The current “peril” for religious freedom is global, given forces like communism and Islam that often trample it. On unclear evidence, the statement goes so far as to say that “the greatest period of persecution in the history of Christianity” is occurring right now. It calls for a response abroad, in how “the foreign policy of the United States and Canada” are conducted. But religious freedom is also threatened within.

All this is very interesting. Rooted in the vision of the founder of First Things, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, and imbued with the spirit of his resounding complaint that the public square is naked in this country, the statement portends a continuing period of strife over the very meaning of religious freedom and the everyday management of the secular public space.

It is important that the group situates itself historically. Religious freedom is deeply rooted in the West, the statement explains. The group offers a “genealogy” (its term) of the principle, starting from Jesus and running through Lactantius, Roger Williams, and Martin Luther. And then, rather remarkably, it leaps to the last half of the twentieth century, most especially Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae (1965).

I want to take up some of that history in this short post—but first let’s consider the contemporary politics of the statement.

It may have appeared too late to welcome the Supreme Court’s “ministerial exception” case that, in January, limited the scope of antidiscrimination law in the name of religious freedom. With perfect timing, the statement coincided with the politics of the accommodation President Barack Obama famously offered (and continues to seek in new versions), constricting reproductive choice in view of objections based on the same principle. Some might see those developments as illustrating the considerable force of religious sentiment, and the power of the norm of religious freedom, in American public affairs. Outside the United States, the Lautsi v. Italy case decided last summer by the European Court of Human Rights suggests a similar conclusion. A prominent American law professor invoked Neuhaus’s slogan in his appellate defense of the continuing presence of crucifixes in Italian schoolrooms, and the Court’s decision to side with him shows that religious freedom and public Christianity maintain a healthy communion.

This coalition of American Christians, however, is still worried, as it explains in a crucial paragraph:

Proponents of human rights, including governments,” it writes, “have begun to define religious freedom down, reducing it to a bare ‘freedom of worship.’ This reduction denies the inherently public character of biblical religion and privatizes the very idea of religious freedom, a view of freedom such as one finds in those repressive states where Christians can pray only so long as they do so behind closed doors. It is no exaggeration to see in these developments a movement to drive religious belief, and especially orthodox Christian religious and moral convictions, out of public life.

In view of such fears, I write to ask how serious a “genealogy” of this coalition’s preferred understanding of religious freedom is required to understand its own current advocacy. It may seem strange, especially on this blog, to bracket a currently influential critique of secularism, in order to investigate instead the lineage of the worry that privatization of “orthodoxy” is normatively misguided or practically discriminatory. In view of the coalition’s statement, however, this agenda seems pressing. Where did the strategy of insisting on the “inherently public” character of religion come from, especially one grouping some Catholics in alliance with American evangelicals?

It’s important to recall that the defense of Christianity as an “inherently public” religion is nothing new; but until very recently Catholicism—and especially conservative Catholicism—considered the principle of religious freedom to be the disease rather than the cure. The failure of various mid-twentieth century political attitudes led to an Americanization of Catholicism in which religious freedom made unprecedented inroads. It did so, however, as the new way that “inherently public” religion was pursued—one in which American Protestantism suddenly became model rather than stigma.

Most people know—though the statement doesn’t mention—that Catholic authorities generally rejected religious freedom prior to Vatican II. In its scandalous indifference to truth, religious freedom, Pope Leo XIII explained in Immortale Dei (1885), is little more than slavery to falsehood. According to this encyclical on “the Christian constitution of states,” Catholicism must stand against the:

theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each one’s conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks. Now, when the State rests on foundations like those just named … it readily appears into what and how unrightful a position the Church is driven.

