The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America by Richard John Neuhaus was published in 1984. Herewith, twenty years later, reflections on the influence of the book and contemporary problems raised by its argument, with a response by Father Neuhaus.
Stanley Hauerwas
I should not like The Naked Public Square. After all, the book has little time for “sectarians” who have allegedly given up on the public square. (Indeed it would seem that I should be in favor of the public square’s nakedness. If the public square is naked, so much the better if you are a sectarian. Sectarians get to say you should have never trusted the world to underwrite your faith in the first place.) Richard John Neuhaus even claims that the possibility should not be dismissed that Constantinianism was a faithful response of the Church at that “historical moment.” He is right, moreover, that Constantinianism had no place for the dichotomy of politics and Christian truth-claims so characteristic of modernity—but then, we sectarians also have little use for that distinction.
Yet despite what some may expect, I do like this sprawling and diffuse book. I like it first of all because, like most of what Neuhaus does, it is so full of energy. Neuhaus reads everything and uses well what he reads. The book exemplifies its main argument by giving robust theological readings of figures such as Dewey and Rawls. As a sectarian, I think the reassertion of strong theological commentary is exactly what we need. I should like to think that from time to time I have followed Neuhaus’ example by offering a kind of theological narration of the challenges facing Christians today.
Neuhaus, of course, is quite gracious to sectarians. He indicates that we are an “honorable alternative,” a “needed corrective” that calls into question the spineless acquiescence of mainline Protestantism. I must say, however, I am not sure it is a good idea to accept this compliment. Reinhold Niebuhr—a Protestant liberal theologian whose hold on Neuhaus’ soul seems permanent—was among the first to compliment those of us committed to Christian nonviolence. We sectarians, however, do not think of ourselves as a “corrective.” We think what we say about what it means to be a follower of Jesus is true and, therefore, not simply a reminder to those who responsibly get their hands dirty.
Yet as much as I like The Naked Public Square, I continue to be puzzled by people who insist on interpreting Neuhaus as a religious conservative when he is so clearly a Protestant liberal. I quite understand that even though Neuhaus wrote the book as a Lutheran soon to be a Roman Catholic, he admirably left clues throughout the book that his habits of thought are determinatively habits learned at the feet of Protestant liberal theologians. Take, for example, the fundamental claim at the heart of the book, which is “that politics is most importantly a function of culture, and at the heart of culture is religion, whether or not it is called by that name.”
Ernst Troeltsch could not have said it better. On second thought, that may not be true: Troeltsch probably did say it better. He saw quite clearly that if Christians were to assume the task of forming the ethos of modern societies, the “myths” once thought constitutive of the Christian faith must be rejected or reinterpreted. Reinhold Niebuhr learned that lesson well. Neuhaus, like Troeltsch and Niebuhr, wants Christianity to be both orthodox and the “form” of culture. It is nice work if you can get it, but I remain skeptical that even Richard Neuhaus can pull that rabbit out of the hat. Of course, one of the benefits of assuming the mantle of Troeltsch is you get to call anyone who worries about making Christianity a civilizational religion a “sectarian.”
It may be objected that Neuhaus never mentions Troeltsch in The Naked Public Square. You do not need to mention Troeltsch when you have at your disposal an updated existential version of Troeltsch—that is, Paul Tillich. The claim that politics is a function of culture, that at the heart of culture is religion, and that religion is meant to serve as a public source of transcendent meaning—this is, as Neuhaus acknowledges, pure Tillich (and Hegel and Plato). Indeed, in the course of the book Neuhaus goes all the way with Tillich, whom he identifies as a “liberal theologian,” and underwrites Tillich’s claim that America has avoided the unhappy choice between heteronomy and autonomy by being a “theonomous” culture. Therefore America has avoided and can continue to avoid the idolatry called theocracy. This is the basis on which Neuhaus appeals to the religious right to be less combative in the public sphere. The religious right needs to understand that it does not need to use first-order theological language in public when it can appeal to “transcendence”—though in the process the religious right may fail to notice it has accepted the philosophical presuppositions of Protestant liberalism.
