The idea that people of faith should not be permitted in the public square to influence public policy is antithetical to the First Amendment, which says the free exercise of religion – James Madison called people of faith, and by the way, no faith, and different faith, the ability to come in the public square with diverse opinions, motivated by a variety of different ideas and passions, the perfect remedy. Why? Because everybody is allowed in.

And on This Week, Santorum affirmed an earlier statement about his reaction to President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on his religion:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

In light of Santorum’s recent comments, we asked a small handful of scholars about the status of these and related claims regarding religion in American political life. Just how “naked” is the American public square? What is the appropriate place of religion in the public sphere?

This page was updated on 3/8/2012—ed.

Our respondents are:

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

John H. Evans, Professor of Sociology and and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

Philip S. Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Research, Yale University

R. Marie Griffith, Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics and Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

Cristina Lafont, Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

Nancy Levene, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

Nadia Marzouki, Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute

Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies, Duke University

Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

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Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

Rick Santorum seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, by privileging his religious views at the expense of other views in the public square. It is neither true nor practically possible in the United States to prevent religious views from coming into the public square to influence public policy. There is no prior censorship or “policing” of views in the public square, to permit non-religious and exclude religious views. What is not and should never be permitted is to protect any views from contestation because some of us believe them to be “religious.” If any views are to influence public policy, they must do so by being persuasive to all citizens, regardless of religious belief or lack of it. The logic and process of reasoning in the public square should be accessible to all citizens and not only to religious believers on their internal terms. Calling views religious emphasizes their inaccessibility to non-believers, thereby insulating them from critical evaluation. The rhetoric of disenfranchised religion seeks to perpetuate an establishment of one religion under the guise of saving it from unfair exclusion. The way forward for all Americans is to acknowledge and regulate the connectedness of religion and politics in order to ensure effective disestablishment of any religion by the state. The pretense of unfair exclusion of religion from politics is the Trojan horse of the establishment of religion.

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

Each passing week of the Republican primary season brings an amplification in rhetorical appeal to the highly, or should I say severely, conservative base dominated by white evangelical voters. When insurance-mandated contraception coverage for employees in Catholic colleges and hospitals can get co-opted as an issue of religious liberty (notwithstanding the brutal irony that since the 1970s the vast majority of American Catholics use contraception and believe that one can be a good Catholic without adhering to the Vatican’s opposition to contraception), we should be on high alert for other instances in which democratic ideals are strategically hijacked for partisan gain. Rick Santorum’s recent comments about religion in public life and how he was sickened by JFK’s call for the separation of religion and politics can be seen in this vein. In the current political landscape portraying Democrats as anti-religion, Santorum struck a blow against President Obama (whom earlier in the week he accused of a “phony theology”), the Democrats, and their iconic figure JFK. The same comments also quite efficiently struck against his immediate rival, Mitt Romney, whose minority religious views as a Mormon continue to be a source of concern for many evangelicals. Not coincidentally, Romney has dealt with the looming shadow of his religious identity by emulating the tack used by JFK; namely, asserting the differentiation of church and state as legitimate separate spheres.

Claims regarding religion in American political life always have to be understood in context. JFK had to say what he said in 1960 if he were to have any legitimacy among highly skeptical and indeed prejudiced Protestants who were long accustomed to thinking of Catholicism as  anti-democratic and anti-American, and who feared that JFK would enact policies only if they had Rome’s imprimatur.  It was strategic of JFK and indeed a bold move.  It anticipated a key doctrinal shift subsequently made by Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) when they eloquently elaborated principles of religious freedom, individual conscience, and the rightful differentiation of church and state.