In the crisis in the middle of the twentieth century, when liberal democracy was destroyed, it was therefore not out of nowhere that Catholics frequently voted with their feet in favor of explicitly Catholic states in crisis circumstances (in Austria, Portugal, and Spain before World War II, and then Croatia, Vichy France, and Slovakia during it) and fascist states when this first best option was not available (in Germany and Italy before World War II and most of Europe during it). Indeed, forsaking state capture still seemed radical in the 1940s, when  powerful Vatican forces remained stalwart in its defense of the older view that an endorsement of religious freedom made sense only as a “hypothesis” in those situations in which Catholics were in the minority—as in the United States—rather than a general principle or “thesis.” (Leo XIII proceeded this way, for instance, in first taking note of American Catholicism in his encyclical Longinqua Oceani [1895].)

The end of World War II famously gave birth to a widespread new compatibility of Catholicism with liberalism, including liberal rights. Yet through the 1950s, and in fact through Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church as a whole still opposed religious freedom, against a strong set of dissidents like Jacques Maritain and others. After the war, figures like Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (last head of the millennial inquisition) continued to inveigh against religious freedom, offering Spain, where clericofascism in a majority Catholic country had survived, as the ideal model. Indeed, Ottaviani and his allies, in a once dramatic set of events, nearly derailed Vatican II’s declaration on religious freedom, which was the most high-profile and visible part of its work precisely because it was by no means uncontested.

In short, the idea of religious freedom as the key buttress of inherently public religion was painfully acquired—thus allowing today’s coalition. Among Catholics, it had to be developed against those who insisted that “inherently public” religion needed to be immunized against the idea of religious freedom, with its Protestant, liberal, and privatizing implications. Long censured as a principle that brought ruin on Christianity, religious freedom now seemed a tool to buttress it.

It is not obvious why the switch happened. Those interested should be sure to read a new book by Emile Perreau-Saussine, a scholar who died tragically young a couple of years ago, for one important account. In my somewhat different opinion, it was a process in which the geopolitics of the Cold War mattered most, as certain principles like freedom of conscience once denounced by a reactionary church got a second look. The stimulus for this to occur was provided by a frightening secularist enemy against which the United States now stood as principal opponent, after an interwar period in which different choices—and serious mistakes—were too often made. Once tasked in Catholic political thought as a catalyst of secularism, religious freedom found itself recuperated as a crucial tool to stave secularism off. No wonder, then, that in privatizing faith, liberalism in the United States still seems analogous, for this coalition, most of all to communism. (As the statement explains, “the totalitarian temptation … seems to exist in all forms of political modernity.”)

The adoption of religious freedom in the face of the totalitarian danger also allowed an unprecedented move in the direction of Protestantism, once denounced as the source of modern ills. It also permitted American life to become a model—though many Catholics had commonly associated it with modern, individualist, and materialist error. Catholics like Maritain, for example, promoted America on the grounds that it showed how religious freedom promoted rather than undermined Christianity. In the nineteenth century, Catholic thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s attitude towards Protestant America was that it had figured out, by disestablishing the church, how to make Christianity more publicly powerful than ever. His message to Catholic reactionaries at home who denounced America as godless was that they needed to know how strong Christianity can become precisely among those who have given up the campaign to capture the state. “I shall wait until they come back from a visit to America,” Tocqueville wrote of his reactionary opponents. Maritain, who had once attacked America too, spent World War II there, forging alliances with theologians like John Courtney Murray who followed him in marginalizing the thesis/hypothesis model. Murray, under Maritain’s influence, became the most pivotal figure in Vatican II’s work on religious freedom.

That conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants rally around religious freedom together is nothing like a smooth continuity from Tocqueville’s America. Yet this is not simply because Tocqueville lost the argument in his time, with the unedifying politics of the twentieth century following, and the Cold War finally prompting the Catholic pivot. It is also because, after World War II, mainline Protestants in the United States turned religious freedom into a more genuinely liberal and privatizing principle than ever in this country’s history. If the Catholic transformation with respect to religious freedom was fateful, this mainline Protestant move was equally so. For in making it, mainline Protestants may have sealed their doom—and provided a short-term boost to privatizing liberalism that did not secure it in American life for long. After all, the evangelical ascendancy away from mainline coastal fortresses, which are today so depopulated, opened the door to the other side of the equation for today’s conservative coalition—not to mention to the rise of American conservatism generally.

