Religion and Democracy: A Necessary Tension

Many years ago, in 1965 to be precise, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer were worried about ideological seizures in the social sciences and decided to do something about it. They established the Public Interest , a quarterly that has had an enormous influence far beyond its few thousand subscribers. Over the years, there has hardly been a major rethinking of social policy that did not start with, or receive an indispensable boost from, the Public Interest . As the editor notes in the Spring 2004 issue, the magazine has regularly attended to the importance of religion in society, but this time the entire issue is devoted to “Religion in America.” One detects just a hint of defensiveness on the editor’s part. He writes that “all our authors look at religion in America, as did Tocqueville, from ‘a purely human point of view.’” That I take to be a vestigial secularist tic, reflecting the fact that it used to be not quite respectable for social scientists to take religion too seriously. Like Tocqueville, the authors here write about religion as social observers, but they also understand religion “from within” as committed adherents. Of the thirteen contributors, four are, to my personal knowledge, devout Protestants, four are devout Catholics, and at least one is an observant Jew. Perhaps there should have been a fourteenth essay on why being religious is not a disqualification but an asset in writing intelligently about religion. That having been said, there is much good stuff in this special issue of the Public Interest . Herewith a sampler:

• The lead essay is by Wilfred McClay of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who is also, not incidentally, a member of the FT editorial board. September 11, he writes, “produced a great revitalization, for a time, of the American civil religion, that strain of American piety that bestows many of the elements of religious sentiment and faith upon the fundamental political and social institutions of the United States.” President Bush, he says, “puts forward the civil-religious vision of America with the greatest energy of any president since Woodrow Wilson.” McClay quotes Bush at a 2003 speech at the National Endowment for Democracy: “The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom”the freedom we prize”is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind . . . . And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the Author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom.” McClay reflects on the significance of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan: “It has become a shrine, a holy place, and has thereby become assimilated into the American civil religion. Yet the single most moving sight, the most powerful and immediately understandable symbol, is the famous cross-shaped girders that were pulled out of the wreckage and have been raised as a cross. What, one wonders, does this object mean to the people viewing it, many of whom, one presumes, are not Christians and not even Americans? Was it a piece of nationalist kitsch or a sentimental relic? Or was it a powerful witness to the redemptive value of suffering”and thereby, a signpost pointing toward the core of the Christian story? Or did it subordinate the Christian story to the American one, and thus traduce its Christian meaning?” There has been much public fretting about Bush’s “God talk,” but McClay observes that “his oratory lies well within the established historical pattern of American civil-religious discourse.” The new thing is the negative reaction to such rhetoric. Bush’s way of understanding America is embraced by millions of Christians who otherwise feel excluded by the secularism that dominates much of our culture. “It is far too early to say that a settled alienation of religious believers from the American nation-state is no longer a possibility,” McClay writes. From Tocqueville to John Dewey, it is understood that American democracy depends upon a close connection between religion and our national creeds and institutions. Dewey, a committed secularist, even proposed a “common faith” that would embrace the emotive power of religion without its supposedly divisive truth claims. McClay writes, “It was not a bad idea. In a pluralistic society, religious believers and nonbelievers alike need ways to live together, and to do so, they need a second language of piety, one that extends their other commitments without undermining them. Yet it seems needlessly revolutionary, not to mention futile, to invent a common faith when one is readily at hand. To be sure, there is always something secondary and unsatisfying, and even inherently dangerous, about a civil religion. But the alternative may be even more perilous.”