Differentiation, theoretically, produces integration, not exclusion. The differentiation of church and state does not mean that religious individuals or institutional voices have no place in politics or the public sphere. Quite the contrary. They have the same democratic right as secular individuals and organizations to articulate views about the issues at hand.  The democratic procedural expectation, however, is that they do not merit exemptions or opportunities denied to the non-religious. The public square can never be naked; it is inevitably clothed in the religious and religio-cultural strands woven into any given societal context and this shapes who speaks, what is said, and what makes sense. The challenge is to make room for and listen to the Other and to refrain from accusing others a priori of phony religious theologies or secular ideologies.

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John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

Statements like, “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up” and “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” reveal the extent to which Rick Santorum plays to the religious right. He remains an ideologue and demagogue whose outbursts and rhetoric play on and appeal to the prejudices, fears, and emotions of people, like his propensity for Islamophobia.

Santorum seems to have missed American history classes in school and to have been asleep for the past few decades of American politics. While America has an institutional separation of church and state, it most certainly has not witnessed a separation of religion and politics or public policy. We have had ordained ministers such as Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson run for president, had robust debates in Congress and society over birth control, abortion, school prayer, and stem cell research, in which religious actors and organizations have been influential participants. The Christian Right and similar groups have played active roles in these issues as well as other religious issues in electoral campaigns and have weighed in on appointments to the Supreme Court.

Santorum’s strategy, while attractive to many voters in Iowa and South Carolina, will backfire nationally among moderate Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.

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John H. Evans, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

Rick Santorum recently said that then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s statement on the separation of church and state made him want to throw up because he claimed that Kennedy wanted no influence by religious people in public life. This is typical campaign hyperbole aimed at motivating the religious right through allegiance to one of its founding myths—that religious conservatives are increasingly and literally barred as religious citizens from participating in the public sphere. I could deconstruct this and find a much more subtle and limited truth-claim in Santorum’s statement, but I think that what is most interesting is that Santorum felt he could repudiate his fellow Catholic’s statement about church and state.

Kennedy made this statement to assuage the anxiety of conservative Protestants in voting for a Catholic president. The Pope, it was claimed at the time, would pull the strings of Kennedy the marionette. Now, fifty years later, not only does Santorum not need to claim that he is independent of the Pope, but by rejecting Kennedy’s statement he actually scores points with conservative Protestants. This not only represents the decline of anti-Catholicism, but the declining importance of background theological conceptions to conservative Protestants.  As long as Santorum takes the substantive policy positions they agree with, conservative Protestants apparently do not care that he takes inspiration from the Catholic Magisterium and not directly from the Bible as they do. Perhaps if Romney had been consistent on conservative social issues they would not oppose his underlying Mormonism. So, I’ll take this kerfuffle as evidence of limited progress towards religious tolerance in the U.S. If the religious right has indeed learned to get beyond their deeper theological differences, in my more utopian moments I wonder if they could use this experience to become more tolerant of additional religious traditions underlying people’s policy stances, such as Obama’s mainline Protestantism or Islam.

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Philip S. Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Research, Yale University

Rick Santorum has a point. People of faith should be allowed into the public square, and they should not have to check their faith at the gate. Those liberal secularists who claim that “America was founded on the separation of church and state” and that religious people must adopt a (purportedly) “neutral” language of “public reason” in the political realm have a poor understanding of the First Amendment and an illiberal understanding of political speech. Legal and intellectual historians such as Noah Feldman, Philip Hamburger, and Steven Green have convincingly shown that the doctrine of “total separation” is an invention of the 20th century, not the legacy of the framers. And philosophers and theologians such as William Connolly, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Jürgen Habermas have persuasively argued that discursive restraints on religious speech cannot be defended on liberal grounds.

But Santorum is also running through an open door. The doctrine of total separation may still have some purchase within the judiciary, and some diehard defenders within the academy, but it is a minority view within the broader society. This is an extraordinary development. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy gave his speech on faith and politics, leading universities such as my own still had Jewish quotas, and American Catholics were still viewed as a fifth column. A half century on, the Supreme Court is dominated by Catholic conservatives and Jewish liberals, and a Mormon and a Catholic are the leading candidates for the Republican nomination. These days, it is people of no faith who are most likely to be locked out of the public square.