The strange fact today, in summary, is that the principal defenders of American religious freedom defined as recognition of the “inherently public” role of faith could not have been in coalition at any other time. Even in postwar America, the coalition was not inevitable, and ending the story at Vatican II also leaves aside the very recent years when this coalition came together in what some have seen as a disturbing pact—one that certainly didn’t follow from a deeply rooted past.

Attractively, the group pauses at the start of its text, mindful of the injunction about casting the first stone. It alludes vaguely to some prior period when “Christians have also employed the state as an instrument of religious coercion.” But this passing allusion doesn’t interfere with the spotty history the statement goes on to give. After its acknowledgment that mistakes have been made by politicized Christians, the statement concludes that “memory of Christian sinfulness … gives us all the more reason to defend the religious freedom of all men and women today.” But everything then turns on what the “inherently public” forces deploying the principle of religious freedom really aim to achieve.

History won’t settle America’s debates about what religious freedom means. But its uncomfortable bits matter fully as much as its inspirational bits in showing that the principle is far from straightforward: for it is as much a novel tactic as it is an eternal truth.

The other big sociological bestseller of the past generation was of course Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone—the argument of which also began life as an article, published in 1995—which decried the decline of “social capital” and its consequences for the country. Because it was focused on domestic affairs, the book was of much greater interest to American sociologists, who tend not to pay much attention to matters beyond their own borders. Like the previous sociological bestseller (this time by card-carrying members of the tribe), Robert Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart, the book fit into the long tradition of reflection on the pitfalls of American individualism that goes back at least to Tocqueville. Putnam worried that TV- and electronic gadget-addled Americans have retreated from the voluntary associations that impressed Tocqueville as the true life-blood of American democracy, weakening its civic fiber. Yet Bowling Alone soft-pedaled the rougher edges of American life and the growing dominance in its politics of a profligate financial elite. In this respect, it is noteworthy that, in the preface to a new edition of Habits published in 2007, Bellah mused darkly about the runaway unaccountability of a wealthy “oligarchy” in American life. Nonetheless, Putnam’s ideas caught the attention of the nation and spawned a cottage industry of research on social capital—that is, more or less, on the role of trust, networks, and volunteerism in social life.

Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell’s American Grace follows up on these Tocquevillean themes, exploring the contemporary American religious landscape to understand, in the words of the subtitle, “how religion divides and unites us.” As in Putnam’s earlier work, the book mobilizes the full array of methods available to the social scientist—survey research, interviews, participant observation in relevant settings, historical comparisons. Vignettes drawn from qualitative research are interspersed with discussions of the quantitative data accessible to the uninitiated. The authors draw frequently on other pertinent studies to buttress their own findings, helping reassure us that the results of their research are reliable.

And what are those results? One main finding is that, as compared to thirty years ago (their baseline of comparison), religion and politics have tended to line up more consistently than they had previously, such that people who are more religious tend to be more conservative politically, whereas people who are less religious tend to be more liberal. One of the chief reasons is that younger people have been put off by the association of religion with conservative politics since the time of the Moral Majority. This was itself, according to Putnam and Campbell, a response to the upheavals of the 1960s, and especially to its challenges to gender and sexual norms. Religious-political polarization has been the consequence.

This partisan realignment represents an important shift from a time when churchgoers were more evenly divided between the conservative and the liberal. In those days, for example, many opponents of abortion were liberal on other measures; the reason is that they were devout Catholics who objected to the taking of unborn life but also supported measures to soften the blows of a capitalist economy, which was much less true of their white Protestant political allies. Now, opponents of abortion tend to be the more devout of all denominations (other than Jews), and those more devout people also tend to be more conservative across the board. The association of religiosity with conservatism has driven younger people out of religion, leading to a spike—into the 15-percent range—of the “religious nones,” those who claim no religious affiliation. Needless to say, these trends strongly parallel the contemporaneous emptying of moderates from the Republican Party and its transformation into a strongly ideological grouping lately driven by the sensibilities of the Tea Party.

