The genesis of Church, State and Citizen was a panel on different Christian approaches to the state that was part of the 2004 meeting of the American Political Science Association. The result is an examination of church-state relations from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, the Lutherans, the Reformed Churches, the Anabaptists, Evangelical Christianity and Pentecostalism. Like almost all such survey books it has both strengths and weaknesses. On the credit side, it provides a helpful series of potted ecclesiologies for the traditions under scrutiny and deals with certain strands in American Christianity of which the British reader may be largely unaware; on the other hand, the overall quality of the contributions is variable.
James Skillen's short essay on church and state in the Reformed tradition is very helpful on Calvin's view on government but rather less so when he turns to theories of the just war. And though I happen to share Skillen's utter abhorrence of the conflict in Iraq, I am not sure that his lengthy appeal for reconciliation and a just world order, however cogent and heartfelt, adds very much to our knowledge of church-state relations in the Reformed tradition.
Similarly, Leah Seppanen Anderson's six-page historical introduction to Anglicanism will no doubt be of interest to Americans unfamiliar with that tradition but is unlikely to tell an English reader with more than a passing interest in the subject anything that he or she will not already know. A further and more fundamental criticism is that because of the widely-varying constitutional contexts in which the provinces of the Anglican Communion are obliged to operate, any search for an ‘Anglican’ view of church-state relations is almost certainly doomed from the start. Quoting Hooker is all well and good but, in institutional terms at least, Rowan Williams and Katherine Jefferts Schori – and even David Chillingworth – must have very different expectations of how their church communities will engage with the civil authorities. What Anderson describes as ‘An Anglican perspective on the state’ (pp 104–107) is in fact a Church of England perspective: not the same thing at all. Perhaps surprisingly, where Anderson is at her most acute is in her description of the evolving relationship between the Church of Nigeria and the secular authorities after the ending of the military dictatorship. Overall, however, her analysis is not entirely convincing. ‘Because Anglicanism has, from its origins, been a broad church, members have had to practise the Christian virtues of humility, patience and long-suffering.’ (p 109). Was that really the reason? Not, simply, that that is what Jesus told his followers to do? And are ‘humility, patience and long-suffering’ peculiarly Anglican virtues anyway?
The most interesting parts of the book from a British perspective are those that deal with traditions of which we have little or no experience. In spite of the enthusiasm of some of the early English reformers for Luther's theology, the modern Lutheran presence in Great Britain is tiny, with the result that members of other traditions (not excluding your reviewer) are sometimes rather mystified by the paradox inherent in Luther's ‘Two Kingdoms’ which Timothy Lomperis teases out with such care. Similarly, Sandra Joireman's essay on the Anabaptists – in particular, the Mennonites – introduces us to a tradition barely visible in the United Kingdom. Mennonites would assert the primacy of the church over the state, the purpose of the state being merely to secure civil order so that the Gospel can be preached. ‘From a Mennonite perspective, the state is not the Christian's fundamental allegiance. Mennonites are particularly suspicious of calls to engage in violence on behalf of the state’; moreover, ‘When the distinction between the church and the world is no longer discernible, the church has lost its ability to bear witness to the good news of Christ’ (p 79).
Turning to traditions that are more familiar but which have a much higher profile in US politics, Timothy Samuel Shah provides an interesting analysis of Evangelical attitudes to church-state relations which effectively demolishes the British assumption that there is any kind of monolithic American Christian Right. In the 2008 Presidential primaries, for example, 47 per cent of Evangelicals backed the moderate John McCain while only 37 per cent backed the overtly-Evangelical Mike Huckabee (p 135). Perhaps the reason why there is no single Evangelical stance is the movement's emphasis on personal faith: if your belief-system rests on an individual conversion experience, why should that experience imply any particular view of the position of government vis-à-vis religion? And that seems to apply equally to Pentecostals, for whom Stephen Swindle concludes that to suggest a distinctive understanding of church and state ‘is to misrepresent the extraordinary diversity that defines the movement’ (p 160).
If the book has any overall conclusion, it is probably the statement tucked away in Skillen's essay on Calvinism: ‘Most Christians today, we can say, are probably Anabaptists in the sense that they contend for free churches in open societies with governments that give equal treatment to all citizens regardless of their faith’ (p 59). If this is true for the United States, it is equally true for the United Kingdom – but surprisingly so, given that relatively few British Christians have even heard of the Anabaptists, let alone actually met one. That in itself points to the fact that much of the discussion springs from the American experience; but the book is none the worse for that and, overall, would be a useful primer for someone coming to the subject of church and state for the first time.
The contributions to the Religious Voices in Public Places are predicated on the assumption that ‘the context in which liberal societies must function is one in which there is no prospect of religion disappearing, or of citizens agreeing on the fundamental principles of justice and of social order’ (p 8). Given that not unreasonable proposition, what is to be the relationship between religion and politics in a liberal society?
