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Emerging Patterns in America's Political and Religious Self-Understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2004
Extract
Parallel statements through the 1970s and 1980s can be found regarding study of the religious elements in early modern liberal political thought, notably that of Hobbes and Locke. By any measure, the study of religion in American politics, history, and culture, and in political philosophy today, is not only flourishing, it threatens to overwhelm us. This is true not only in the bureaucratic sense of the Religion and Politics Section of the APSA, but in the focus on religion across the discipline and in the use by these political scientists of the work of political, social, cultural, racial, and gender historians and literary critics. And where enough entrepreneurial academics go, grant-giving foundations are sure to follow.
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I. Introduction
In his book The Study of Politics (1959), former American Political Science Association (APSA) president, Charles Hyneman (1961–1962), remarked that “religions appear to be virtually untouched” in mainstream political writing:
Certainly, no American political scientist has provided a noteworthy analysis of the idea-system . . . that characterizes religion in general. Neither has an American political scientist carefully explored the significance for legal government of the belief-system, organization, and rituals we call Christianity.1
From George Armstrong Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984), 7.
Parallel statements through the 1970s and 1980s can be found regarding study of the religious elements in early modern liberal political thought, notably that of Hobbes and Locke.2
On Hobbes, see Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990). Locke scholarship began to take his religious ideas seriously with John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). However, this reading has become standard only within the last two decades. For a summary of recent Hobbes and Locke scholarship, Eldon Eisenach, Narrative Power and Liberal Truth; Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 64–70, 146–54. Given the sheer amount of scholarly publishing, these statements about lack of attention usually can be refuted with many examples (this is particularly the case with Tuck's 1990 statement regarding Hobbes scholarship); however, what the authors really mean when they say “no one, or very few,” is that “no one, or very few, whom one respects and takes seriously in the field of study.”
The most notable have been the “Fundamentalism Project” at the University of Chicago and the munificence and breadth of support given by the Pew Charitable Trust under its Religion and Public Life Project.
Two Quick Indicators
Recently, I chaired “prize” committees for two sections in the APSA (Religion and Politics, best dissertation; and Foundations of Political Theory, best first book). While all of the entries in the former concerned religion, what struck me was the freedom and sophistication of these younger scholars, particularly in American and Comparative Politics, concerning the relationship of liberalism, modernity, and modernization with religious consciousness. While I cannot recount them here, these studies were not framed as if religion were either a premodern and atavistic ghost at the banquet of neoliberalism or a merely external mobilization link of self to politics which, having done its job (sometimes violently), can quietly fade away. Even more indicative is reading every first book published in political theory in the year 2001 – a great window to see what the next generation of political theorists are writing about. Of course, “the personal is the political” looms large, so identity politics and, especially, feminism were well represented. Eight of the seventeen books, however, directly addressed religion and religious thinkers.4
On this topic, see James R. Martel, Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2001); Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park: Penn State Press, 2001); Daniel Engster, Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois, 2001); Robert C Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Post-Mortem Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Anthony Simon Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); John Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).
These studies, and much recent work by historians, suggest four emerging theses:
(a) The secularization thesis/narrative is not only wrong, it distorts scholarship by leading us away from some of the constitutive elements of what is political by forcing our gaze to what is decidedly un- or antipolitical, whether it be bureaucratic and instrumental rationality, economic determinism, or therapy. To study politics seriously is to take religion seriously.
(b) Taking religious seriously means that re- ligion is seen not simply as a vehicle for empowerment, moral agency, and mobilization for those previously excluded from politics. Accommodating new or newly-emergent discourses and structure of religious ideas is often constitutive and transformative of both persons and states, providing a way of discrediting frozen truths that have excluded newer values and interests and replacing them with more capacious ones.
(c) The boundaries between secular and sacred in political philosophy, social and political theory, and political rhetoric and practices are permeable. And, just as there are a variety of religions and forms of religious beliefs, so there are a variety of secularisms and secular beliefs, many of which have their origins and articulations in religion.
(d) Religious belief, religious/political ideas and rhetoric, and religious institutions are and will remain primary sources of both political conflict and political consensus, will remain in but not of politics, both subversive and supportive of political orders.
America's political self-understanding is gradually being transformed by and through contemporary academic scholarship on religion and American culture and politics. In the remainder of this article, I address each of these theses in a variety of contexts. First, I outline a paradigmatic and often unconscious divide in contemporary American self-understanding regarding religion and American politics. I then turn to historical studies represented by the new ways in which religious history is being written and to the ways in which cultural, gender, and political histories now incorporate religion more fully in their analysis. A third articulation of an emerging pattern in the relationship of religion to American politics is at the level of political theory. I discuss this third topic in the context of critiques of liberalism, especially that represented by John Rawls, by his many critics, most notably, Charles Taylor, the “post-modernists,” and the advocates of a new pragmatism in political theory. Generalizing from these critiques, both historiograph-ical and philosophical, one result, which I take up as my fourth subject, is a set of arguments and modes of analysis that posit “multiple secularisms.” To suggest that secularism comes in many forms and intersects with value and religious pluralism in many different ways, is also to hold that there is no single or clear epistemological or analytical boundary between secular and sacred. I conclude, then, with some reflections on the ways in which “sacred” discourse and rhetoric can intervene in and interrupt more secular forms of political discourse and rhetoric, thereby resituating and redirecting political life itself.
