GOD AND THE COMMONS:  DOES RELIGION MATTER?

An Issue Brief and Guide for Deliberative Dialogue

Introduction

Religion:  A Gathering Storm in American Public Life

“God was in Rindge on Saturday,” said a reporter for the Keene Sentinel, referring to the many references speakers made to the divine from the podium at last year’s Franklin Pierce College graduation ceremony.  The headline for the story read “In God They Trust.” 

“While graduations are often a time to thank God, among other clichés,” the news reporter explained, “several speakers went above and beyond a passing reference to the deity, instead focusing their entire speeches on the effect God has had on their lives.” 

Chief among them was Lisa A. Biron, valedictorian for the graduate and professional studies program.  She spoke about how her faith in Jesus Christ had helped her to overcome a life of alcohol and partying, and enabled her to change the abusive nature of her intimate relationships and to successfully complete her education.  She went on to say that she now plans to go on to law school to arm herself with the knowledge and skills to fight the American Civil Liberties Union, which she says is trying to destroy religion in this country.  She concluded her speech by saying, “ I am more certain that ever that with God all things can be done.”

Maybe the reason she is optimistic about affecting social change in the country is because she is one of a growing number of organized and politically active conservative evangelical Christians in America, President George W. Bush among them, who have come to feel that our country has been on a harmful course in recent decades because its major social institutions—the family, law, government, the media and education—are being shaped primarily by secular values rather than religious ones, in general, and conservative Christian ones, in particular.  

In their view, the American Civil Liberties Union, with its mission to defend an interpretation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights that stands for a “wall of separation” of religion from politics and defends all manner of free thought and expression, has become emblematic of the shift in the last half of the twentieth century to a more secular (non-religious) American society.   This way of viewing the Constitution seems to have guided many of the rulings of the Supreme Court in recent decades, which has strengthened this transformation to a more secular society. 

Many, like Columbia University Law School professor Stephen L. Carter, say these decisions have led to the trivialization of the religious devotion of many Americans and to a widespread “culture of disbelief”.   They say America was formed, in large part, by Christian values and that the founding fathers never intended the freedom of religion and the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment to lead to the kind of strict institutional separation of church and state, and to what, in their view, has amounted to a government-enforced freedom from religion in the public sphere. 

More liberal, progressive evangelicals and people of other faiths are also critical of the drift toward a more secular America.  They argue for restoring the civic value of religion in our society, which, they say, has historically been profound and today is sorely missed.  Important social movements that have greatly improved our society over the years—abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights—were aligned with spiritual motivations and faith-based organizations.  Other speakers at Franklin Pierce’s 2005 Commencement, some of which received honorary degrees, made references to the spiritual motivations of these movements in our nation’s history and to contemporary organizations that are making efforts on behalf of international peace and the rehabilitation of gang members and drug addicts in inner city America.   

Liberal and progressive believers like political/religious/cultural editors Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine and Michael Lerner of the Jewish journal Tikkun are inclined to agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in 1831, recognized the central, but indirect role that religion played in American society.  “Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions in that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions… I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.”

But many others such as writer Susan Jacoby in her recent book Freethinkers defend the secularist heritage of America.  They emphasize that many of the founders fathers, as students of the Enlightenment, had as much faith in human reason as they did in God and they were intent on giving Americans the first government in the world based on it rather than on the authority of religion.   Governmental checks and balances on power, the non-establishment of religion, freedom of thought and religion, mechanisms for civic discourse and democratic participation, they thought, would be sufficient to foster and guide Americans into the future toward the good life and a free society.   

Moreover, prior to the Enlightenment, Europe lived through hundreds of years of bloody wars fueled by religious group differences.  For this very practical reason also the American founders were concerned to keep religion out of the public domain as a way to eliminate one of the major sources of conflict in society.  Their solution involved relegating religious belief and practice to the private sphere of life.  And indeed, the First Amendment and the non-establishment clause in the Constitution have protected our pluralist nation and preserved a measure of peace among religious and cultural groups and between the religious and the non-religious in our society.  The United States is unique in that it was founded expressly as a place where people could be set free to practice their religion, where there was no official national church, and where religion and government can co-exist but operate separately.

In the intervening years since the founding period in American history, however, we have lived through many cultural and social changes.  Faith in reason and democratic political mechanisms alone has been shaken to some extent by events in the last century such as the two World Wars. Scholarship and science have relentlessly defined themselves as agnostic enterprises explaining the natural world and human behavior without any transcendent points of reference (i.e., evolutionary theory, Marxism, rational choice theory, conflict theory, structuralism, functionalism, secularization and modernization theory, etc.). 

Now at the beginning of a new millennium, it seems many people in America and across the globe are not satisfied with a purely scientific worldview.  In spite of its many legitimate achievements, we are starting to see its limitations.   In response, many are returning to traditional religion or other orthodoxies or to new spiritual beliefs and practices in their quest for meaning, which transcends the restricted space of empirical existence.  Concurrently, it seems that the appropriateness of certain social policies and political arrangements such as the separation of church and state, the foundations of which were laid during the Enlightenment and built and sustained through the increasingly secular 19th and 20th centuries, are today being renegotiated and redesigned with post-modern concerns in mind. 