• In “The Unraveling of Christianity in America,” Clifford Orwin, political scientist at the University of Toronto, writes: “Thus, mainline religion, despite its efforts to please, has become merely incidental to the lives of so many who continue to profess it. When I was growing up as a Jewish kid in Chicago in the 1950s, America still seemed very Christian. (Our Reform rabbi said it was ‘Judeo-Christian.’ We wanted to believe him, but the fists of the Irish kids enforced skepticism.) In retrospect, the country looked more Christian than it was. Today, by contrast, it looks less Christian than it is.” Orwin takes up the Bobo (bourgeois-bohemian) image of Americans proposed by David Brooks and compares it with Alan Wolfe’s book, One Nation, After All ”which he rightly says would have been more accurately titled One Suburban Upper Middle Class, After All . For Brooks and Wolfe, “moral laxity is a way of life, having mysteriously emerged as the fundamental principle of morality itself.” Differing from McClay, Orwin writes that, in his eagerness to avoid any hint of crusading, “Bush has embraced willy-nilly the view that liberal democracy is one thing, Protestant Christianity (or Christianity of any sort, or even Judeo-Christianity) entirely another. He has chosen to present America to the world not as the Christian nation for which his religious supporters take it, but as the universal sponsor of liberal democracy, which as such is impartial in principle as between Christianity and Islam.” As a result, writes Orwin, “His administration must become America’s first genuinely Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jewish (and Muslim) one. And so the challenge of Islamic terror will collaborate with other forces to drive official America to ever greater lengths of secularism or syncretism.”

• Muslims in America, suggests Hillel Fradkin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, are eager to be Americans. “With the exception of African-American Muslims, America’s Muslim households are relatively prosperous: More than half have incomes in excess of fifty thousand dollars a year, and the average overall is about fifty-five thousand dollars. This undoubtedly reflects the fact that nearly half of all Muslim Americans earn their living in professions such as engineering, medicine, teaching, and business management. It also reflects the fact that Muslim Americans well exceed national educational averages, with nearly 60 percent holding college degrees.” After September 11, “the nature of Islam in America has become increasingly defined by the global role of America in Islam. American Muslims are now, more than ever, forced to engage in the worldwide struggle over the current reformation within their religion.” “A civil war is raging within the soul of Islam pitting radicals, along with their terrorist offspring, against moderate Muslims who wish to embrace modern democratic, social, and economic principles. The subjects of this dispute are encapsulated by America. In effect, then, America has become a party to that religious war.”

• Bush’s faith-based initiative is taken up by Stanley Carlson-Thies of the Washington-based Center for Public Justice. He writes, “In their 1977 book To Empower People , Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus argued against expansive government, recommending that officials instead should protect and foster the institutions of civil society, even utilizing those institutions in carrying out its own responsibilities. But they also raised red flags that the government might co-opt churches, families, and nonprofit structures ‘in a too eager embrace that would destroy the very distinctiveness of their function.’ Looking back in 1996, Berger and Neuhaus underlined that concern, writing now of a potentially ‘fatal embrace’ when nongovernmental organizations collaborate with the government.” The fatal embrace might be avoided, Carlson-Thies suggests, through the use of vouchers and other instruments that give people a real choice among providers of social services. But religious organizations have the primary responsibility for making sure that they are not compromised by cooperating with the government. “The success of the faith-based initiative must be gauged not only by the number of times faith-based organizations win government funds, but also by those times when, if the conditions are not right, faith-based organizations reject the support that is offered.”

• John DiIulio of the University of Pennsylvania and the first director of the faith-based initiative under President Bush writes that over the years “religious mega-charities like Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, Jewish Federations, and others have literally received tens of billions of dollars in public support.” He obviously agrees that smaller organizations that are closer to the communities in need should be helped in helping others. But there are big problems in achieving that, especially when those organizations are not only “faith-based” but are “faith-saturated.” DiIulio writes: “Some conservatives want this accomplished by having all or most government social-welfare programs administered, not via direct grants, but through indirect disbursement arrangements, chiefly by vouchers supplied to eligible individuals. There is, in principle, nothing wrong with vouchers, and for some civic purposes (for example, drug treatment and child care), vouchers have been used to varying degrees with no obvious ill effects. Indeed, there is growing evidence that school vouchers are associated with measurable gains, including among low-income urban children and youth, and the Supreme Court’s 2002 Zelman decision upheld a Cleveland school program that used vouchers.” DiIulio concludes that “faith-based and community initiatives will improve the prospects of the needy only by following a constitutionally correct path paved by empirical data and broad public support.” In view of the convoluted and conflicted rulings of the courts on “the separation of church and state,” it is hard to know what that “correct path” might be. As for public support, I expect it depends chiefly upon the perception, whether supported by empirical data or not, that people are being helped.