Of course, Neuhaus can respond that simply because he uses the modes of thought sponsored by Protestant liberalism, this does not mean that he accepts the Protestant liberal theological program. That may be the case, but I think Neuhaus needs to show how he avoids making theological claims mean something else than what they say. Neuhaus claims, for example, that theology is “the disciplined reflection upon transcendent truth and value that gives significance, perhaps eternal significance, to our lives.” But such an account of theology assumes that you know what “transcendence” means prior to knowing what it means for God to have called Israel from the nations. It is interesting, indeed, how little there is about the Church in The Naked Public Square. If you have transcendence I guess you really do not need the Church. Perhaps that is why Neuhaus claims that without a “transcendent or religious point of reference, conflicts of values cannot be resolved.” But as far as I can tell he never shows us how transcendence qua transcendence actually works to resolve “value” conflicts. Surely the problem begins by accepting the language of “values.”
The Naked Public Square, of course, is not to be judged by what was said in the book itself. Rather, The Naked Public Square is to be judged by the work done by First Things. With The Naked Public Square Richard Neuhaus named a challenge before us and as a result located a community of writers and readers ready to meet that challenge. The theological journalism Neuhaus unleashed I believe to be a great good. Along the way, moreover, I have noticed that he has talked less and less about transcendence and more about the Church. I take that to be a great good, but he must be careful. Someone may think he is a sectarian.
Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University.
Mary Ann Glendon
In The Naked Public Square Richard John Neuhaus charged that the United States, while calling itself a democratic society, was systematically excluding the values of the majority of its citizens from policy decisions. He contended that to rule out of bounds in public life religiously grounded moral viewpoints not only does injustice to America’s “incorrigibly religious” citizenry but also saps the very foundations of our democratic experiment. Convinced that the moment had come for men and women of faith to make themselves heard in setting the conditions under which we order our lives together, Neuhaus was heartened by what he saw as the growing political effectiveness of groups that were beginning to do just that. If religious voices in the U.S. today are stronger, more confident, and more adept at translating their values into terms that are persuasive to their fellow citizens, more than a little credit must go to the encouragement and example of Richard John Neuhaus.
Nevertheless, twenty years later, there is limited room in the American public square for conversation, contention, and compromise among a wide variety of moral actors. State-sponsored secularism, legally tightening its control, is ever more openly intolerant of rival belief systems. Despite efforts by some of the country’s best lawyers to promote applications of the First Amendment that are respectful of text and tradition, the courts continue to set the establishment and free exercise provisions at odds with each other, to the detriment of individual and institutional religious freedom. In the 2004 case of Locke v. Davey the Supreme Court actually gave its blessing to official religious discrimination, permitting the state of Washington to single out the study of theology for exclusion from a public scholarship program. The current Court majority has pressed forward with a six-decade-long trend of cabining religion in the private sphere while eroding protections of the associations and institutions where religious beliefs and practices are generated, regenerated, nurtured, and transmitted from one generation to the next.
At the state level, too, the outlook for the first of freedoms is bleak. The freedom of religious institutions to govern themselves is under growing assault, as we saw in the 2004 California Supreme Court decision requiring Catholic Charities to provide prescription contraceptive coverage for its employees. Faith-based institutions are facing ever-bolder efforts aimed at forcing them either to compromise their principles or to cease providing alternatives to government-controlled education, health care, housing, and programs for the poor. Attacks on religious freedom in the name of new sexual liberties are increasing. With the judicial nomination process excluding many men and women whose religious or moral beliefs diverge from the secular magisterium, there is little likelihood of a change of direction any time soon.
If present legal trends continue, it is not fanciful to suppose that the situation of religious believers in secular America will come to resemble dhimmitude—the status of non-Muslims in a number of Islamic countries. The dhimmi is tolerated so long as his religion is kept private and his public acts do not offend the state religion. Naturally, key positions in society must be reserved to those who adhere to the official creed.
