seek to hold officeholders to religious discipline.

The debate over the appropriate role of religion in the public square was the most interesting church-state controversy of the 1980s. That debate led to no clear answers, which is not a particularly troubling situation. The fact is that there are conflicting policies and pressures involving a balance among competing interests of religious freedom, pluralism, freedom of speech, and civility. It is instructive that while Richard John Neuhaus made a manful effort in his Naked Public Square, he was never quite able to explain—even, if I understand him, to his own satisfaction—what the implementation of his thesis calling for greater religious involvement in the public square would mean for religious minorities. For Jews, that is no minor objection to advocacy of greater political activity by religious groups. Probably the best that we as a society can do is muddle through, giving due regard for the conflicting interests.

In a way, however, the issue is an unfortunate distraction from more pressing realities. There is no lack of religious voice in American society. There is real lack of religious influence. In part, this is because of the give and take of the legislative process, a give and take for which the absolute commands of religious ethics are ill-matched.

But the problem goes beyond that. It is that religion’s pronouncements do not generate deep commitments. The question for churches is how to persuade people that their pronouncements are weighty and deserving of implementation. How can religion speak to a society whose organs of communication are secular (and in which religious affairs receive relatively little coverage), a society whose values are pragmatic and short-term, where the commitment to religion is increasingly superficial, where most of the roles that religion once filled—whether setting moral standards, providing social services, or providing community—are now filled by groups and institutions in which religion doesn’t play a role? The immediate problem, then, for religion is to persuade internally before turning to the public square. It is ultimately by persuading their adherents that religious groups will have influence, not by getting on the evening news.

I am not calling for a retreat into purely personal piety or a mystical insistence on communing with the Divine to the exclusion of all else, nor do I believe that the secular world is corrupt and beyond redemption. Rather, the question is where struggles for religious influence should be fought—whether the primary forum ought to be the public square. The public square is attractive and beguiling; it offers mass audiences, and the illusion of fame. What it does not offer for religious leaders is a substantial chance of success. That lies in creating communities of believers.

This prescription depends on the existence of religious institutions with the wherewithal to demonstrate the viability of alternatives to the prevailing secular morality, and the legal freedom to implement those lifestyles as much as possible. Both of these preconditions are now in substantial doubt. Here, then, is the future of church-state relations. And on this turns the future of religious influence on the public square.

Marc D. Stern is Co-Director of the Commission on Law and Social Action for the American Jewish Congress.

Dennis Prager

Secular Jewish activists have been doing both America and American Jewry great harm in their unrelenting war against any manifestation of religion outside the church or synagogue and the home.

The harm to Jews has been the raising of a generation of “Jews for Nothing.” I deliberately choose this phrase because many American Jews resent—correctly, I believe—“Jews for Jesus.” Yet Jewish fears of “Jews for Jesus” have been utterly disproportionate to the threat. The few “Jews for Jesus” are a negligible threat to Jewish welfare and survival, while Jews for Nothing pose an almost fatal threat to American Jewry.

The harm to American society at large is that we have been also raising non-Jews with no commitments to anything higher than themselves. And when these products of our secular world do have commitments, they are increasingly to trees and to sea otters rather than to humans, and certainly not to anything so quaint as God, character development, or the holy.

In lectures to American Jews, one of the points I emphasize is the tragic irony that the Jews, the people who brought God into the world, are today among the leaders of virtually every American movement dedicated to removing God and religion from the world. To cite one of too many possible examples, a Jewish organization, the aggressively secularist American Jewish Congress, welcomed the Supreme Court ruling upholding a state ban on the posting of the Ten Commandments in public high schools. We Jews gave the world the Ten Commandments, and the secular Jews of the American Jewish Congress and the non-Jewish Jews of the ACLU devote their lives to taking them back.