• A less hesitant approach is provided by Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation. Telling the stories of Prison Fellowship, Teen Challenge, and other programs reflecting “the politics of conversion,” Loconte writes: “The First Amendment debate over religious charities is often trivialized as a fight over mealtime prayers or a crucifix hanging on an office wall. Something much more consequential, however, is at issue. The real fight is over whether the overly scientized public sphere will accept a competing anthropology: a view of the human person as endowed with moral and spiritual capacities”and obligations. If Bush’s faith-based initiative can bring significant government support to groups so decidedly religious, and if those groups can deliver real results, it could revolutionize social policy in America.”

• As does McClay, Joel Schwartz of the Hudson Institute revisits Will Herberg’s classic 1955 book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew . There is, he notes, a crucial dimension of religion in America that Herberg did not anticipate. “If the civil rights movement began to push some American religious forces to the left, the rise of evangelical Protestantism signified the movement of other forces to the right. But Herberg’s treatment of Protestantism emphasized the mainline denominations and had little to say about evangelicals and fundamentalists: ‘Whereas the Methodists and Baptists and Disciples have become great churches, the peripheral sects of today seem to be denied such possibilities. They emerge on the fringe of Protestantism but never appear able to get much closer to the center.’” Fifty years ago, Herberg saw the affirmation of religion, even if in the potentially idolatrous form of civil religion, as the glue that held Americans together. Today, says Schwartz, it is increasingly evident that religion is viewed as conservative and “is now a force that divides Americans and sets them against one another.” During the Civil War, Lincoln observed that the people of the North and the South, whatever their differences, “pray to the same God.” Today, writes Schwartz, religion is a more polarizing, less unifying force than it was in the time of Lincoln and a hundred years later in the time of Herberg. “We no longer pray to the same God”not because many Americans are now Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, but because a gulf has arisen between the majority of Americans who pray and the minority who do not.”

• Largely forgotten today is the insistence of James Madison in his Memorial and Remonstrance that one’s duty to the Creator “is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation” to one’s duty to civil society. Michael McConnell, a federal judge and one of our most distinguished constitutional scholars, quotes these words of Madison: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the general authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.” That is in sharp contrast to the argument of Rousseau”who first came up with the term “civil religion””that civil society and religion should be one and the same thing. When Jews were emancipated in Europe, the motto was “Be a man in the streets and a Jew at home.” This privatization of religious particularity, McConnell notes, is still urged by many academics, including law professors. To be a citizen is to put aside, at least in public, loyalties that are not shared by all other citizens. In other words, McConnell observes, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The idea that secularism is tantamount to neutrality”as in France’s current banning of religious symbols in public”is, says McConnell, “a Western illusion.” Like other essayists, McConnell ends up with a reflection on Islam. “It is fanciful to imagine that the Muslim world will lose its attachment to religion, just as Jefferson was fanciful and illiberal in his desire that Americans all become Unitarians. A more realistic hope is that the jihadists can be separated from the Muslim mainstream and be reduced in influence. That will not happen if America embraces a secularism that does not differentiate between the two. Laïcité , as a national policy, neither seems congruent with America’s constitutional tradition nor likely to bring about interreligious harmony.”