Still, there remain important exceptions from the tendency for the more devout to be politically conservative. Black Protestants and Jews remain politically more liberal than white evangelical Protestants, while their religion is also much more deeply bound up with their ethnicity than is the case for other Protestants and Catholics. Yet their numbers are rather small. The authors also find that the white evangelical surge actually came to an end in the early 1990s; we have been shadow-boxing with it for the last two decades.

Meanwhile, in contrast to a waning mainline Protestantism (there is currently not a single Protestant on the Supreme Court!), Roman Catholicism remains vibrant in the country, but that is mainly because of the large-scale immigration of Latinos since the mid-1960s. The social cohesion of the WASP elite has declined in favor of a more religiously mixed top tier, and the general connection between ethnicity and religion has declined, with the exceptions noted. On the whole, in other words, religion is less strongly associated with other divisions in American social life, which tends to moderate the conflict deriving from the conservative political impulses of white evangelical Protestants.

Accordingly, despite the tendency toward polarization between religious conservatives and less religious liberals, Americans demonstrate a great deal of religious tolerance. Using an example reminiscent of the famously self-worshiping “Sheila” in Habits of the Heart, Putnam and Campbell adduce every family’s “Aunt Susan” as the person who doesn’t fit the family religious tradition but sanctifies her particular faith for them by being such a good person anyway. She personifies the “religious bridging” that they regard as typical of the American experience and the key to its high levels of religious tolerance. Indeed, while acknowledging the country’s sometimes deadly anti-Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century, the book concludes by gushing that “America has had religious toleration encoded in its national DNA.”

One might wonder here about the relative exclusion from the discussion of the newer religions on the American scene, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, and above all Islam. The stated reason for excluding these groups from the analysis is that their numbers remain so small that reliable statistical analysis is impossible. Fair enough. But the focus on the American mainstream is likely to encounter the same response from critics as it did when Bellah et al. wrote Habits of the Heart—that the book concentrates too much attention on the mainstream and obscures the margins. In view of the extensive mistreatment and opprobrium directed at Muslims in the post-9/11 period, one might ask, can the Putnam/Campbell approach be justified? One answer is that, in contrast to the European situation and to that surrounding such anomalous episodes as the so-called Ground Zero mosque, Putnam and Campbell’s marginalization of the Islam question gives it just the right amount of attention—namely, very little. Islamic extremism engages a vanishingly small proportion of Muslims, but overwhelms all other discussion of Islam (and, of course, drowns out other things that one might pay attention to, such as the approximately five million deaths in the god-forsaken Congo during roughly the same time period as the “war on terror”).

On the other hand, to await the day when newer religious groups achieve a statistical critical mass might keep us from saying anything about them for a long time to come. And whether they like it or not, Muslims in the United States are the subject of a great deal of attention at present and are adherents of the only faith associated with extensive anti-American violence. As even so liberal a publication as the New York Review of Books has pointed out, there is also an increasingly homegrown dimension to anti-American Islamic attacks. Does the religious tolerance in Americans’ national DNA extend to Muslims? Given radical Islam’s targeting of the United States, chiefly if by no means exclusively, should Americans be tolerant of Muslims’ demands for accommodation of their faith when those demands seem at odds with liberal norms? Germany sought to be tolerant but eventually felt that it had to deport the so-called “caliph of Cologne” for his repeated and outspoken denunciations of the German political order. Putnam and Campbell say that the more Americans get to know people of other religions (or of no religion), the more they like them. But what of those—not always Muslims, to be sure—who denounce America as the Great Satan on religious grounds? Liberal societies reach the limits of tolerance when they have to deal with persons who reject the constitutional basis of those societies. This book cannot help us with that debate.