II. Two Paradigmatic Portraits of America
In a concluding essay to a collection of new writings in American political history, James Kloppenberg draws our attention to the way in which these new political historians have shifted from the liberal paradigms of Louis Hartz to the democratic paradigms associated with Tocqueville. Hartz not only missed the important parts played by race, ethnicity, and gender, he also ignored both democratic and religious beliefs.5
James Kloppenberg, “From Hartz to Tocqueville: Shifting the Focus from Liberalism to Democracy in America,” in The Democratic Experiment, ed. Meg Jacobs, William Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 352. As developed, this distinction somewhat echoes that between “humanist” and “reform” liberalism in David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
One portrait is “liberal” in three senses: (1) it rests on highly abstract-legal distinctions between public and private (state and church); (2) it translates religion into “interests” that, like other private interests, seek recognition and advantage in political struggles; and (3) it distinguishes and isolates religion from other private interests when religion (illegitimately) seeks to shape constitutive features of the polity. This paradigm tends to reign in law and the social sciences.
The other portrait is “democratic” in three senses: (1) it focuses on national-consensual and moral-civic values lying underneath and inside external political forms and practices; (2) it stresses struggles and conflicts over the definition and import of these shared values; and (3) it concerns inclusion in, exclusion from, and assimilation into the larger society, culture, and polity.6
Here, Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chap. 7, is a useful addendum, particularly where he compares Tocqueville's “voluntarist” ideal of integration into a shared but local democratic culture with the “pluralist” (and Progressive) ideal of assimilation into a shared and national democratic culture. This shift entails the more familiar one between a society of small producers and one of hierarchic production but mass consumption. Also see Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1994), chaps. 2, 5.
A. The Liberal Portrait
America has become increasingly religiously pluralistic, just as it has become increasingly racially and ethnically pluralistic. Divisions within a still dominant Protestantism have divided us still more, making any attempt at creating a new religious consensus on the order of previously existing informal and voluntary establishments (successively, WASP Protestant, Euro-Christian, Judeo-Christian) both quixotic and dangerous.7
This is the formulation in Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995).
Like the individualism assumed in voting, religion is understood politically as religiously-motivated individuals coming together in groups or social movements and seeking to translate those understandings into political influence. Analysts (or psychoanalysts) of these phenomena are presumed to be able to stand outside these phenomena and to convey the results of their studies in replicable, scientific form. Running parallel with this universalistic posture of the scientific analyst is the universal posture of liberal constitutional rules and principles that keep these claims and conflicts within the bounds of civility and good order.
B. The National-Democratic Portrait
This more internal and historical portrait begins by asking us to set aside particular churches, religious interests, and “faith traditions” interacting with politics or taking sides in contemporary political battles. We are asked to look instead to the larger patterns and spirits in our national history and culture. America, proclaimed the English Catholic, G.K. Chesterton, in the 1920s, is “The Nation with the Soul of a Church.”8
This became the book title for Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
Sacvan Bercovitch, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” The Massachusetts Review (1976); 597–630; and The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999); J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994).
For example, Robert L. Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pts. 2–3; Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York: Free Press, 1970); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Given this interweaving of religion and politics, this portrait makes religion so pervasive, so deeply embedded in U.S. culture and practices – ranging from politics to entertainment, from philosophy to literature, from consumption patterns to music and sport – that to be distinctly American is to be distinctly religious, even for those who proclaim to hold only “secular” values. These long-standing foreign observations and historical studies are increasingly being rediscovered and restated in new keys by contemporary American scholarship – fulfilling what was, until the twentieth century, a common understanding that the American nation itself – not its particular churches and not its particular religiously- inspired interests and social movements – is the proper object of inquiry about the relationship of religion to politics in America.11
Here is evidence of the pervasive influence of Bercovitch's Puritan Origins and “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution” on studies of colonial and early America. The recent reinterpretations of America by the political scientists James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) and James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) are good recent examples.
Once one begins with the assumption that religious ideas and understandings are as constitutive of our political culture and political discourse as are formal constitutions some interesting intersections and comparisons seem to suggest themselves. Religiously inspired political and social movements and political and social interests must be seen as both external and internal to U.S. politics. Religion is, from portrait A, contestable “from the outside” in the name of constitutional and secular political values and institutions. Religion is, from portrait B, also contestable, but from the inside, when particular religions and religious practices are deemed outside a shared American faith.12
R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and, more broadly, David A. Hollinger, “How Wide and Circle of the We? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 317–37.
When Americans have attempted to keep religion permanently “outside” of politics in the name of liberal-constitutional order and individual rights, these attempts have been not only short-lived and in vain, they have often served to suppress the very resources and energies that power democratic politics and political change.13
Eldon Eisenach, The Next Religious Establishment: National Identity and Political Theology in Post-Protestant America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), chap. 2. The paradigmatic case is that of slavery. The most poignant statement of the costs of removing religion from politics in the case of slavery is Robert Ferguson, The American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 177:
Arguably, the Revolution inflicts another disservice on the slave population of America by separating church and state with such rigor . . . the most dynamic opponents of slavery in eighteenth-century America are ministers.
Both portraits intersect in our histories and in our self-understandings, even as each understanding seems to confound itself as it seeks to become definitive – as if each paradigm harbors, within itself, subversive features. While these self-subversive features will be taken up more fully later, they can be briefly outlined here. Portrait A is vulnerable to the argument that political liberalism as a historical and theoretical project was itself the particular secular product of a very specific kind of Protestant Christianity, that it remains a “comprehensive moral doctrine,” and that it, therefore, seeks a philosophical religious imperium over competing religious beliefs (and participatory democratic values) under cover of fairness and neutrality. Portrait B is also vulnerable to self-subversion. As the “embodying” churches of “Christian America” became an ever smaller slice of the American faith salami, so, too, does the distinctly Protestant-Christian content of the religion of America. The more pluralistic the number and variety of churches and faiths, the more need for theological modernists (i.e., liberal Protestants) to set the conditions and norms for getting along. As these conditions and norms became stated in increasingly secular and liberal terms, they were transformed into a civic religion of tolerance and mutual respect standing above all particular creeds and churches. The ironic result (and happy coincidence) was an almost exact restatement of American liberal constitutional and moral values and a formidable barrier to distinctly religious voices in future democratic contestations and struggles.14
The contestations in constitutional law and political philosophy are within the disciplines themselves and are voluminous. For a sample, see Eisenach, Next Religious Establishment, 134–36. The literature contesting these issues in political science is more between political scientists and their outside critics. Internal disagreement seems to be between those who argue that the claims of the Christian right are legitimate, as is the role of religiously-based interest groups and social movements generally, and those who argue that such “identity” groups and movements always constitute a potential threat to liberal democratic values. See Justin Watson, The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).
