For more than half a century, the American public has been embroiled in one of its recurring debates about the proper place of religion in political life. Speaking before a group of Protestant clergymen in 1960, a young Roman Catholic presidential hopeful named John F. Kennedy articulated what was by then the liberal ideal: “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Earlier this year, another Catholic presidential hopeful named Rick Santorum spelled out what was by then conservative orthodoxy: “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.” Kennedy’s speech, he added, “makes me throw up.” No doubt many liberal observers had a similar reaction to Santorum’s speech.
The debate on the campaign trail often echoes that in the courtroom. Beginning in 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court applied the separation principle in a series of landmark decisions that effectively removed all forms of religious expression from the nation’s public schools. But of late, religious conservatives have regained the offensive. In January, for example, the court ruled that antidiscrimination laws did not apply to “ministerial” employees of religious organizations (in this instance, teachers at a church elementary school). Meanwhile, a new rule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring religious institutions to include birth control in their health-care plans has sparked dozens of lawsuits from religious groups that view it as an infringement of their First Amendment freedom.
Is there any middle ground between the liberal and conservative visions of a totally secular country or a Christian nation? Yes. But reoccupying it would require both sides to let go of some of their deepest and most cherished misconceptions about American history. It is far from clear that either is willing to do so.
Their misconceptions are embedded in two competing narratives. In one, favored by secular liberals, the United States was founded upon a “Godless Constitution” written by Enlightenment deists who constructed a wall of separation between church and state to put an end to religious wars that had ravaged Europe in earlier centuries. The moral of that story is that religion should be quarantined—locked up in the private sphere and denied entry into the public square—because it is too divisive, too oppressive to be let loose.
In the opposing narrative, favored by most religious conservatives, America is a Christian nation founded by orthodox believers whose main goal was to protect religious freedom from the sort of tyrannical state that had driven the Puritans from England. The upshot: The state must be kept out of churches because freedom—especially religious freedom—is the supreme value of American politics.
Readers of The Chronicle will probably have little difficulty spotting the flaws in the conservative narrative. Some of the founders had rather unorthodox creeds. As for the Puritans, their political ideal was more a Calvinist theocracy than a liberal democracy. Nor is religious freedom the only ideal of the American Republic; social equality forms a second pole on the nation’s political compass. While contemporary conservatives happily recall the Declaration of Independence’s reference to a “Creator,” they quickly forget the preceding claim that “all men are created equal.”
What may be less obvious to some members of academe are the various defects in the liberal narrative. For one, the Constitution itself does not speak of a “separation of church and state.” The “separationist” reading of the First Amendment was first mooted by Thomas Jefferson, in his famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists. Ironically, the “wall” metaphor was most likely introduced by Roger Williams, a religious radical who wanted to keep the Puritan state out of his “garden of faith.” Finally, the separationist approach did not really triumph in court until after World War II.
Since then, influential legal scholars like Philip Hamburger have challenged the historical pedigree of separationist doctrine, showing how it developed first in response to fears of New England Federalists in the 18th century, then Catholics in the 19th century. Protestant nativist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan were outspoken supporters of separationism. So the lineage of the doctrine includes some disreputable characters.
That has led Hamburger and other leading interpreters of the First Amendment, like Michael W. McConnell, Daniel Dreisbach, and James Hitchcock, to elaborate an alternative doctrine of “accommodationism.” It allows public accommodations to religion as long as they facilitate free choices by individuals, provide “equal treatment” of religions, and do not invade the religious freedom of others.
If the common cliché that “America was founded on the separation of church and state” is both historically inaccurate and legally debatable, the claim that the First Amendment was primarily a response to Europe’s wars of religion is more problematic still. What Madison and Jefferson were most concerned about was not a European-style religious war, but an Anglican-style established church or a Spanish-style Inquisition. Nor did the First Amendment do away with established churches at the state level. Massachusetts and Connecticut, for instance, had them into the 19th century.
Arguably, then, the purpose of the First Amendment was to prevent the creation of a national religious establishment and to protect the right to individual religious freedom (qua freedom of conscience and assembly).
Here, the separationist might object that the only way to protect religious freedom is to keep religious belief private. Otherwise religious majorities will use public power to oppress dissenters, religious and irreligious alike. That was Madison’s main concern. In his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments"—a canonical text of separationism—Madison argued against a state tax to support Virginia’s churches, warning that it created a slippery slope toward denominational establishment and perhaps even a new Inquisition.
One of the best arguments against Madison was made by Madison himself. In Federalist No. 10, he argued that pluralism—competing “factions"—is the best guarantee that no one faction will gain the power to abridge another’s freedom. Madison was speaking of political factions, but the logic is easily extended to religious denominations.
From this perspective, the best guarantee of religious freedom may be ... religious freedom, because religious freedom leads to religious pluralism. The worst guarantee of strict secularism may be ... strict secularism, because attempts to banish religion from public life often have the opposite effect. The Rev. Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the New Christian Right often cited the separationist jurisprudence of the 1960s and 1970s as the principal reason for their entry into politics. Secularizing campaigns in other countries, like Turkey and Egypt, have also led to a politicization of religion.