Notwithstanding this quibble, Putnam and Campbell have produced a thoroughly researched, clearly written study of the state of American religion that reminds Americans of what we hold in common and offers the prospect that the polarization produced by the 1960s and its sequelae may be behind us. They do so on the basis of meticulous research using a broad variety of social scientific methods. The book comprises another valuable contribution to sociological efforts to make sense of American life—even if its principal author is not formally a member of the guild. Many sociologists will follow in his footsteps, as will many nonspecialist readers, because American Grace is an outstanding example of public sociology.

Whether or not we want to feed these findings back into a very long-running debate about sociology’s secularization thesis, many of us will feel compelled to ask what this trend means for American public life.  We are trained to ask the question because we are so used to thinking in Tocquevillian terms about religion’s relation to democracy. For that reason alone, it is worth taking a little time to clarify what the oft-quoted French traveler, diarist and social thinker Alexis de Tocqueville actually did say about American religion and its public consequences, so we can better decide what, if anything, in the Tocquevillian heritage helps us grapple with these findings. As my co-author Brady Potts and I have pointed out in a new volume, it has become popular to read Tocqueville uncritically and rather hurriedly as saying that American democracy depends on Americans’ deeply ingrained religious sensibilities. From that standpoint, ARIS findings on growing atheism and agnosticism would look especially troubling.

But Tocqueville’s writing on religion was much more nuanced than such simple readings would have it, and I am not ready to be as concerned about the growing ranks of nones as neo-Tocquevillian sensibilities might dictate. Like much of both common-sense and social science thinking about religion, Tocqueville supposed that religion matters socially because of the power of religious beliefs; he had Christian ones in mind. He supposed that religious beliefs would make Americans both forbearing and other-regarding, keeping us from succumbing either to rash collective enthusiasms or heedless individual striving. Tocqueville was aware of cult-like religious enthusiasts in America, but his view of religious beliefs overall is closer to what observers have said about mid-twentieth century mainline Protestantism: that it celebrated moderation, decorum, and polite, charitable social concern. We can’t really fault Tocqueville for not foreseeing that political candidates would use evangelical Protestant beliefs immoderately and sometimes impolitely—to put it politely—to forge political constituencies and sway national elections. We can, however, take some of his claims less for granted.

As for heedless individual striving, it is true that religious groups make up nearly half of the realm of voluntary associations. Many of these perform the kinds of charitable social service, such as staffing food pantries or hosting homeless shelters, that Americans typically point to as examples of our not so selfish, not so materialistic impulses. It is not so clear that religious beliefs make a great deal of difference in either the form that volunteer projects take or their effectiveness over all. Research suggests that a few sorts of “faith-based” social service really could be more effective than their secular counterparts, but research also shows that some religiously motivated social service is ineffective and even self-defeating if it eschews strong partnerships with secular, governmental agencies. More often than not, religiously sponsored social and community service looks pretty similar to what non-religious volunteers and networkers do.  If increasing numbers of people decline to state a preference for some religious beliefs over others, or avoid religious certainty altogether, this indifference to religious belief may not greatly weaken prospects for the local, charitable version of good citizenship that neo-Tocquevillians prize.

Yet Tocqueville said something else, something more subtle, about American religion, which also may be changing: He said it did not matter if Americans all really believed the religion they propounded, and he surmised that quite a few, in fact, did not. What mattered to Americans was that they hear each other sounding religious. Not religious belief so much as the reputation of religion would give individualistic Americans some recognized, shared moral standard. In contemporary—and, frankly, over-used—terms, religion would give Americans “social capital,” a widely accepted token good for “buying” trust from others in this far-flung, sometimes very disconnected republic. Since roughly half the nones said that they believe in some kind of divine power, we can infer that a lot of Americans still sound like they accept the standard, even if only vaguely.