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R. Marie Griffith, Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics and Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

Rick Santorum’s blatant distortion of John F. Kennedy’s historic speech reveals the paranoid underside of far-right Christianity in the U.S. People of faith play major roles in all arenas of public life, including policy making; just because they do not share Santorum’s particular brand of theology doesn’t erase them from view. What Santorum wants is a theocracy in which Catholic dogma is the rule of the land—something, incidentally, that the vast majority of U.S. Catholics do not want. What an irony that Santorum singled out the nation’s first Catholic President as his scapegoat. Among other grave dangers, Santorum now risks rekindling the latent anti-Catholicism of the American religious and secular left—a move that would do his Church and its people far more harm than good.

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Cristina Lafont, Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

Rick Santorum is certainly right when he claims that “the idea that people of faith should not be permitted to make their case in the public square in order to influence public policy is antithetical to the First Amendment.” He appeals to the “free exercise of religion” clause, but simply on “freedom of speech” grounds it seems that the case is closed. This indicates that what is at issue in this debate is not whether citizens of faith are permitted to make their case in the public square but rather what it takes for citizens to legitimately make their case in order to influence public policy. The issue is not that citizens of faith should exclude their religious convictions from public debate, but that appealing to religious convictions alone is insufficient to justify the imposition of coercive policies on secular citizens and citizens of different faiths who have an equal right to be co-legislators but do not share those convictions. Thus, citizens of faith who participate in political advocacy in the public square can appeal to religious reasons in support of the policies they favor, provided that they are prepared and able to show that these policies are compatible with treating all citizens as free and equal and thus can be reasonably accepted by everyone. Citizens of a constitutional democracy cannot make their case in favor of coercive policies on the basis of their religious convictions alone, since they are constitutionally bound to only support those policies that can be shown to be compatible with the constitutional principles of freedom and equality (i.e. with the equal protection of the fundamental rights of all citizens). Thus, citizens of faith who participate in the public square in order to influence public policy must ultimately rest their case on the basic democratic values that they share with secular citizens and citizens of different faiths.

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Nancy Levene, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

“I have often wondered that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance, and honest dealing with all men, should quarrel so fiercely and display the bitterest hatred towards one another day by day, so that these latter characteristics make known a man’s creed more readily than the former… In seeking the causes of this unhappy state of affairs, I am quite certain that it stems from a widespread popular attitude of mind which looks on the ministries of the Church as dignities, its offices as posts of emolument and its pastors as eminent personages. For as soon as the Church’s true function began to be thus distorted, every worthless fellow felt an intense desire to enter holy orders, and eagerness to spread abroad God’s religion degenerated into base avarice and ambition. The very temple became a theater where, instead of Church teachers, orators held forth, none of them actuated by desire to instruct the people, but keen to attract admiration, to criticize their adversaries before the public, and to preach only such novel and striking doctrine as might gain the applause of the crowd… Surely, if they possessed but a spark of the divine light, they would not indulge in such arrogant ravings, but would study to worship God more wisely and to surpass their fellows in love, as they now do in hate.” —Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

“[F]or he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God.” —Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

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Nadia Marzouki, Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute

“Everybody is allowed in,” says Rick Santorum…so long as, one might add, their views and conducts do not disturb me. Rick Santorum has been one of the most vocal supporters of the anti-Sharia campaign and claims that: “Sharia is incompatible with our jurisprudence and our constitution.” He participates in the movement launched by pundits and activists  such as Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, and Brigitte Gabriel to recast the past distinction between good and bad Islam into an even more incendiary distinction between  Sharia as a political-legal system and “spiritual Islam.” There is something sadly ironical to Santorum’s call for the inclusion of religions in the public sphere, when he so clearly advocates for a complete invisibilization and neutralization of Islam.