These self-subversions and ironies are only visible and the source of lively intellectual differences and argument at particular moments in our history. The fierce cultural wars between constitutionalist Jacksonians and evangelical Whigs15
Lawrence F. Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Greenstone, Lincoln Persuasion, pt. 3; Kelley, Cultural Pattern, chap. 6.
Kleppner, Cross of Culture; Richard J. Jensen, The Winning of the Mid-West: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
III. Some Historiographical Moves
In outlining these two portraits and their potentials for self-subversion, it is apparent that historical understanding is deeply implicated, both as paradigmtic historiographical foundations and as ways to contest, amend, and transform these foundations. In this section, I consider both these implications in looking at religious history, women's history, regime change theory, and religious sociology. I stress the latter implication, however, because the “liberal” portrait A had become the dominant paradigm in the mid-twentieth century, while the new histories have tended to reconsider the salience of portrait B.
A. Religious History
One area of scholarship that is important for understanding the relationship of religion to American politics, is – after the title of a recent book collection – new directions in American religious history.17
Harry S. Stout and P.G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
The best summary of the forms of this scholarship is Jerald C. Brauer, ed. Reinterpretation in American Church History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), containing critical reflections by divinity school church historians or their students. See especially, essays by Jerald Brauer, Winthrop Hudson, Sidney Mead, and Martin Marty. See also Richard W. Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 639–60, and his essay in Stout and Hart, New Directions.
One must note first that the teachings of this church history were two-sided. From the constitutional and liberal outside, state and church were clearly separated; however, from the national and democratic inside, this separation released the energies and spirits of evangelical Protestantism in its project to “Christianize” both America and the world.19
William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and see discussion of Lyman Beecher and Josiah Strong in Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1994), 67–71, 112–13.
Martin Marty, Modern American Religion. Vol. I: The Irony of It All, 1893–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Modern American Religion. Vol. III: Under God, Indivisible, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). This latter move toward “modernism” began early in the last century. Here is one of America's leading church historians, Frank Foster, writing in 1911:
Though Jesus should be proved never to have existed, the truth which has come down to us, and which we have received because of its own self-evidencing value, and which we have found to work out such great results in the liberation of our spirits . . . it would still be true, and its effects would remain unaltered. In this sense a historical Christ is unnecessary. (Foster, “The Christology of a Modern Rationalist,” 1911; qtd. in Henry Warner Bowden, Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1876–1918 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971], 215)
Another phrase that captures this shift is “Protestantism without Christianity,” Howard Murphy, “The Ethical Revolt against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England,” American Historical Review 60 (1955): 800–817; and Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 28, 32, 45.
So long as the implicit political theology of church history was safely tied to constitutionalism and moderate reform, it melded easily into prevailing aca- demic political science and sociology. Indeed, the “political science” that church history embraced for twentieth-century America was a kind of political sociology in which denominational markers were demographic markers that could, in turn, be translated into partisan political commitments. In short, the older church history both supplemented and confirmed mid-twentieth-century pluralist political science. Both disciplines legitimated an increasingly secular liberal establishment. Translated into political theory and constitutional values, this mode of church history posited an elite consensus of secular liberals presiding over and providing an inclusive political consensus for increasingly diverse sets of believers and faith communities, often overlapping with racial and ethnic differences.21
An ironic student of this short history from liberal protestant church history to multiculturalism might say that this phenomenon was less a movement from sacred to secular than a migration of the same religious spirit from church, to divinity school, to university.
The entry of a new and different scholarly spirit in American religious self-understanding can be quite clearly marked. In 1990, the journal Religion and American Culture was founded to serve the growing constituency outside of divinity schools to address issues of religion in history, religion, and humanities departments.22
The website for the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, the journal's sponsor, lists six other centers at University of Southern California, Princeton, Notre Dame, Baylor, Hartford Seminary, and Calvin College engaged in similar studies of religion in the United States.
Almost exactly one-hundred years earlier, there was a comparable series of events involving scholarly journals, but with much wider import. Prior to the rise of professional academic disciplines and graduate schools at the turn of the last century (including the academic discipline of church history), the journals that represented the highest intellectual/academic culture in America were religiously based: Princeton Review; Bibliotheca Sacra (Andover Seminary, then Oberlin); Andover Review; Unitarian Review (Harvard), and New Englander (Yale). Although nominally tied to liberal or liberal-evangelical denominations, their main contributors were not denominational ministers. While almost all of their contributors and readership had ties to these denominations, they also broadly represented prevailing America national academic, cultural and intellectual leadership.23
Many contributors to these publications (e.g., John Dewey, Richard Ely, Arthur Hadley, Vida Scudder) went on to become prominent academics and authors of defining books in their respective academic fields. See Eisenach, Lost Promise, chaps. 1–4.
The same is true with more popular magazines with particular denominational sponsorship in post-Civil War America, such as Outlook, Independent, and Chautauquan. In the 1880s and 1890s, they became general purpose weeklies with large advertising revenues and circulations (Eisenach, Lost Promise, 13–14).
In a way, these journals perfectly embodied religious history in America before it became academic-professional church history and before professionally trained academic historians came on the scene.25
See Bowden, Church History, especially chapters on Phillip Schaff and Walter Rauschenbusch. According to Bowden, in 1880, there were only eight professors of history in American colleges and universities. The American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884 and the American Society of Church History was founded in 1889, to merge with the AHA seven years later.