The idea that religion would become increasingly irrelevant in modern society (secularization), a view held by many intellectuals over the last couple centuries, has now come to seem seriously misguided and shortsighted in light of the resurgence religion is experiencing in America and around the world.  The religious impulse beats strong in human beings and appears to be a perennial feature of humanity, perhaps ultimately because, as sociologist Peter L. Berger explains, of the feeling that existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition. 

In his recent book Why Religion Matters, comparative religion scholar Huston Smith says, “that the finitude of human existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely.  Built into the human makeup is a longing for a ‘more’ that the world of everyday experience cannot require.  This outreach strongly suggests the existence of the something that life reaches for in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air.  Sunflowers bend in the direction of light because light exists, and people seek food because food exists.  Individuals may starve, but bodies would not experience hunger if food did not exist to assuage it.  The reality that excites and fulfills the soul’s longing is God by whatsoever name.”

We stand at a crossroads in human history and in American life.  How will human beings in the new millennium give personal and public expression to this perennial feature of their existence—the religious impulse?  What role should religion play in public life, if any?  How valid are the critiques of secular culture raised by both conservative and liberal religious people?  What are our concerns regarding secularism, fundamentalism and about the political aspirations of conservative Christians, Muslims and other traditional religious groups? 

Today more citizens see religion as one of the few antidotes to a perceived decline in morality and more politicians want not to have to check their religious beliefs at the public door.  And there are others from across the political – and religious – spectrum who call our attention to the civic purposes of religion.  If we are not to ignore those religiously motivated citizens and public officials – and recent elections indicate that we cannot – then the fundamental political and social challenge of these times is one of figuring out how a polity can be open to religious insights without succumbing to the temptation to impose specific religious beliefs through the state. 

The path that avoids these pitfalls, globally and within our own country, is one that recognizes the need to genuinely listen and engage the liberal and conservative critiques of secular culture.  Having a way to talk productively about and think through the challenge that religion presents both at home and internationally could help improve our society and reduce religiously based mistrust, hatred, and violence in the 21st century.  The circumstances call for campus conversations as well as a national, public dialogue.

To help facilitate such a deliberative dialogue this brief outlines three broad approaches to social change with regard to this national dilemma.  It is essential that college students, who are our next generation of leaders, discuss this issue and offer their input.  Each approach in this issue brief offers a different diagnosis of the problem and, therefore, calls for different remedies.  Weighing each of the approaches and considering the pros and cons of each one and sharing perspectives with each other will help to better inform us as individuals and as a public.  For, in a democracy, it is the citizens who must make choices and provide direction for the future about the proper place of religion in society.

Approach One:  Stay the Secular Course

Proponents of this approach believe that, overall, our country’s secular public culture is good and that the enforcement of a strict separation of church and state is essential to preserving social peace and fostering a diverse, pluralist society.  Most Americans, as a recent Pew Charitable Foundation poll results show, whatever their religious views, have a healthy respect for the Constitutional principle of separation of church and state.  Religion may play a role in people’s private lives, they admit, but should not be used as a guideline for public policy.  When people speak as citizens or as elected or appointed officials in the public sphere, they should “check their religious beliefs at the door” and make their arguments for particular policy positions in rational terms (pragmatic and empirical, etc.) and on the basis of general non-religious moral principals.  One does not, proponents of this approach explain, have the right to demand that others accept the tenets of one’s own faith in making a political decision.

What Should Be Done

• Continue to support a strict “wall of separation” between church and state by restricting governmental support of religion, i.e., outlawing prayer in public schools, the teaching of religious doctrines such as creationism or intelligent design alongside of scientific evolutionary theory in the curriculum, and the display of particular religious texts like the Ten Commandments and symbols in schools and in other public places such as courtrooms and in town commons
• Support scientific literacy and rational thought in schools and in all forms of public reasoning and participation
• Keep tax dollars and government agencies out of the business of supporting faith-based organizations in the social service aspects of their work
• Insist on the appointment of judges and other public officials who do not seek to blur the distinctions between “God’s justice and ours,” between secular government and religiously-guided politics

Critics Say

• The founding fathers were not atheists, for the most part, and they did not intend that government be the enforcer of a secular culture on its citizens
• Most Americans believe religion is a positive social force and that government should play a role in supporting religious institutions and faith-based organizations in society
• Scientific and rational explanations are not enough to address life’s ultimate questions and to guide the moral and political decisions that impact our individual and social lives

A Likely Trade-Off

Keeping our public life thoroughly secular may reinforce damaging trends of materialism, selfishness and ethical and spiritual decline.