Moreover, although Santorum poses as the defender of those who want to make communitarian arguments against the so-called hegemony of secular-liberal individualism, he actually reinforces the very worldview that he claims to combat. First, his statement is based on the assumption that there is an obvious distinction between the full and rich realm of faith, and the deserted field of non-faith/secularism. In a very Platonistic perspective, he imagines the possibility of a naked public square that is waiting to be covered and filled with faith-based values, even though such a “naked” space has never existed outside of the embattled fantasies of secular and religious extremists.  Second, this understanding of the relation between faith and the public square reaffirms a typically neoliberal vision of the public sphere as a free market of ideas, where  any individual can and should fight for her inner convictions. By suggesting that the improvement of American politics entirely rests on the rights of (some) individuals to express their faith, Santorum skillfully eludes the more pressing issue of the structural inequalities that keep so many out of the public square.

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Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies, Duke University

I do not like Rick Santorum’s politics. Nor do I understand the moral credo underlying his views on reproductive rights. I leave it to the public to reward or punish him for his views at the polls. Yet, his provocative and hyperbolic comments challenge prevailing orthodoxies of Euro-American political philosophy: the inability to have an honest debate about the place of religion in the public sphere. The words of an eleventh century thinker, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, resonate. “An intelligent adversary,” Ghazali said, “is preferable to a naive friend.”

Most thinkers inadvertently or intentionally become statist in their preferences when it comes to discussing the place of religion in the public square. How? By adopting a definition of religion that serves the paramount interests of the nation-state. That view relegates performed religion to the private or communal spheres. In reality this is just a case of smoke and mirrors. This is going to happen more frequently as strong evaluations, to cite Charles Taylor’s felicitous phrase, are pursued by a variety of publics. The nation-state and its defenders might want to get their act together without suffocating debate by retreating various artifices at its command.

A variety of publics are no longer satisfied with generic “store-brand” versions of political and social morality. A public sphere that does not entertain the substantive value commitments of citizens is like driving in bad weather where the smoke has turned into unbearable smog. Accidents are bound to happen.

Is it not transparent that our public sphere is replete with theological doctrines and faith claims laundered as the secular? That kind of dissimulation has indeed perverted secular political and cultural discourses. Often, for opportunistic reasons, politicians pretend to be secular when their proclamations are deeply religious. Newt Gingrich is exhibit number one of this fraudulence. When he claims that Sharia is the enemy of the constitution, what he really wants to say is that he hates Islam and Muslims. At least Santorum had the courage to say what he believes. Then, at least, we can substantially engage him for his beliefs, ideas and values.

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Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

It bears reminding, given the sensitivity of Rick Santorum’s gag reflex, that nothing in the Constitution (or even in Mitt Romney’s recent speeches) can be construed as limiting the presence or the voice of people of faith in the public square. Despite his claims on Meet the Press, no one—least of all Mitt Romney—has said that “people of faith should not be permitted in the public square.” Santorum’s strident critique of political secularism thus rests upon a series of deliberate misreadings, straw men, and manufactured affects. On our last time around the Ferris wheel of the Republican primary process, when he was having an even harder time courting a skeptical electorate, Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech affirmed the importance of religion in public and private life while assuring voters, like Kennedy before him, that specific doctrines and Church authorities would not be the basis of his public policies. In his analysis of Romney’s speech in a column for the Philadelphia Enquirer in 2007, Santorum favorably compared Romney’s position to Kennedy’s, though he faulted Romney for not having adequately addressed the specificity of his Mormonism. What has changed in the intervening years? Alleging that his opponents want to keep people of faith out of the political process may be an effective way for Santorum to marshal the indignation of conservative Christians, but it is not an honest one. While religion will undoubtedly remain a visible and divisive part of the American political process, someone should remind the candidate that vomit, however, has no place on the public square.