Among the earliest were American Journal of Sociology (1885); Publications of the American Economics Association (1885); Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1890); American Historical Review (1884). The church historians, under Schaff, formed their own professional organization and journal in 1889 (see fn. 26 above).
However we read this earlier transition and its ironies, the “new religious history” is telling us something beyond the negative message that the older church history has reached a series of unproductive dead ends that now are barriers to American self- understanding. As befits the journal name change, the issue is not (and perhaps never really was) the relationship of churches to each other and to the state, and is not the role and effects of organized religious movements, interests and institutions on politics. The positive message is that we must study how religion and politics intertwine and interpenetrate each other in and through the larger culture.27
In addition to the contributions in Stout and Hart, New Directions, see Bloom, The American Religion, William Dean, American Spiritual Culture and the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies (New York: Continuum International, 2002); Eisenach, Next Religious Establishment; Fox, “Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism;” Philip Hamberger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Louise L. Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); George M. Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1989).
B. Women's History
Another area of scholarship that indicates this newer approach to religion and politics is women's history. How did women – who could not vote and were not church ministers – become active agents in American political life and religious culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The very question moves the meaning of what we might mean by politics and political regime away from parties, elections, and constitutional-legal structures and toward civil society and patterns of authority and practices in the culture and society. This question simultaneously alters the meaning and location of religion out of separate and separated churches as ministerial-led institutions for Sunday worship and into moral reform associations, evangelism, philanthropic institutions, and even popular fiction.28
Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton's Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press., 2001); Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Alison Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1988); Kathleen D. McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001).
While it could be said that women turned to religiously-based political activity because they were excluded from formal political participation, so were they without formal authority in churches. In neither case would marginalization or prejudice explain why so many men participated along side them and why the implicit antiparty ideas contained in these new forms of politics became such a large part of electoral-political argument both before and after the Civil War.29
John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Douglas W. Jaenicke, “The Jacksonian Integration of Parties into the Constitutional System,” Political Science Quarterly 101 (1986): 85–107.
McCarthy, American Creed and Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society; and, more generally, Schmidt, Consumer Rites; Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change; and Moore, Selling God.
C. Regime Theory and Constitutional Transformations
Another body of scholarship that tends to carry some of these same implications regarding the deeper relationships of religion and politics is the study of American national politics as a series of distinct “regime periods” that define the contours of our political life. While critical elections (e.g., Lincoln, 1860; McKinley, 1896; Roosevelt, 1932) mark the demise of one regime and the start of a new one, the values, purposes, and discourse of each of these new regimes were not created de novo in and by the electoral campaign. Rather, they were found embedded in the larger culture, now made articulate, public, and ruling in the national government.31
Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970); Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Gerring, Party Ideologies; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party; Howe, Whig Political Culture and “Protestantism, Voluntarism, and Personal Identity in Antebellum America,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and P.G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Kohl, Politics of Individualism; Eldon Eisenach, “Reconstituting the Study of American Political Thought in a Regime Change Perspective,” in Studies in American Political Development, 4 (1990): 169–228, and Lost Promise of Progressivism; Fox, “Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism.”
Thus the astute remark in Greenstone, Lincoln Persuasion, 75, that the seemingly predemocratic and untenable moral elitism of New England, represented by John Adams, was a pattern that “kept repeating itself,” most obviously in Whig political culture and then in Lincoln.
See Skowronek, Politics Presidents Make, on the many passages from disjunctive to reconstructive presidencies.
In this sense, the new religious history, women's history, and regime period political history are implicitly “interpretivist” or “hermeneutical,” addressing ideas of identity and meaning that combine and fuse sacred and secular, spiritual and material, private and public. This fusion is both at the psychological and the intellectual-ideological level. Religion is not only implicated in these cultural modes of understanding our politics, it is in many ways constitutive of the identities and meanings that go into the constructions of the meaning and purpose of politics and the meaning and purpose of civil society.
D. Religious Sociology
Like religious history, contemporary religious sociology is less church or “denominationally” oriented than it was, and more anthropological and intepretivist in its understandings. Earlier sociology of religion tracked church history and political science in assuming that the progressive narrative of liberalism, pluralism, and secularization was the larger truth behind the proximate truths of their studies and teachings. While there were many internecine battles, especially as Jews and Catholics entered mainstream sociology departments, they tended to share the same master narrative that drove church history and political science. This is no longer the case. The many studies by Rodney Stark and his associates and by Robert Wuthnow; the reconfigurations of the meaning of “church,” “sect,” and “cult”; and the more anthropologically-oriented studies of the role of religion in everyday lives and communities, have combined both to discount many of the findings and assumptions of the older sociology of religion and to reveal and to cast doubt on the assumptions built into its organizing narrative of America.34
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religious Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); on anthropology, see chapters by Fox and by Hollinger in Stout and Hart, New Directions.
Two recent books by political scientists indirectly confirm some of the spirit of this new scholarship.35
Morone, Hellfire Nation; Block, Nation of Agents.
Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and see Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edward's Philosophy of History; The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
IV. Some Theoretical Contestations
Political theory both causes and reflects changes in our understandings of the relationship of religion to American politics. It is causal in two ways. Political theory articulates and helps to make consciously paradigmatic the different forms of understanding. In so doing, however, especially when articulating and extending the logic of the dominant or conventional understanding, it reveals anomalies and other difficulties, helping to cause, as it were, its critique and even its overthrow as hegemonic. Political theory reflects changing understandings when it seeks to articulate new or emerging ideological and cultural divides in the polity. Like the earlier discussion of historiography most attention here will be paid to the dominant liberal paradigm and then to three main forms through which it is critiqued: phenomenology and the human sciences, civic republicanism, and pragmatism, all of which are often grouped under the rubric “antifoundationalism.”