For Further Reading/Stay the Secular Course

Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

Approach Two:  Recover Our Judeo-Christian Heritage

Proponents of this approach are most concerned that our culture has become a toxic one and that secular humanist values have encouraged this cultural decline.  They believe these values are anti-religious and are privileged in all our public institutions—government, law, education, the media, etc.  Proponents of this choice believe these are not the abiding values that shaped our nation at its founding and through most of its history, nor are they the values that are held by most Americans today.  Instead, they believe our society has been hijacked by a secular cultural elite who imposes their values on the rest of the nation through their disproportionate power as leaders of major social institutions.  They argue that most Americans are religious, and that many have come to feel that their religion is under assault by a militant secularism that allows no place for their beliefs and shows no respect to their culture.  It is time, they argue, to recover the Biblical values of our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage and to allow these values to have effect in our public lives and policy.

What Should Be Done

• Allow public schools to teach about the Judeo-Christian heritage of America and theories about natural and human origins that challenge scientific evolutionary theory
• Strengthen the public (governmental) support of faith-based initiatives and encourage government-religious institutional partnerships for a wide array of societal tasks from social services to international diplomacy
• Let religious belief inform our public discourse and policy decisions

Critics Say

• Whatever our past, America is today a pluralist society that cannot enforce one religious/cultural perspective on its citizens through government, law and public policy
• Teaching religious based theories about natural and human origins alongside scientific evolutionary theory is dumbing down the scientific curriculum of our nation’s schools and leads to less respect for the capabilities of human reason
• Mixing religion with political ideology and political power is dangerous and can lead to great oppression and evil carried out in the name of religion

A Likely Trade-off

Trying to reestablish Judeo-Christian values through operations of government and other social institutions may foster intolerance and lead to the creation of a social ethos many in our modern society would find oppressive, if not politically totalitarian.

For Further Reading/Recover Our Judeo-Christian Heritage

Antonin Scalia, “God’s Justice and Ours,” speech given at the University of Chicago Divinity School reprinted in First Things: The Journal of Religion and Public Life, May, 2002.

Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1993).

Charles L. Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies, (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2000).

Approach Three:  Embrace Religion’s Civic Value

Like the proponents of approach two, proponents of a third approach also think that many of our nation’s problems stem in part from our secular culture that has come to undermine religious and spiritual sensibilities.  But, they differ from those who advocate restoring our Judeo-Christian heritage as a remedy in that they advocate embracing religion’s civic value in ways that gesture outward in an inclusive embrace of all religious traditions as well as those who champion non-religious moral viewpoints.   The main problem in modern society, as Michael Lerner has argued, is not secularism, but rather the materialism and selfishness that have become the common sense of global capitalism.  Like Lerner, advocates of this approach remain adamant about church/state separation not as a means for keeping religious and spiritual values out of the public realm.  Instead, getting the state out of the God business is a way to ensure that spiritual values retain their vital and distinctive character, uncompromised by an alliance with political power.   Only in functioning separately from the state can religious and cultural pluralism be preserved.  Moreover, it is in the realm of civil society apart from the state that religious institutions and spiritual values express their strongest civic value and play their important role in society and public policy as a redemptive alternative to socially destructive capitalist values.  Additionally, proponents of this approach argue that secularists go wrong when they claim that their position is the only one compatible with intellectual sophistication and scientific truth.  Science does not and could not take any stand on religion any more than it can broker public policy decisions, as public problems are ultimately moral questions and not scientific ones.

What Should Be Done

• Recognize that religion is a perennial feature of humanity and an important thing to most Americans and it plays a vital role in society, but keep it separate from government
• Allow religious perspectives to be part of the public discourse, but seek to persuade others on the basis of the beliefs universal ethical content rather than on grounds that they are mandated by a particular religious tradition
  
  
• In political discourse, be civil and don’t resort to demonizing when there is disagreement

Critics Say

• Religion is backward; human reason alone is the only way to solve our public problems
• Both historically and in contemporary society, the majority of Americans are Christian, therefore, it is appropriate and democratic to emphasize that particular religious tradition in our cultural life and to do so through the mechanisms of government
• Allowing religious perspectives a place in the public sphere is to invite the worst kind of conflict into society; religion is best kept in the private realm of life

A Likely Trade-off

Welcoming religion into public life may result in greater moral conflict in society and could lead to oppressive laws and policies that violate our sense of personal and economic freedom

For Further Reading/Embrace Religion’s Civic Value

Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 2005).

Michael Lerner, “Church and State: When the Right Breaks the Barrier, How Should a Spiritual Left Respond?” Tikkum, Vol. 20, No. 4, July/August 2005.

General Sources/Religion and Public Life

Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 1984).

Peter L. Berger, editor, The Desecularization of the World:  Resurgent Religion and World Politics, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 1999).

Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 2001).

E.J. Dionne Jr., Jean Bethke Elshtain and Kayla M. Drogosz, One Electorate Under God? A Dialogue on Religion and American Politics, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004)

Terry Easterland, editor, Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define the Debate Over Church and State, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 1993).

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