• Brian Anderson of the Manhattan Institute addresses the dramatic differences between Europe and America in religious belief and practice. He writes, “As for Europe, it is possible to imagine a religious resurgence there, perhaps radiating outward from still-faithful and soon-to-be-powerful Poland. Nothing in history lasts forever. The Italian philosopher and papal advisor Rocco Buttiglione argues convincingly that European modernity, in its secular humanism, leaves men and women cut off from ‘an essential dimension of their being”the Absolute”and thus confronted with the worst diminution of their being.’ Such diminution is existentially unbearable for many human beings over the long haul. At the same time, however, a revival does not seem imminent. The rift between a religious America and a secular Europe is thus likely to widen in the years ahead, with unpredictable consequences for the democratic world as a whole.”

• One frequently hears that the naked public square is necessary because we live in a pluralistic society. William Galston of the University of Maryland proposes a refreshingly different understanding of pluralism: “Liberal democracy must steer a principled course between theocratic claims that subject politics to a single religious orthodoxy and a civic republicanism that subordinates faith to the functional requirements of the polity. This means acknowledging that there are multiple sources of authority within a shared social space, and that the relation among them is not straightforwardly hierarchical. This political pluralism may be messy and conflictive. It may even lead to confrontations not conducive to maximizing public unity and order. Avoiding anarchy is unquestionably in the public interest. But the evidence linking accommodation of conscience to the bogey of political dissolution is scanty. And if political pluralism reflects the complex truth of the human condition, then the practice of politics must do its best to honor the principles that limit the scope of politics.”

• Alan Wolfe comes in for further attention in a review by Daniel J. Mahoney of Wolfe’s book The Transformation of American Religion . The problem with Wolfe, says Mahoney, is that he has “a meager understanding of religion” as one social variable among others that is of interest only to the degree that it affects Wolfe’s version of democracy. “Wolfe’s view of religion, in fact, turns out to be something of a caricature. He repeatedly casts traditional religion as narrow, illiberal, and judgmental. In the worst instances, it becomes apparent that for Wolfe, the mere act of interrogating one’s faith makes one a full participant in intellectual modernity. A believer who thinks”in particular, one who reasons about the nature of faith”is simply no longer a practitioner of ‘old time religion,’ by Wolfe’s lights. Such a claim would surely astonish readers of Maimonides or Aquinas.” Wolfe’s greatest compliment to “transformed” religion in America is that it has abandoned any authoritative truths by which the social order can be judged, and is therefore safe for democracy. Mahoney writes, “If his sociology’s ultimate inspiration is the antireligious enlightenment, his inchoate theological assumptions can be traced to a fideism that denies the natural and necessary intersection of faith and reason, religious truth and natural law.” Mahoney does not think Alan Wolfe is a reliable guide if one wants to understand religion in America.

• Finally we come to Joseph Bottum, who keeps his day job with the Weekly Standard while serving as our poetry editor. In “The Fire Next Time,” he writes: “There is something in America, as well, that has always burned against the world. From Cotton Mather to William Lloyd Garrison, from John Brown to Martin Luther King, Jr., there has been a hunger here to speak with lips touched by burning coals, a blessed rage for the apocalyptic lessons taught only by tongues of fire. A nation formed by political geniuses”masters of compromise, philosophers of prudence, judges of wisdom”we are also a nation with another theme. Something here has, from the beginning, disdained political order and sought not to be brilliant, wise, and learned, but only true , though the heavens fall as a result. ‘I am come to send fire on the earth,’ Christ says in the Gospel of Luke, ‘and what will I, if it be already kindled?’ It’s not the only thing in America, of course, but without it there is no America.” Secularists understandably see religion as a social danger, and they have had a long run since the 1930s up to the present. “But,” Bottum writes, “I have the sense, insofar as one can judge the tides of such things, that the secularists have lost the intellectual part of the battle and are running now only on the fumes of their irrational belief in anti-belief.” The truth is, he claims, that “liberalism needs religion, but religion doesn’t need liberalism.” The Founders understood that, in the words of Washington’s farewell address, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Bottum writes, “The United States, as it naturally wants to be”what we might call the platonic ideal of America”contains a tension we must be careful not to resolve. From its founding, the nation has always been something like a school of Enlightenment rationalists aswim in an ocean of Christian faith. And how shall the fish hate the water wherein they live? Or the water hate the fish?” And again, “‘Biblical America’ is the oxymoron that defines us, the contradiction that maintains us. If we lose either our extra-public religion or our Enlightenment use of public religion”if either side in this tension ever entirely vanquishes the other”the United States will cease to be much of anything at all.” Bottum discusses books (by Leon Kass and Thomas Pangle) that try to mine the Bible for its contributions to our public philosophy. But the Bible is not for hire in that way, he insists: “We need the untamed Bible that forces public philosophy to bend and accommodate.” And where does this leave us? Bottum answers: “Even while the mass mind’s mindless cant clatters all around us, there is that which must be celebrated: the worldly wisdom of a broad and democratic spirit, the reasonable discourse of reasonable men seeking reasonable compromises. The platonic ideal of the United States must have these things; America is not America without them. But America is also not America unless, underneath it all, a small voice whispers that the nations are as a drop in a bucket and are counted as the small dust on the balance. America is a triumph of political philosophy because it is not entirely political”because it also hears, even in these days, the murmur, ‘I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?’”