If any two contemporary political philosophers could be said to stand for different styles of contemporary liberal-democratic political theory, they would be John Rawls and Charles Taylor. Rawls asks to be judged on the truth and internal logic of his argument. In A Theory of Justice, especially, the “God of reason” speaks, independently of the persona of the truth teller. In contrast, Taylor's Sources of the Self asks us to interrogate our own intuitions and reflect on our own individual and collective experiences, first to discover intimations of, and then to articulate philosophically, the moral orientations and moral sources that shape our overt principles and practices. If A Theory of Justice is, like the first half of Hobbes's Leviathan, simply true and comes to ground our political life, reason's revelations would essentially end, having nothing more of importance to tell us about the grounds of our common life. In prophetic terms, it would be the last Word and the end of a politics of becoming. Conversely, if Sources of the Self is true, it only means “la lotta continua” – the struggle continues and revelation is not at an end. In prophetic terms, it keeps the Word alive. Echoing Max Weber's distinction, Rawls comes to us as the “ethical prophet” with fixed principles and rules, while Taylor comes to us as the “exemplary prophet,” calling us to destinies and destinations yet unknown. In more conventional terms, Rawls articulates the core ethic of liberalism and Taylor, the many-sided moralities of democracy. Today, Rawls represents the solid centerpiece of a well-wrought liberal theory of justice, while Taylor stands for a series of energetic and sometimes incongruent peripheries seeking more transformative forms of politics.
Taking John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) as a touchstone and tracing the fate and standing of its leading arguments, gives one a fairly clear picture of the state and direction of academic political theory in America.38
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Prominent writings in this same tradition would include Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Amy Gutmann, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and all defenses of multiculturalism as a principle. On the relationship between liberal principles and multiculturalism see Lind, Next American Nation, 97–138, 217–45; Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 4; and Eisenach, Next Religious Establishment, 100–103.
For America, Rawls's theory encodes a narrative of secularization and cosmopolitanism. No matter what our historical past might have been and no matter what our own felt experiences of political agency might be, our political present and future should be guided by public principles that are neutral and fair. Public/democratic discourse and the standards regulating action and decision in the public realm must not be contaminated by privately-held religious and other comprehensive moral doctrines. When major political choices are contested, holders of those doctrines are to constrain themselves (or be constrained by others) not to use those comprehensive arguments directly. Legitimate political discourse must be a translation of what is “privately” felt and believed true into secular, scientific, and pragmatic forms. The resulting discourse produces a “public reason” that is “political” and not metaphysical or religious: “it neither criticizes nor attacks any comprehensive doctrine, religious or nonreligious, except insofar as that doctrine is incompatible with the essentials of public reason and a democratic society.” Shielding the public realm from these doctrines prevents that realm from claiming that its decisions regarding fundamental political questions are decided “according to [some] idea of the whole truth.”39
John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997): 765–807; quoted from Owen, Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism, 108–9, 112.
While many of Rawls followers have not been as modest as he, especially in refraining from more imperious Kantian and Enlightenment claims that liberal-democratic justice is “the whole truth,” they combine in completely rejecting a political standing or a political place for supernatural religious belief in the American polity. It was this rejection that gave rise to the charge that Rawls's theory would sustain its regime of liberal rights by repressing democratic expression of ideas judged “incompatible” with this reading of liberalism – in effect, using political power to prevent challenges and alternatives to its proclaimed truths. Most of these arguments center on this rejection or “bracketing out” of religious belief and moral commitments grounded in religious beliefs.40
While this is the major argument in Owen, Demise of Liberal Rationalism, it can be found in a wide variety of other writings, including William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Fish, The Trouble with Principle, chaps. 9–11, 15; and Patrick Neal, Liberalism and its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997). For an excellent overview of Rawls, Taylor, and William Connolly on issues of democracy, religion, and secularism, see Mark Redhead, “Alternative Secularisms,” (unpublished APSA paper, Philadelphia, 2003).
Rawls's liberal theory is pitted against two alternatives, one stressing more open-ended theories of political democracy and limited government (to stop an imperial secularization penetrating all the way down) and the other, more historically and sociologically grounded arguments about the American polity and the origins of liberal democratic states. Both types of alternatives charge that a Rawlsian self-understanding of America would drive many people out of politics. By making second-class citizens of those who had previously participated in politics because of and through their religious and moral commitments, the polity would deprive itself of the insights and interests of a good portion of its citizens.41
For a formal classification of American citizens into a four-tiered hierarchy based on Rawls and Amy Gutmann, see Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice, chap. 2 – as if confirming the worst fears of liberalism's democratic critics.
Shifting the ground of this critique, these alternatives question whether one can treat “comprehensive moral doctrines” as static “things” – as if each person at some stage in his life were given a wardrobe selection of religious and metaphysical doctrines from which to clothe his identity.42
This is one of the main criticisms by Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America In Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). And see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and “What is Human Agency?” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 1999).
See, for example, Judith Butler, “Universality in Culture,” Martha C. Nussbaum with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
Fish, The Trouble with Principle, 191, charges that those who refuse to play the liberal “theory game” are consigned to an “epistemological criminal class.”
Without addressing all of the forms in which these arguments are embedded, I want to highlight four of these forms and suggest how they bring religion, or at least a religious sensibility, back into politics.
A. Phenomenology and the Human Sciences
The first form is the most firmly grounded in the language of philosophy and its history, namely, a critique of the liberal-enlightenment project in philosophy from the standpoint of phenomenology, tracing its roots back to Hegel.46
Lewis P. Hinchman, Hegel's Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984); Charles Taylor, Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and “The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment,” in Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 386–400.