Neuhaus’ diagnosis of the problem remains valid, but events have not borne out his confidence that a supposedly religious majority could help remedy our circumstances. Perhaps he read more into the polling data about American religious opinions than was really there. Certainly he staked a great deal on the notion that most Americans were still attached in important ways to the Judeo-Christian tradition. No doubt he was right that millions of Americans felt “a powerful resentment against values that they believe have been imposed on them,” but were their numbers really greater than the millions who adopted various forms of indifferentism, going along to get along? After all, it’s so much easier to get into the public square—or anywhere else one wants to go in American society—if one checks one’s religion at the gate, at least those parts of one’s religion that do not conform to the dominant ideology. If a majority of Americans are still religious in some sense, how many, one wonders, adhere to religions that assert strong truth claims and make strong demands on their members? And how many are devotees of what Robert Bellah and his associates dubbed “Sheila-ism” after the interviewee who described her entirely private religion as a matter of “listening to her own inner voice”?
Twenty years ago, Neuhaus correctly saw that the chief threat to our republic was not communism (as many thought at the time), but “a collapse of the idea of freedom and of the social arrangements necessary to sustaining liberal democracy.” But he seemed reluctant to follow his own analysis to its natural conclusion. Though he mentioned in passing the “lethal liberationisms that reached their apex in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” he did not explore what that social revolution was doing to the cultural foundations of our republic. Though insisting, as did many of the Founders, that our regime of ordered liberty requires certain moral qualities in its citizens and statespersons, Neuhaus held back from pondering the condition of the principal settings where those qualities are acquired. It is now clear that the years of adult “liberation” took a dreadful toll on children, and on the nation’s principal seedbeds of character and competence: families and their surrounding communities of memory and mutual aid.
What many Americans now seem to want is for other people to be “incorrigibly religious” (or at least to behave as if they were). They want other people to cultivate the self-restraint that makes social life possible, other people to hang in there when family life gets tough, other people to be ethical in business dealings, other people to pay taxes, and other people to provide children with attention and discipline. While Neuhaus was urging free citizens to claim their rightful places in public life, we were becoming a nation of free riders, coasting along and spending social capital that is rapidly running out.
It would not have suited the hortatory, upbeat mood of The Naked Public Square to dwell on the state of American culture. The book, after all, was a rallying cry. But on the very last page, Neuhaus observes that the “new thing we are looking for may not come at all. The naked public square may be the last phase of a failed experiment.” No doubt he meant that warning as a spur to action. Today, it has a more ominous sound. The American agora, now crowded with jealous idols, awaits a new Paul preaching the unknown God.
Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Harvey Cox
When The Naked Public Square appeared, it was immediately clear that Richard John Neuhaus and I agreed on a basic premise: that it is wrong to ban religious discourse from the public square just because it is religious. We also agreed, I think, that religious discourse should not be privileged in the public forum. We both wrote and thought (and still do) from our basic religious commitments, but our interpretation of how those commitments should inform our political posture differed considerably, and this made our discussions and debates lively and memorable (at least for me). My religious and theological foundation led me to a somewhat left-of-center politics. I will leave it to Neuhaus to characterize his. I opposed both the Vietnam war and the U.S.-sponsored war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Neuhaus and I agreed on the former, but (as I recall) disagreed on the latter.
That is all water under the bridge, I suppose, although we as a people still bear the scars of both interventions. When one surveys the current state of the public square, many things have changed, but my (our?) insistence that religious voices—even the ones with which we disagree (or maybe especially those)—do belong in the public square has not wavered.
Today, however, it hardly seems necessary to argue that religion must be allowed a voice in public policy discourse. It is more than evident that the voices of conservative Protestants, Roman Catholic bishops, Jewish leaders, and others are neither excluded nor silenced. Of course, many people still believe that those who actually forge policy are not paying sufficient attention. But that is another matter. If anything, I would say that, on balance, religious opinions are more frequently voiced and heard today in America than they were twenty years ago.