The special issue of the Public Interest on religion in America is remarkable in conception and execution. The McClay, Galston, and Bottum essays are especially valuable in underscoring the necessary tension”the tension that must not be definitively resolved one way or the other”between authentic religion and liberal democracy. Christianity has lived, and indeed flourished, with and under many different kinds of regimes. Liberal democracy, at least in its American expression, has never been without and almost certainly cannot continue without the support of Christianity. The Christian’s primary community of allegiance is the Church and the Kingdom of God that the Church both proclaims and anticipates. Madison was right: one’s duty to God is precedent in both time and degree of obligation. We have written in these pages that the popular American piety of “God and country” could, under the onslaught of exclusive secularism, be transformed into a forced choice of “God or country.” Some of our friends, including some associated with the Public Interest, have bridled at that. For thinkers in the tradition of John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Jeffrey Stout, to name but a few, American democracy is their religion. Put differently, they view religion instrumentally, and approve of it to the extent that it serves democracy. This is, to employ the precise biblical language, idolatry.

If, on the one hand, there are those who would exclude religion from public life or admit it only to the extent they find it useful, there are others who, in the name of “Christian America,” would resolve the necessary tension by conflating God and country, to the severe detriment of both religion and democracy. This was the program, spelled out in elaborate detail, of “Reconstructionism” under the leadership of the late and eccentrically Calvinist thinker R. J. Rushdoony. While there are relatively few proponents of Reconstructionism, many conservative Christians are possessed by the Reconstructionist impulse, believing that America should be reconstituted on the basis of “Bible Law.” They follow in the train, interestingly enough, of an earlier and liberal social gospel movement that aimed at “Christianizing America and Americanizing Christianity.” Whether it comes from the left or the right, that ambition is fatally wrongheaded. The necessary tension will not be resolved, and we must not try to resolve it, before the End Times. Meanwhile, our circumstance is not so different from that of St. Augustine in the fifth century. We live in two cities––or, more in today’s language, two polities. The one is the polity of man, marked both by the corruptions of the lust for power and by the human aspiration toward approximate virtue. The second is the polity of God, which is the Church in obedience to the lordship of Christ. These two polities interact––sometimes conflicting, sometimes converging––in both the public square and in the hearts of believers. But Christians know which polity is precedent. Knowing that, they are pleased to serve the polity of liberal democracy that, on balance and considering the alternatives, is worthy of service and is, not without grave ambiguities, conducive to the flourishing of the Church. If, however, in the name of liberal democracy and of the necessary concerns of the secular, the polity of man succumbs to an ideological secularism at war with the polity of God, our first allegiance should not be in doubt. Such is the necessary tension that gave birth to and will, please God, sustain our constitutional order––and, with it, the vitality of religion in America. Until a better polity of man is on offer. Which may or may not happen short of the coming of the Kingdom.