It’s striking, though, that they don’t affiliate with any particular religion. Nevermind for a moment whether or not and how often Americans practice institutionalized religion; what is interesting here is that a growing minority of Americans don’t feel compelled to name themselves with a specific, religious identity. Only twenty-five years ago, Richard John Neuhaus supposed in a much-discussed book that Americans wanted to hear other Americans sounding religious, and identifying with specific religious teachings, in an otherwise “naked” public square—and, by implication, that they may have longed for the openness to sound religious themselves. That was why Christian Right politics was on the rise, he said.  If Neuhaus was right then, we could infer from the findings on nones that his argument no longer applies so easily to a growing swath of Americans. We can’t know exactly what the survey results mean yet, and what the two-decades-long trend does or will amount to, but here are some starting points that get us beyond both Tocquevillian celebrations and Tocquevillian forebodings.

Religion scholars have said for quite awhile that just as Americans have become increasingly singularized agents since Tocqueville’s day, religion in the American mainstream has become more personalized, especially in the last several decades. Students of contemporary spirituality know there is more than a germ of insight in mid-century sociologists’ hunch that the future’s religion would have to survive without collective, institutional moorings. Personalized religion may be able to dispatch with even the broadest categories of affiliation—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist. Maybe the rise of none-hood reflects a larger move toward de-centered social relations, personal nodes, and shifting networks—the Facebook society. Are the nones giving up anything when they give up conventional religious affiliations?

For some Americans even today, religious affiliation and the language that goes with it locates people, helps us place them on some social or moral map. That is not to say we always trust people when we know where they are coming from. Sometimes the public fact of religious affiliation—the reputation of religion—does work the way Tocqueville surmised, as a badge of trust. In one alliance of churches I observed up close in a Midwestern city, middle-class churchgoers used religious language to talk about the public health nurse they wanted to fund for a low-income neighborhood where relatively few people could afford doctors. It was not that they wanted to proselytize their neighbors; rather, they wanted to signal with quietly religious language that they had decent motives, a sense of collective responsibility.

In the same city, a pastor’s coalition against racism nearly broke apart over religion’s reputation. The clergy agreed easily that their beliefs told them that racism is wrong. The trouble was that in this largely Protestant coalition, mainliners wanted to be known as anti-racist first while evangelicals wanted to be known as Christian first, and each side suspected the other of being less than fully committed to what they took to be the true cause. At stake was not religious belief but conflicting ideas about the proper reputation of religion in their town, the social fact of being religious in public.  Members of yet another church-based alliance, a small network of social activists, told me that they did not use religious terms to describe their group’s opposition to capital punishment or welfare policy reforms because “that’s how fundamentalists talk.” People use religious identity to locate people, for better or worse; and for some Americans, sounding religious means being rigid, closed-minded.

Maybe it is no wonder that some Americans want to disaffiliate, to step off the map of religious identities altogether. If conservative Christian politicians and commentators hoped to clear the public fray of less orthodox believers and to claim the very reputation of religion for themselves, then this may be evidence that they have been succeeding, and in some Americans’ eyes, religion’s reputation really may have suffered and declined. In that case, we need to think a lot more about how public life changes if, when Americans are asked to think about religious affiliations in general, theological conservatism increasingly comes to mind. Those myriad, religiously based community service efforts that Tocquevillians prize may be harder to see for what they are—and are not—if they are obscured by a growing sense that religious people out there mostly are theological and political conservatives pursuing hot-button, polarizing issues.

We don’t know what Americans tapped by the ARIS “really believe” in their hearts. We don’t know how much they know about any of the religions or denominations they theoretically could have chosen to affiliate with. We know what they said when asked what religious category, if any, they identified with. In the American context, the act of telling a stranger that one has no religious preference is itself fascinating. It calls for more study and interpretation before we can say what it means for society, democracy, or the future of religion.