During those years, however, I have become more and more interested in Christianity as a world religion, and this has led me to be careful about making generalizations about religion and public life that might make sense in the United States but not in other countries. For example, Christians in India have just lived through a period of Bharatiya Janata Party government in which a policy of “Hinduization” of the public sphere was an announced aim of the ruling party. True, this objective was greatly watered down after the BJP achieved power and realized both that it had to face elections and that the various religious minorities (including Christians), as well as many Hindus, did not favor their policy. Is it any wonder that Christian leaders in India have been praying for a more secular public square? By “secular,” of course, they mean not antireligious but rather a position that is genuinely neutral vis-à-vis the various religious groups in Indian society. Those who hold secularization to be bad in every situation might be puzzled by this “pro-secular” position advocated by Christians. But in India it makes quite a bit of sense.
Meanwhile, in some of the Arab states we have seen a wave of demands for a decidedly more religious public square, one that would be governed by a strict enforcement of shari’a. The intellectuals who nurtured this idea (such as Sayyid Qutb of Egypt) and those who support it today use arguments that sound very similar to those of the most conservative Christian advocates of “Christian America,” like the followers of Rousas Rushdoony and the school of “Christian Reconstruction.” Many of the advocates of a return to shari’a were imprisoned, tortured, and killed by more secular rulers. Qutb, for example, was murdered on Nasser’s orders in an Egyptian prison, a death that pushed the Muslim Brotherhood from its original reformist and educational agenda toward the employment of violence. Qutb is now (mistakenly, I think) referred to as the father of Islamic terrorism.
The debate about “religion in the public square” is still raging in the Muslim world. Indeed, the real goal of such groups as al-Qaeda is primarily to rid majority-Muslim countries of secular rule. As Americans we seem to have been drawn into a struggle that was not initially directed against us.
How should the often significant Christian minorities in majority-Muslim lands respond to this challenge? Palestine is a key example. For Christians there to support Hamas, which envisions a Muslim homeland, seems self-defeating (even though there would certainly be a lot of religion in that public square). To side with Israel is out of the question for them, especially when those Israelis advocating a “Torah state” seem to be gaining ground. This leaves the PLO, which despite its corruption and ineptitude, promises at least a secular alternative in a future Palestinian state. The choice is an anguishing one.
I do not suggest I have any answers to the nettlesome problems sketched above. Yet in a world in which the majority of Christians now live outside the old perimeters of Christendom, they are hardly questions that can safely be ignored.
The Naked Public Square focused mainly on the U.S. Perhaps it is time for Volume Two, which would expand, elaborate, and complicate the thesis for a Christian church that lives in a widening variety of circumstances, and for churches that may be able to learn something from the American model but should hardly be expected to emulate it.
Harvey Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of numerous books, including Religion in the Secular City (1965).
Alan Mittleman
When The Naked Public Square was published, I was working for a venerable Jewish organization and was increasingly frustrated by its doctrinaire approach to church-state issues. The organization stood for the strictest separation of church and state, which it justified with incantatory repetitiveness as the best way to ensure that religion could flourish. There is merit in this line of thought, of course, but there are also problems. For one thing, when religiosity did flourish, many of my colleagues seemed scared and discomfited by it. The nation seemed then—and perhaps still seems—to be in the midst of a religious revival, but my colleagues viewed this as a deviation from a settled consensus as to the normative secularity of our public life. Admittedly, the moral majoritarians were hard to love (as Richard John Neuhaus fully displays in his ambivalence toward them). Nonetheless, they betokened a major transformation in the history of religion and society in America, and my organization was ill-suited to do much other than complain about it.
It was Neuhaus in this book who first began to expose for me the limitations of a strictly jurisprudential approach to a profound problem of politics and culture. If you only have a hammer, the saying goes, every problem will look like a nail. Jewish organizations treated all the questions of religion and democracy as if they were legal ones that could be solved by heightening the wall of separation or advocating for free exercise, so long as that exercise did not undermine the almighty wall. Neuhaus taught me that one needs many tools in one’s toolbox: law, yes, but also history, social and political theory, and, above all, theology.