How and why this happened is a theme that Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and I developed in the chapter on non-Jewish Jews in our book Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. Suffice it to say here that activist secular Jews are highly religious and they do profoundly believe in shaping society according to their beliefs. The problem is that their religion is not Judaism. It is liberalism.

Liberalism possesses every characteristic of a religion, with the exception of God-based ethics. Liberalism is a leap of faith (to, for example, the inherent goodness of man); it offers idealistic passion and a community of fellow true believers (in the myriad liberal organizations). It offers commitments to things higher than self; it even has saints (liberal heroes and liberal organizations such as the ACLU) and of course villains (conservatives, particularly neo-conservatives, Ronald Reagan). It has its own sacred scriptures (e.g., the Constitution), its inviolable laws (just as Orthodox Jews venerate and rely on halakha, liberal Jews venerate and rely on American law), and even a Devil who causes all evil (socioeconomic forces).

Thus, before addressing the question of how religion should enter into public life, it is imperative that we recognize two things: First, secular religion, i.e., liberalism, has no problem whatsoever with imposing its agenda on American life. If liberalism could be officially listed as a religion, we could then use the separation of church and state clause against liberal authoritarianism just as liberals use it against religious authoritarianism.

Second, were it not for the Judeo-Christian tradition (I am quite aware of the many differences between Judaism and Christianity, but I am equally well aware of the values that the two religions share), America would have been a moral and economic wasteland. And that is precisely what America will become without religion.

Having said this, I do wish to emphasize the importance of separating church and state. The mixture of the two has never been good, not historically in Christendom, and not today in Israel. It is also particularly bad for religion, which becomes weak and corrupt when it can rely on the state for its force.

The dilemma is then quite clear: without religious values, America will rapidly crumble, yet the state and religion must be kept separate. How can we reconcile these divergent realities?

The answer lies in one of the least common traits in contemporary American life—moderation. The secular government must bold as an American value that cultivating religion is a good thing for purely practical reasons. Even an atheist can acknowledge the negative ramifications of the death of God in society—e.g., the late Michael Harrington in his book The Politics at God’s Funeral.

That is why this Jew has no problem with a crèche at city hall. Only secular extremists can find offense in such an innocuous governmental display of religion. (But have you noticed that there is no such thing in the American lexicon as secular extremists, only religious extremists?)

Not only does this Jew not object to a crèche in city ball, I think it can actually benefit Jews. I want Jewish children to ask their parents questions about who they are. Quite aside from my belief that a vibrant Christianity is indispensable to American life, I want Christianity to be vibrant in America for selfish Jewish reasons: When the non-Jews are religious, the Jews stay Jewish; and when the majority culture believes in nothing, most Jews will believe in nothing.

Thus, I want Christians to fight the battle against abortion on demand even though, as a Jew, I strongly disagree about abortion being murder. For the secular liberal view of the fetus as of no more value than a decayed tooth—what else can “a woman can do what she wants with her own body” mean?—is frightening. Moreover, that Jewish organizations should hold such a position constitutes one of the gravest Jewish sins, a khillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name).

I want the Ten Commandments taught, not just displayed, in public schools. I do not want young people to get a secular brainwash, going from kindergarten through college without once having been challenged to look at life through religious eyes.

Most of all, I want religious men and women to advocate religion in the public square (not through government). But I mean religion, not liberalism and not conservatism.

When the National Conference of Catholic Bishops sounds identical to Jesse Jackson and the secular left on the role of American force in a world of evil, I wonder whether this is Catholicism or liberalism that I am hearing.

When Protestants start flirting with or even embracing pacifism, a doctrine that holds that it is morally preferable to allow Dr. Mengele to continue to perform medical experiments on men, women, and children than it is to kill him, I see why many people regard liberal Protestantism as secularism with Christ’s name added on.

My ideal is a secular government and a religious society. But with every passing day I see America moving further and further from this ideal, becoming militantly, nihilistically secular. Only if Jews and Christians begin pointing out that it is not socioeconomic conditions but the decline of religion that is the greatest single cause of the moral decline of our country do we have a prayer. Without doing so, prayer won’t help.