Similarly, the best argument against liberal secularism may be liberalism itself. One of the cardinal values of modern liberalism—perhaps the cardinal value—has always been freedom of speech. And yet one of the most influential of modern liberals, John Rawls, actively promoted restrictions on religious speech. He contended that religious citizens may not invoke religious reasons in the public square, but must state their political arguments in a “neutral” language of “public reason” that is “accessible” to all citizens. Other leading liberals, like Ronald Dworkin and Robert Audi, have advanced similar arguments. But it is hard to see how such restrictions can be squared with the liberal principle of equal protection, since they impose an asymmetric burden on religious citizens by forcing them to speak a foreign language of “secularese.”
Nor is that the only argument against a Rawlsian approach. Critics have identified at least three others. First, “public reason” is not neutral; its tacit ideal is an autonomous and abstract individual, a “man without qualities” (as the novelist Robert Musil put it), lacking any binding ties. Surely that is a fantasy—human beings are inherently social creatures. Second, if popular accessibility is really our main concern, then why not require secular citizens to translate their arguments into biblical language? After all, the Old Testament is far better known to the average American than Kant’s Second Critique! Finally, Rawls’s restrictions create a Catch-22: Religious citizens who use secular arguments will be accused of concealing their true motives, while those who use religious arguments will be castigated for violating separationist principles. It is not surprising that a number of leading liberals, like Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas, ultimately retreated from the Rawlsian position.
So what role should religion play in American politics?
From a practical point of view, the total separationism that Kennedy proposed is plainly unworkable. One can ban religious symbols from public spaces and deny religious schools public funds. But the political convictions and projects of citizens who are religious will inevitably be influenced by “ecclesiastical sources,” consciously or not. About that much, Santorum was right.
However, his reading of the First Amendment was not right; it was at odds with the American tradition of religious freedom, which is an individual right granted to citizens, not a collective right granted to “the Church” (singular and capitalized). Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor reminds us, religious freedom must often be weighed against other goods, like civic equality—as in the Department of Health and Human Services’ ruling requiring health insurance to cover contraception.
What is needed, then, is a mediating tradition that allows room for both religious and political values, without subordinating one to the other. Such a tradition does exist. The sociologist Robert N. Bellah sought to describe it almost a half century ago in his famous article on “Civil Religion in America.” It comprises two main intellectual strands: civic republicanism and prophetic religion. Where liberalism emphasizes individual autonomy and a free market, republicanism is more concerned with civic virtue and participatory government. Consequently it is less wary of religion. Where religious conservatism stresses individual salvation and personal accountability, prophetic religion emphasizes human flourishing and collective responsibility. Consequently it is less wary of the state.
What has become of this tradition? In 1976, in the wake of Watts, Vietnam, and Watergate, Bellah pronounced the American civil religion “an empty and broken shell"—emptied by “expressive individualism” and crushed by laissez-faire capitalism. But perhaps the obituary was premature. From Reagan’s repeated invocations of Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” to Obama’s frequent insistence that “I am my brother’s keeper,” the language of civil religion continues to infuse the political discourse of the United States (at least during presidential-election years).
But while American presidents have long served as the high priests of the civil religion, the main carriers of the tradition have been religious and secular intellectuals like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and Reinhold Niebuhr, men and women who powerfully articulated the higher ideals of the American project, speaking truth, not only to power, but to a wayward nation.
One source of the present crisis in American politics—far from the only one, to be sure—is the absence of voices capable of providing a moral check on partisan politics (and ruthless profiteering). The liberal Protestant proto-establishment that once stood in judgment over American political life is now vastly diminished in size and influence. Its usurper, the conservative evangelical anti-establishment, mostly lacks the intellectual heft and the institutional coherence that the role requires. At first glance, the Catholic Church seems better suited to the part. It surely is not lacking in intellectual heft. But some of its recent actions raise questions about its autonomy from the Republican establishment. And secular intellectuals? They generally seem wary of a public role—and mostly disdainful of religion.
Perhaps the real problem is not that religion has insinuated itself into politics, but precisely the reverse: that the ineluctable but potentially productive tension between religious and political ethics has been dissipated.
On the right, intellectuals whose political compasses no longer register the pull of equality would steer us toward the libertarian shores of marketopia, there to worship the shallow freedom of a false god who promises a guilt-free, consumer cornucopia, a heaven-on-earth where everyone is upper class. Asked why he entered politics, the Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan cited Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged rather than the social teachings of his own Catholic Church (although he revised his position following a rebuke from the bishops).
On the left, relativists beckon us to the Kingdom of Whatever, a vast archipelago where Robinson Crusoes diligently—and anxiously—prostrate themselves before their god of the moment. A new guru like the self-described Übermensch Tim Ferriss preaches an eclectic gospel of busy self-realization in the land of liberal, educated bohemia—Get in shape! Start a business! Take a vacation! Have an orgasm! Clean up your e-mail! It’s a narcissistic gospel, utterly devoid not only of justice and charity, but any concern with other human beings except as means to self-regarding ends.
Both courses portend disaster. A republic cannot survive without some measure of civic solidarity that extends beyond blood kin and co-religionists. Neither can it survive without some measure of civic virtue, the government of self, and the spirit of sacrifice. Somewhere between the kingdoms of Paul Ryan and Tim Ferriss lies the vital center of American politics.