Taylor, Hegel, and “What is Human Agency”; and see James Tully, ed. Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
B. Civic Republicanism
The second form of criticism is in the form of an alternative understanding of the foundations of contemporary America and liberal-democratic societies generally: the discovery/invention of “civic republicanism” as an alternative model to a rights based liberalism.49
An excellent summary and discussion is James Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–70.
Like the original Antifederalists and many forms of Populism, it is an open question whether civic republican critiques are from the right (to protect traditional and often morally backward ways of life) or from the left (to penetrate and discredit great inequalities of wealth and power). The civic republican alternative began as an attempt to reread the history of liberal-democratic political thought beginning in early modern England, continued as a way of reinterpreting the American revolutionary founding, and only later found its most secure institutional home among “critical legal theorists” in the national law schools. As a countertheory of politics it is at once “conservative” (protecting the ligaments of community and loyalty; rediscovering the moral and religious bonds necessary for concerted political action) and “radical” (extending the powers of the democratic community against elites; creating newly empowered political movements). Civic republicanism, from either direction, is highly skeptical of “rights talk” abstracted from political democracy, whether this talk is used to shore up established interests and powers or to legitimate self-appointed judicial and bureaucratic elites in creating clienteles dependent upon their sponsorship and good will. One powerful element of civic republicanism is a deep critique of the rights talk underwriting contemporary church-state jurisprudence, particularly noteworthy in view of the fact that critical legal theorists think of themselves as critics of liberalism from the democratic left.50
See, for example, Mark Tushnet, “The Constitution of Religion,” Connecticut Law Review 18 (1985): 701–38; Steven D. Smith, Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Fish, The Trouble with Principle chaps. 9–11. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) and Eisenach, Next Religious Establishment, 29–49, show that nineteenth-century arguments for separation of church and state were powered mainly by defenders of de facto Protestant common schools and against Catholics. To some extent, civic republican critiques are modern restatements of Antifederalist thought – at once insisting that the national government, especially the imperious judiciary, stay out of religion and insistent that states and local communities can control moral and religious teaching by reaching ad hoc political settlements. This same sensibility is found in the economic realm; e.g., Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, who would empower local communities to ban Wal-Mart and other chain stores in order to protect main street and the local economy.
C. Pragmatism
In the search for alternative bases for American political thought and American self-understanding, pragmatism has emerged as a powerful source of ideas critical of Rawlsian understandings.51
Indeed, some would claim that Rawls's later revisions of the arguments in A Theory of Justice go in the direction of pragmatism and are a testament to its enduring power in America.
Clearly, a different set of readings of American pragmatism underwrites its current appropriations and uses. These different readings come from a variety of directions. The most obvious is establishing the Hegelian and evangelical Protestant features in the initial shaping of American pragmatism. Equally important are recent studies of Dewey showing the relationship of his pragmatism to the need for strong political democracy premised on the ratification and authority of shared experience and communication.52
Most notably in the writings of Richard Rorty and Cornel West but most clearly in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and see John J. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), and Herbert Sussman, Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Essays after Dewey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
See the collection of essays in Robert Orrill, ed. Education and Democracy: Reimagining Liberal Learning in America (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1997), especially those by Orill, Kimball, Menand, and Smiley.
Most notably Lind, Next American Nation, 259–347; and see Eisenach, Next Religious Establishment, 147–50. See also Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness, 270–75 on Josiah Royce on loyalty. The clearest difference on this issue is Judith Butler's critique of Martha Nussbaum's defense of cosmopolitan patriotism in “Universality in Culture.”
Implicit in pragmatism and codified in some of Dewey's work is testimony to the life of the spirit. Pragmatism never fully rejected its phenomenological and its Hegelian origins, any more than those origins rejected its evangelical-Protestant ones.55
Stephen Crites, Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel's Thinking (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
Victor Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Westbrook, John Dewey, chap. 10. Both suggest that Dewey should have titled this book Experience and Culture because his reading of nature is the humanly created world that we experience as given and that largely constitutes who we are and how we think.
D. Antifoundationalism
The relationship of all three of these alternative understandings to religion is both complex and indirect. Insofar as each is a critique of Rawlsian theory and “rights talk” grounded in claims of moral and religious neutrality, each of these alternatives is, at a minimum, less hostile to claims of the spirit, to religiously-based identities, and to forms of political obligation grounded in contingency and history. Beyond this minimal conclusion is an openness to discussions of nationalism and patriotism that situates discussion of equality, rights, and freedom inside of traditions, discourses, and feelings that frame all politically salient thinking. The radical historicism that pervades some of these writings and the “antifoundationalism” that feeds their critiques, often replicate and restate deeper theological perspectives on politics. Just as Nietzsche lies at the foreground of antifoundationalism, so Augustine is in the background.57
William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Politics and Ambiguity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), best suggest this relationship.
IV. Multiple Secularisms and Secular-Sacred Boundary Problems
It is important to adumbrate one issue in the critique of Rawlsian theory that was raised at the very start of this article but not discussed as a set of general propositions. This issue is the charge that the claims of secular liberal political theory are not (and cannot be) universal, based on “a view from nowhere” or from behind some veil of ignorance that screens out self-serving interests and values; rather, they are made by particular historic subcultures with particular traditions and roles and with particular interests and values. This critique takes many forms. One flows simply from the naïve question of who authorizes this set of political and legal theorists to speak for America and its core identity and political values.58
Neal, Liberalism and its Discontents, 125–26, 128, 158.
Earlier, I had suggested that a progressive-liberal establishment prevailed in American politics and intellectual culture from the Progressive Era through the 1970s. Even the electoral victory of Franklin Roosevelt and the rebirth and dominance of the Democratic Party did not significantly blunt this dominance.59
David Plotke, Building a New Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113, 187–88; and Morone, Hellfire Nation on the New Deal as Social Gospel.