Dennis Prager is coauthor of The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism and of Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. He also has his own program on KABC Radio in Los Angeles.

Nicholas Wolfson

I do not share the assumption that more Jews are having “second thoughts” about the relationship between church and state. In my personal experience in organized Jewish life, there is no major shift. No doubt many in orthodox Jewish groups desire a breakdown in the wall between church and state, but the mainstream liberal Jewish organizations continue to maintain the old position.

They do so with good reason. It is in the self-interest of minority religions to uphold the separation principle embedded in the First Amendment. Breach the constitutional barrier, and dominant religious forces will flood the schools and public life with the majoritarian religious beliefs of the day. There will soon be no breathing space for minority voices.

There is nothing inherently cynical in alluding to Jewish self-interest. It is an interest shared by all the other minority voices in the country. It is, in essence, shorthand for a description of the core purpose of the First Amendment, whether in free speech or in religious expression and the separation principle.

That core is the protection of the minority in fundamental matters from the oppression of the majority, no matter bow sincerely or passionately the majority makes its claims. Indeed, in affairs of religion, passionate sincerity is present more often than not. In a democratic society that passion will always lead to excesses, unless checked by the anti-majoritarian principles of the First Amendment.

I believe that some Jewish conservatives, or neoconservatives, have been influenced by the 1980s rhetoric of Christian conservatives calling for the return to traditional values. I need not remind the readers of this journal of the argument which suggests that morality in private life can be restored only if religion is returned to the public square. It is based on a kind of Aristotelian notion that the state has the opportunity and responsibility to develop a cohesive moral order. This is in conflict with modern libertarian ideas that men and women should be free, as John Stuart Mill put it, to express themselves in word and action so long as they do not harm another.

I do not share the conservative faith in the wisdom of the state. Modern experience with the cruel excesses of state power has taught us the value of government restraint in areas of personal belief and action. Belief in the beneficent role of government, intermixed with religion, embodies a nostalgic longing for an imagined premodern golden age where religious leaders led the common populace in a private (and public) life of piety centered in the happy nuclear family. If ever there was such a world—and I doubt it—it cannot be introduced in modern Western society without coercive government suppression of heretical (as the government sees them) movements.

There is a passionate diversity in religious belief. For example. Orthodox Jewry, the Catholic leadership, and other religious orthodoxies belittle the role of women in religious leadership. Reform and Orthodox Jewish groups and other religious groups differ deeply over the legitimacy of homosexuality. Reform and Orthodox Jews cannot even agree as to who is a Jew. In the current Gulf crisis and other crises, different religious groups argue over the moral legitimacy of the use of military force. What religion, then, do we bring into the schools and American public life? The answer, tragically, will be the religious belief that the dominant majority endorses.

Another obvious example of the dangers of religion in public life is the abortion issue. Catholic prelates, driven by fundamental belief, have threatened to excommunicate Catholic politicians who do not toe the line on this great debate. Fortunately, their effort at creating conformity appears to have failed. But their campaign is an indication of the kinds of censorship that will ultimately be brought to bear on minorities if religion is introduced as an instrument of proper belief into the schools and public life.

Unfortunately, Jews have only to look at Israel for a lesson in the dangers that religion in public life can bring. In Israel, Jews are the dominant majority. Religious leaders, under a complex set of laws and customs, have a powerful grip on the role of religious life in the public square. Marriage, divorce, and family life are largely subject to the dominant religious voices, which in Israel happen to be those of the Orthodox. As a result, although Israel is the only democracy in the region, the freedoms we are accustomed to in the United States as a consequence of the First Amendment are diminished. Indeed, my sense is that American Jews, and many citizens of Israel, are having second thoughts about this problem, which they view as equal in significance to the Israel-Palestinian issue.