John Rawls has argued in ‘The Idea of Public Reason’Footnote 1 that any viable conception of ‘justice’ must allow for diversity and plurality of opinion about the meaning, value and purpose of human life and that, because there is no means of adjudicating between conflicting understandings of ‘the good’, ‘a well ordered society must develop a political conception of justice (namely justice as fairness) which is independent of and free from any consideration of the good’ (p 6). The presence of Rawls broods over the contributors as they consider the issue from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, theological and political.
The fundamental problem of religion in politics is posed in the title of Nicholas Wolterstorff's contribution: ‘Why Can't We All Just Get Along with Each Other’. Debates over matters such as abortion and euthanasia suggest that, empirically speaking, we do not; and Wolterstorff firmly dismisses as utopianism the suggestion that we could achieve some kind of overall moral and political consensus if only we could agree on a version of ‘religion’ that had been emptied of its content in the interests of harmony and inclusivity – nor, realistically, would such a denatured version of religion ever be capable of displacing the historic ones (p 26). What could unite religions, he suggests, is an acknowledgement that ‘rights are grounded in the worth of persons’ rather than an unachievable and morally-suspect attempt to guarantee ‘some general right to act as one sees fit’ (p 35).
The authors range widely: from Nigel Biggar on the theological and philosophical arguments against euthanasia and Brian Stiltner and Steven Michels on the impact of the candidates' religious views in the recent US Presidential election to Luke Bretherton's careful analysis of how we might establish common ground that will provide the basis for a common life in a plural society. Bretherton's preferred solution, at least in a Christian context, is what he terms a ‘hospitality model’ based on ‘the central themes of Christian doctrine: Trinity, creation, incarnation, salvation and eschatology’– though he accepts that other religious traditions will have their own responses to ‘how to deliberate about common action with those with whom one does not share a common vision of the good life’ (p 98). Perhaps the least convincing contribution is Paul Weithman's essay on ‘Religious Education and Democratic Character’. His philosophical defence of religious schools is unimpeachable; what he does not appear to address, however, is the purely pragmatic but nonetheless crucial issue of social cohesion. In a society divided on lines that are at least partly religious, is educating the children of the opposing communities in separate and mutually-exclusive faith schools likely to help heal those divisions or exacerbate them? The experience of Northern Ireland would suggest the latter.
Having myself written on bishops in the House of Lords,Footnote 2 I was particularly interested in Peter Sedgwick's chapter on ‘Anglican Religious Leaders and Public Culture’, in which he considers the contributions to Lords debates of Robert Hardy (on prisons and healthcare) and Richard Harries (on a wide range of issues, but especially on human embryology and stem cell research). Sedgwick concludes that ‘the participation of Anglican religious leaders in English political life does not violate Rawlsian principles per se, unless the existence of the establishment by its very nature does so’ (p 258). Fair enough, so far as it goes: but in so saying he elides England and the United Kingdom. Whether or not English bishops have a proper place in English political life is one thing; whether or not they have a proper place legislating for Scotland or Northern Ireland is quite another – legislative consent resolutions notwithstanding. But the much more basic question is whether or not the House of Lords itself, as at present constituted, is in any way compatible with what Rawls has described as ‘an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship’.Footnote 3 After all, on any normal understanding of the term there is not much of ‘democratic citizenship’ about their Lordships' House.
In his concluding chapter Nigel Biggar concedes that ‘some religious people are not much interested in reasoning together with unbelievers’ and that some of them pose a serious threat to the peace of society. At the same time, however, he argues that ‘not all forms of religion are unreasonable: and it does no good service to tar all believers with the same “racist” brush' (p 320). Exactly so: that is the approach of Richard Dawkins;Footnote 4 and however reasonable it may appear to Dawkins and his supporters to assume that all religious discourse is a sign of total irrationality, their implication that Rowan Williams and Aly Khamenei are somehow in the same business simply flies in the face of reason.
To conclude: this collection of essays is fairly tough going for someone whose professional literary diet is case-law and Hansard rather than philosophy and legal theory – and it certainly helps one's comprehension to have some previous acquaintance with the thought of John Rawls. But tough as it is, it addresses what have become fundamental issues for liberal democracies at the start of the twenty-first century: how is society to accommodate deeply-held religious and non-religious views which may often be in conflict and to what extent does ‘the common good’ require religious practices to be regulated? Given that not all religious attitudes and beliefs are based on total unreason and given also that there are no signs that religion is in terminal decline (except, possibly, in Western Europe), those questions are unlikely to be resolved, if at all, without rigorous and careful scrutiny. Religious Voices in Public Places is an important contribution to that process of analysis.