Even the Cold War was construed by this establishment more as a battle of enlightened civilizational values against an atavistic totalitarianism than as a national-religious crusade. Louis Menand astutely called Harvard's general education curriculum in the 1950s and 1960s “a benign substitute for a national ideology in the Cold War era” (qtd. in Eisenach, Next Religious Establishment, 129).
This liberal establishment came under siege by the left beginning in the late 1960s and was joined by forces from the right soon thereafter. The left charged this establishment with betraying its own proclaimed ideals of universal rights; the right charged it with betraying Americanist ideals of individual and family responsibility, national patriotism, and limited government. The result was perplexing. The left won most of the intellectual, cultural, and elite institutional battles, largely by converting the prevailing establishments from the inside and gradually occupying their seats of authority. The result is a secular liberalism combined with a principled multi-culturalism that still wins important victories in non-democratic electoral settings. The ideological right, however, increasingly consolidated its democratic electoral victories that it began in the 1980s.
What the twentieth-century Progressive and New Deal liberal establishment successfully joined, the left and right combined to tear asunder. In the process, however, each side has found it necessary to use arguments from the opposing camp in order to extend its range of victory. We are familiar with this set of strategies: The right uses first amendment and diversity arguments to enhance the voice of religion and morality in schools and in national institutions (even in the name of multicultural inclusion). The secular-liberal left, on the other hand, is seeking to rediscover national narratives that will lend popular meaning and power to its truths.61
Here, I refer to the many recent books, the most noted being Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), seeking to rediscover the secret of the many successes of the Progressives in order that they might be replicated. Many of these books are discussed and critiqued in Jeffrey C. Isaac, The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Many Secularisms
Historians of voluntary religious establishments in America have little trouble in tracing the genealogy of today's liberal intellectual and cultural establishment to liberal evangelical Protestant sources that have been alluded to above. Indeed, much of the confidence, reforming zeal, and even alleged arrogance of liberalism (see the many writings of Stanley Fish) might be traced to this background. These intellectual ancestors came to dominate the professions, finance, education, the foundations, and later the federal bureaucracy and judiciary. They were overtly nationalistic and overtly Protestant, and envisioned America as incarnating both enlightened reason and a world-redemptive spirit. Their confidence was buttressed at the start by the dominant churches and churchman who shared the secularizing hopes that an ethical, noncreedal, ecumenical, and liberal-evangelical Protestantism spirit would triumph in every sector of American life from the family to the business corporation to foreign policy.62
Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America; Robert Handy, Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism,” Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);. Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism; Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends; Curtis, A Consuming Faith; and Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
This argument can be restated in broader terms, taken from arguments increasingly found in postcolonial studies, in intellectual history, the history of philosophy, and in religious studies. The reigning liberal-enlightenment understanding of the distinction between secular and sacred is that rational-secular understandings are one and sacred understandings are many. The social sciences, history, and philosophy that shape and articulate this secular understanding are united in a shared and “public” epistemology derived from Kant that stands against the almost infinite varieties of “private” world views that are produced by the historical and contingent nature of bodies, hopes, fears, and events. The sacred understandings that result, they conclude, cannot be the products of reason, any more than its symbols and expressions can be understood from the standpoint of reason: imaginative literature, “imagined communities” (nation states), the “social imaginary,” art, ethnicity, and religion are all contingent facts that await their ratification and ranking by secular reason.
This Kantian or enlightenment understanding is rapidly collapsing. In contemporary scholarship the Enlightenment is being deconstructed into “rival enlightenments”63
Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments; Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Knud Haakonssen, ed. Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Peter Harrison, ’Religion' and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ferguson, American Enlightenment; and see Taylor, “Ímmanent Counter-Enlightenment.”
Ferguson, American Enlightenment.
Taylor, “Modes of Secularism”; Janet R. Jakobsen, “World Secularisms at the Millennium: Introduction,” Social Text 18 (2000): 1–27, for a summary discussion of these writings; Redhead, “Alternative Secularisms,” comparing Rawls, Charles Taylor, and William Connolly; and see James Alexander, “An Essay on Historical, Philosophical and Theological Attitudes to Modern Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 25 Spring (2004): 116–148.
Wendy Brown, “Tolerance as/in Civilizational Discourse,” (unpublished APSA paper, Philadelphia, 2003), using this literature in deconstructing the idea of tolerance as a universal principle.
Once one begins to look more closely at the critiques of Rawlsian liberalism from this perspective, it becomes apparent that something like a “multiple-secularisms” argument is implicit in many of these critiques. Whether in the name of political democracy to level the political playing field or to cast doubt on the claims of philosophical and political imperium, the antifoundationalist assumption carries with it the claim that secular reason is neither self-creating nor self-authorizing. And the new religious and cultural historians would add an addendum to this reading directly relevant to our current politio-religious condition:
A key paradox of [American] liberal Protestantism – one that must be a cornerstone of any history of liberal Protestantism – is that its goal has always been, in part, to sanctify the secular, to bring forth out of the natural and human worlds the divine potential contained within them. Secularization can be seen, in some of its forms, as a sign of success for liberal Protestantism, not a marker of defeat.67
Richard Fox in New Directions, 400; and see Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism.”
Read this way, and in view of the relative weakness of the church base of contemporary liberal Protestantism, this victory becomes an increasingly hollow one if, as they have, new religious energies and new religious spirits and new personal identities rise to the fore. The forms of secularization these new spiritual energies might produce are now open because they have not, apart from some national electoral victories, penetrated into much of the larger national culture. In some respects, however, from the left and at the most sophisticated level of the American intellect, we already have some provisional indications.68
Rorty, Achieving Our Country; Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist; and Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” and “Immanent Counter-Enlightenment.”