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

For presidential candidate Rick Santorum, the university is the enemy of Christian America. Arguing that professors “teach radical secular ideology,” Santorum claims that “62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it.” Opposing President Obama’s efforts to expand access to higher education, he criticizes the “indoctrination that occurs in American universities.”

To this date, nobody has been able to locate Santorum’s statistic. While LifeWay’s Ed Stetzer reports that 70 percent of regular attenders drop out of church (35 percent subsequently return), he notes there is no statistical difference between college students and other young adults.

Sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker suggest that Santorum has it exactly backwards. In an essay commissioned by the Social Science Research Council, they report that “young adults who never enrolled in college are presently the least religious young Americans.”

This was not always the case. In the past, researchers found that college eroded religious participation. At the tail end of that era, Rick Santorum went to Penn State.

Much has changed in American higher education. Since 1990 Campus Crusade has tripled in size, while Hillels and Chabads have proliferated across the land.

At Santorum’s alma mater, the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center welcomes three dozen religious groups, including the Latter Day Saint Student Association and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Though American faculty remain less pious than the general public, people of faith are a growing presence in higher education. While born-again Christians make up one-fifth of the professoriate, two-thirds of elite natural and social scientists describe themselves as spiritual. At Princeton University’s James Madison Program, political scientist Robert P. George presides over a “Catholic renaissance.”

Far from a naked public square, the campus has become a bustling religious marketplace. Santorum should quit channeling God and Man at Yale and go back to school. He might like what he sees.

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Although American Grace doesn’t leave historians on the whirling dime, wondering “So what?” it does raise questions about historical context. In other words, how do the changes that Campbell and Putnam retrace fit three centuries of evolution in American religion, politics, and culture?

American Grace is hardly without history. Its most sustained historical analysis occurs in the third chapter, “Religiosity in America: The Historical Backdrop.” A subheading outlines a principal point: “The 1950s: the high tide of civic religion.” Campbell and Putnam rightly caution against accepting some of the common enthusiasm about the purportedly ubiquitous religiosity of the 1950s, such as is suggested by Gallup polling data on church and synagogue attendance. But their main point is straightforward: “Virtually all experts agree, however, that the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s was one of exceptional religious observance in America”—the experts ranging from the historians Sydney Ahlstrom, Patrick Allitt, Maurice Isserman, Michael Kazin, and Uta Andrea Balbier to the ever-looming Will Herberg.

However, my sense is that “backdrop” well describes how history works in American Grace. The book isn’t historiography and wasn’t meant to be.  When it invokes history, often the point is to demonstrate religion’s continuing importance, as well as its new divisions, in America, the authors’ argument about religion’s contemporary centrality being supported by reference to patterns continuing from earlier decades. Consider the first pre-1950 historical reference, which concerns evangelicalism:

Evangelical Protestants comprise one of the most significant religious traditions in America—particularly for understanding change in American religion. Historian Mark Noll notes that evangelicalism dates as far back as the early eighteenth century, when a movement began within Protestantism to find a ‘true religion of the heart.’

Campbell and Putnam describe evangelicalism as “the dominant strain within American Protestantism through most of the nineteenth century,” then raise the fundamentalist-modernist split that “spilled over into American society more generally.” But rather than illustrate change, my sense is that these references limn a comforting continuity, the “religion of the heart,” and even its divisions, remaining a primary mode of American religiosity.

Neither the concept of “religion” that informs American Grace nor longer-term historical patterns provoke much discussion. Campbell and Putnam shun theoretical issues: “One can quibble over just how religion, and religiosity, should be gauged.” They don’t. They seem, literally, to opt for Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” approach. “By any standard,” Campbell and Putnam write, “the United States (as a whole) is a religious nation.” So ends, or begins, their discussion; perhaps one might say that American Grace is itself a riff on the American meaning of “religion.”