There have been many books, both popular and scholarly, written on religion and democracy since 1984, books that address our current dilemmas with erudition, methodological sophistication, and political engagement. The work of Stephen Carter comes to mind. Nonetheless, I am not sure that any of them would merit a twenty-year retrospective, as The Naked Public Square surely does. Rereading it, I am struck by the dialectical quality of the author’s judgments. Almost every criticism of a position or movement is accompanied by an affirmation of some truth that that position or movement nonetheless preserves. It is not a partisan book; it is filled with both “sympathy and skepticism,” as the author writes, toward the persons and phenomena he analyzes. I will leave it to specialists to decide whether this dialectical approach reflects a distinctively Lutheran sensibility. I would say that it reflects Christian moral responsibility—indeed, Christian love. Even at his most disapproving, Neuhaus demonizes no one.
In Neuhaus’ view, a public square shorn of respect for divine transcendence will soon fasten onto the ersatz transcendence of Leviathan. Is this view overly apocalyptic? Now that the contest between European totalitarianisms and liberal democracy has been settled (thank God) in favor of the latter, is the fear of a slide toward totalitarianism passé? Indeed, since a religious movement (radical Islamism) and not secular communism or fascism is the defining threat of our time, should we not have more appreciation for a naked or at least lightly clothed public square? I would also say that the substitution of Islamo-fascism for secular totalitarianisms does not challenge Neuhaus’ thesis. He wants to preserve democracy against all authoritarianisms, religious and secular. Islamist authoritarianism is as much a totalitarian temptation as was Nazism.
This totalitarian temptation stands in vivid contrast to what Neuhaus calls “critical patriotism.” When I first read the book, Neuhaus’ argument on behalf of loyalty and love for America coupled with moral judgment was persuasive to me. His basic claim is that only biblical faith can keep faith in the nation from becoming idolatrous and dangerous. Patriotism is a virtue, but only in the proper context: “biblical faith in the universal purposes of God sets the context and limits of patriotism.” Patriotism is “critical” because it is suspended “in tension between moral judgment and political allegiance.” Patriotism, although it involves love for what is native to us, is not native to us. Love of self, love of tribe, love of locale are all more proximate than love of nation. The sentiments of patriotism must be nurtured. As Walter Berns suggests, if a nation wishes to survive, it must dedicate itself to “making patriots.” Neuhaus is aware of this, yet his distancing of the concept of citizen from the concept of patriot is nonetheless disturbing. Following the late Yale constitutional scholar, Alexander Bickel, Neuhaus sees the citizen as a legal abstraction, a sort of Rawlsian contractarian, rather than as a real person. “The fatal move,” Neuhaus writes, “is in the elevation of the concept of citizen. The concept of citizen is then conflated with and finally swallows the reality of persons.” For Neuhaus “citizen” can mean “cipher” (as, he says, “comrade” does in some countries), for it suggests that our rights derive from our status in a state rather than being original attributes of our pre-political personhood.
If we are to speak of rights, I would agree that they attach to our being as persons and not as citizens. But if we are speaking of patriotism, I don’t see how we can do so without tying citizenship and patriotism closely together. If we don’t do so, then patriotism may devolve into a haze of nationalistic feeling without civic duties and responsibilities.
Neuhaus’ rejection of the moral potency of citizenship stems from a concern to root our rights and duties in the real rather than the artificial, in nature rather than custom. It is of a piece, I think, with the wholeness or integration he seeks in the project of re-infusing public life with moral legitimacy derived from biblical faith. But biblical faith also tells us that the world is broken and that, despite our duty to fix what we can of it, there is a great deal that we cannot fix. In such a world, the distinction between artificial and real is a real distinction, as is that between sacred and profane. A naked public square is not, in my view, desirable, but neither is a sacred one. A civil public square, where citizens explore their ultimate and proximate agreements and disagreements with a modicum of respect, is desirable. I think that a renewal of confidence in the meaning of citizenship would contribute to that goal rather than detract from it.