VI. Conclusion: Sacred Discourse and Political Time
It may seem odd to conclude a research note with a discussion of the attack and destruction of the World Trade Center, but a consideration of the contending rhetorical constructions and popular responses to that event helps amplify some of the patterns of scholarship discussed earlier.
After the attack on the World Trade Center, a struggle immediately began over how to characterize that event. Was it an act of war or a crime? Those who wanted to contain the event within the framework of ordinary politics and ordinary (diachronic) time, to be handled by properly designated officials within preexisting and familiar procedures and language, said the act was a crime, the perpetrators were criminals, and those who aided the criminals were to be apprehended and tried in a court of justice. The resulting punishment would complete the event and everything would then proceed within the prevailing framework of ordinary time and incremental policy-making.69
Long after the crime description was overwhelmed by that of war, Democratic Party leaders in the House and Senate were vainly insisting that the first priority remain the apprehension of Osama bin Laden.
The lyrics of God Bless America that spontaneously sounded throughout the country immediately drowned out this diachronic discourse of crime in the synchronic discourse and sacred rhetoric of war. The country began to speak in a different voice and entered a different mode of time – a synchronic time in which past, present, and future become mixed up, reversed, and conflated. The song was in fact a late and generic coda to a host of patriotic hymns written by Unionists in the period of the American Civil War. The most famous is Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic (technically, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory) whose verses track the path of the nation through the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. Equally famous is another hymn of that same era, Samuel F. Smith's My Country, Tis of Thee. It begins with the Puritan nation founders and ends: “Our father's God, to thee, / Author of liberty, / To thee we sing; / Long may our land be bright / With freedom's holy light; / Protect us by thy might, / Great God, our King.”70
Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910); Samuel F. Smith (1808–1895). And see James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), Once to Every Man and Nation. For an analysis of the lyrics in Battle Hymn of the Republic, see Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
The word “homeland” entered the public vocabulary, carrying with it what Sacvan Bercovitch calls America's “Christianography,” a merging of biblical prophecy and providential nature.71
Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 98–108.
Many Americans were frightened by this outburst of patriotic-religious rhetoric and symbolism. They saw this release of feeling and emotion as a pretext for breaking faith with our legal and constitutional principles, propelling us into the darkness of political extremism. While this response is understandable, some reflection will remind us that the present set of legal and constitutional principles being defended were themselves the result of earlier transformative moments, beginning with the election of FDR and the institution of the New Deal, followed by World War II, the Cold War, and, finally, the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, those transformations were predicated earlier on the nationalization of the federal government occasioned by the Civil War and the long period of Republican Party ascendancy begun with the realigning election of McKinley in 1896.72
Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and We the People: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), has written an entire constitutional history of America premised on extra-constitutional transformative events.
Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Tuveson, Redeemer Nation; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech.
Our participation in the war established our position among the nations . . . the whole world saw at last . . . a Nation they had deemed material and now found to be compact of the spiritual forces that must free men of every nation of every unworthy bondage. . . . The stage is set, the destiny is disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward . . . to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way.74
Speech to the Senate, July 10, 1919. Here is earlier Wilson, the political scientist:
Constitutional government can exist only where there is actual community of interest and of purpose, and cannot, if it be also self-government, express the life of any body of people that does not constitute a veritable community. Are the United States a community? In some things, yes; in most things, no. (Constitutional Government in the United States [New York: Columbia University Press, 1908], 51)
While not all transformative moments in our politics are marked by the sudden insertion of sacred rhetoric (there are powerful secular rhetorics as well), all of these moments require a discourse to discredit and overthrow the previous political ideology within which priorities are decided and policies are made.75
Eviator Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Jennifer Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
Religious belief and sacred rhetoric are not only powerful cultural and intellectual resources that make these moments conceivable, they legitimate the changes and help us bear the sacrifice and loss (material, psychological, and intellectual) in ways that legal-constitutional principles, standing alone, cannot begin to do. And these same limitations apply to philosophical articulations of American political self-understanding and to histories of liberal political theory read as a seamless and secular “just so” story. Like philosophy, diachronic time fixes the past, orders the present, and severely limits the future.
Liberal Young and Democratic New
Perhaps the various articulations of America's emerging self-understanding can best be summarized by reflecting on the tensions implicit in the question of whether America is to be understood as “young” or as “new.”77
Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness, 63–90, discusses these metaphors and their differences in the context of religion.
John Dickinson, The Writings of John Dickinson, Vol. 1. Political Writings 1764–1774, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania 1895), 1:326; Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. and intro. by Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1976), 120.
American identity exists in the tension between these two poles, poles that implicate politics and religion, the secular and the sacred, providence and prophecy. The metaphor of “young” with its ideal of maturity has the advantage of rational discourse and common sense because the framework and the future is known and assumed settled. This metaphor sustains the “order of preservation” even as it entails a necessary incapacity to imagine possibilities outside its authorized purview and hides from itself its origins in war, military or electoral conquest, or new political and religious spirits and movements. The metaphor of “new” sustains our transcendent hopes – the “order of salvation” – and calls us to undertake transformative projects. Yet these transformative moments in politics entail levels of risk and possibilities for tragedy that threaten the goods and purposes provided by stable political and social institutions.
Religious belief and language can accommodate and serve to ratify either metaphorical self-understanding. I would suggest, however, that religion in the service of a “young” America on a path to maturity will always be a rather tepid civil religion, often in moral and ethical thrall to present powers and interests and, therefore, never quite true to itself. Religion in the service of a “new” America is not only more true to itself, it provides a much more realistic understanding of our political condition, anchored as it is in the necessities of contingency and risk, and of coercion and death.
Footnotes
I would like to thank Andrew Murphy and Karen Orren for their helpful comments and suggestions in the revisions of this article.
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