Although history doesn’t operate by the “by any standard” approach here used for religion, the “backdrop” slant given it by Campbell and Putnam makes weak-kneed history. Their discussion of “civic religion” serves as an example. Unlike their operative concept of religion, they do define it, as the notion that “religion—or at least a belief in God—serves to bind the nation together,” and this stands at the center of their discussion of the 1950s. But the only discussion of civic religion before 1950 comes 400 pages later, on a single page that cites Robert Bellah citing Jefferson and Lincoln, along with some words on George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all essentially emphasizing a soothing continuity rather than a contested evolution.

What’s missing in American Grace is a sense of how the current polarization, or its development, from the seemingly peaceful 1950s to the antagonistic 1990s and 2000s, fits American historical patterns more generally. The references to both evangelicalism and civil religion implicitly stress continuity, with the authors’ emphasis on the “religion of the heart,” or on the importance of a broad commitment to a simple “belief in God,” both lasting from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first. Yet the history of American evangelicalism itself is as much one of anger, argument, schism, defeat, organization, dead-ends, and yes, triumph, which might well fit the diagnosis of polarization that Campbell and Putnam find alarming and claim to have developed mainly in the last twenty years. Yet, if we rethink the issue, American civil religion also wallowed in the anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Mormonism that created at least one American political party, deeply shaped others, and produced much violence, fire, murder directed against Catholics, Jews, and Mormons for many, many decades, even into the 1950s.

Because American Grace makes much of Campbell’s own Mormonism and contains ample discussions of contemporary Mormon belief and behavior, its approach to Mormon history is itself intriguing. Its account of Mormon origins bypasses the upheaval of the movement’s radical, polygamous, and harassed past. An acknowledgement that Mormons were “driven from place to place by persecutors” entices no detail, and a plain reference to “the death of Joseph Smith” raises no mention of his brutal assassination by a Missouri mob. Instead, this “backdrop” jumps to the triumphant present and Mormonism’s status as a “global church some 13.5 million strong,” whose “success at winning converts owes largely to its strongly evangelical spirit.” Lacking is an account of Mormonism’s truly extraordinary transformation from polygamous, sometimes communitarian radicalism into the epitome of twentieth- and twenty-first century American political and religious conservatism. Is the intensity of contemporary Mormon conservatism in any way related to consciousness of Mormonism’s radical past, as though Mormons still needed to prove their cultural and Christian orthodoxy?

Even the seemingly simple issue of heaven unravels in the face of both history and theology. Campbell’s and Putnam’s polling data shows that Mormons are far ahead of any other religious group in believing that even non-Christians can enter heaven; 98% of Mormons—but only 83% of Catholics, 79% of mainline Protestants, 62% of black Protestants, and 54% of evangelical Protestants—hold such views. But the Mormon heavens and means of getting to them are remarkably different than those of other Christian groups. Only Mormons have held, since the 1840s, that heaven is complex, with “three degrees or kingdoms of glory,” and that Mormons may baptize the dead by proxy to provide the foundation for their entrance into heaven. These views and this history shape modern Mormon behavior. Mormons have collected birth and death records worldwide for a century, now in microfilm and digital form, and are the originators of the fabulous Ancestry.com, which provides access to more than five billion birth records—a gold mine for historians (it’s by far the best route to fully digitized U.S. census returns up to 1930), genealogists of all kinds, and Mormons verifying records for proxy baptism.

This history and this theology upend one of the seemingly innocuous questions Campbell and Putnam pose in American Grace—can even non-Christians enter heaven?—because the respondents simply don’t share the same understanding of “heaven.”  Mormons pointedly understand heaven differently than do other Christians, and they have a mechanism for getting even the dead there, of which others disapprove, most notably Jewish leaders, who have sometimes bitterly protested Mormon proxy baptism, especially of Holocaust survivors. (Campbell and Putnam do refer to Mormon “posthumous baptism” in an endnote, but one limited to Mormon convictions that theirs is the only true faith.)