Alan Mittleman is Professor of Jewish Thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and Director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute on Religion and Social Studies.
Andrew Murphy
The Naked Public Square was an important book when it was published; it remains an important book twenty years later. In it, Richard John Neuhaus articulated the discontent felt by many culturally conservative Christian Americans, and he articulated that discontent without any illusions about its underdeveloped political and theological nature or its sometimes narrow-minded hostility to outsiders. The questions, problems, and paradoxes explored in the pages of The Naked Public Square are not only timeless in large historical terms, but they remain as thorny as ever in this age of faith-based initiatives, welfare reform, sexual politics, and contention over religious language and imagery in courtrooms and classrooms. To my mind, Neuhaus’ book offers the most compelling presentation of its kind, a weighty jeremiad for the late twentieth century. (By way of disclaimer, I write as a liberal Episcopalian who believes strongly that a public square that is somewhat divested of religion serves an important role in fostering for religious and cultural minorities the very religious liberty that Christian Americans have enjoyed for so long.) There are many ways to enter into dialogue with the book; let me draw out just a few points, by reflecting on three concepts that lie at the heart of Neuhaus’ argument.
Democracy. The book captured the sense of exclusion and frustration experienced by large numbers of cultural conservatives, a frustration powered by revulsion at the increasingly radicalized social movements of the 1960s, separationist Supreme Court rulings on church and state, especially after 1963, and the widening distance between the Christian elements present at the nation’s founding and the character of America’s late twentieth-century culture.
Twenty years on, I wonder how developments in American partisan politics have affected these cultural-moral political divisions. The Naked Public Square was written during the first Reagan term, in the wake of evangelical disillusionment with Jimmy Carter’s presidency and Democratic control of Congress. Clearly, cultural politics do not fall neatly along partisan lines. But such developments as the emergence of Republican Party control at the congressional and gubernatorial level, increasingly narrow margins on many Supreme Court decisions, an increasingly prominent evangelical presence at the highest levels of Republican Party leadership, and Republican hold on the executive branch for all but eight of the past twenty-four years must surely diminish the sense of alienation among the cultural conservatives that Father Neuhaus chronicled. Provocative events continue to pop up on both sides of the religio-political divide—the Ninth Circuit’s “under God” ruling and gay marriage as a stalking-horse for bestiality on the one hand, the latest remarks by Pat Robertson or John Ashcroft or General Boykin on the other. But is it really credible, at this point in the nation’s history and considering not only the current administration but Congress and the Supreme Court, for evangelicals to claim that they are shut out from the halls of political power, that their concerns are marginalized and viewed as politically illegitimate? (This is not to claim that evangelical concerns always carry the day, only that they receive a serious hearing at the highest levels of government.)
Conversely, shouldn’t we remain as concerned as Neuhaus surely was about the antidemocratic nature of the Christian right itself, and note the accounts of mainline Protestant leaders or representatives of the peace churches, who don’t even get their calls returned by the current Republican administration? Has the return, or at least the partial return, of religion to the public square since 1984 contributed to advancing democratic civility in American political discourse? I suspect that it has not.
Morality. Liberal, as opposed to majoritarian, democracy is grounded on the idea that there should be limits on the ability of majorities to enact policy, and that those limits have to do with preserving space for the conscientious beliefs of individuals and minority groups. Neuhaus called for a “renewed respect for moral sentiments and their democratic expression in the public arena,” especially as it relates to evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives. But such a renewed respect, in real political and legal terms, might well threaten the ability of the adherents of minority religious (or religio-political) groups to achieve a meaningful level of respect for their own moral sentiments in the public arena. Think of Judge Roy Moore’s placement of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama courthouse, for example; or legal issues in workplace proselytization, an intriguing and perplexing emergent field of civil rights law. Although the naked public square, or something like it, might certainly be objectionable on several grounds (its free exercise implications fo