Similarly, Campbell and Putnam do not systematically engage Catholic, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, and evangelical Protestant theologies of heaven.  For them, one might wonder if the issue has less to do with heaven than with reluctance to believe in hell, which Campbell and Putnam do discuss, and whose historical decline for Protestants was charted a long time ago, in D. P. Walker’s The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment. Of course, that would also seem to include the “nones,” the non-religious who might feel that if people go anywhere, it must be “heaven,” which our broad popular culture seems to think is good.

I admire the complexity and fascinating ethnographic excursions American Grace offers. I wish I could write as cleanly as Campbell and Putnam do across more than 500 pages. I appreciate the effort at keeping the big picture constantly in focus. At the same time, for a historian, American Grace‘s many and complex “beliefs” float too free from their historical moorings, and not just because I like history, but because history is embedded in contemporary behavior—as in contemporary Mormon views on heaven—even when it doesn’t seem to be.  Maybe part of the general problem is taking the irenic 1950s as the departure point of its historical backdrop. We could debate whether or not the religious peacefulness of the 1950s is itself over-rated, but that’s a different discussion.  Instead, I would suggest that, even if the 1950s weren’t entirely peaceful, they may still have been the most unusual, and indeed relatively irenic, years in American religious history.

But for three centuries, tumult, disputation, and anger— i.e., “polarization” —characterized much of American religion. It is hard for a historian not to remember the hangings of Quakers in Boston in the 1660s, the jailing even of Quaker dissidents by other Quakers in Philadelphia during the Keithian schism of the 1690s, the suppression of much traditional African religious practice among enslaved Africans, even after emancipation, plus virulent American anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-Mormonism, and both polite and impolite ridicule of evangelical fundamentalism, to highlight only some of the contentious, polarizing substance of America’s long spiritual history.

Campbell and Putnam acknowledge this historical religious polarization on the penultimate page of American Grace. Yet they not only trumpet its rarity but assert that “from its founding, America has had religious toleration encoded in its national DNA.” Our DNA?  Here, the episodic, conditional past is annihilated in a paroxysm of essentialist rhetoric. Most historians would say that religious toleration emerged fitfully in America but certainly wasn’t present at its founding; it’s the point of William R. Hutchison’s Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. We might hope it’s present now. But religiously based homophobia, anti-Muslim tension, and even the quietly continuing evangelizing of Mormons by Wisconsin Synod Lutherans suggest that America’s genetically assured triumph of religious toleration hasn’t yet arrived.

The religious polarization of our own and recent times, which Campbell and Putnam chart in such chewy ethnographic detail, is not at all “the same” polarization that began when England’s dissident Puritans joined gold-seeking Virginians to contest the land as well as the divine with American Indians, who themselves had long fought their own battles over both.

Yet maybe, in some very broad and general way, American Grace really announces, without saying so, “Welcome Back.”

This is the chief, if probably unintended implication of American Grace, which I take to be the most successfully argued, comprehensive sociological study of American religion in more than half a century. Robert Putnam and David Campbell harvest a generation of research and mature reflection about how religious affiliations of all kinds divide and unite Americans of different generations, regions, sexes, educational levels, and ethno-racial groups. Will Herberg’s endlessly discussed Protestant-Catholic-Jew, a book of 1955, was not remotely as methodologically self-conscious and as empirically grounded as is American Grace, but one must go back to Herberg to find so striking a single volume purporting to explain the religion of an author’s contemporary Americans. If this coming generation of scholars and journalists allow Putnam and Campbell to define the terms of conversation to the extent that our predecessors allowed Herberg to perform this role, we will be in fine shape.

Why does this book prompt the suspicion that bland may be beautiful? Because Putnam and Campbell argue that the decline of intense, sectarian devotion to any particular faith enables religious believers to be more tolerant and appreciative of ideas and practices different from their own. Putnam and Campbell’s central, data-driven theme is the fluidity of American religion. Americans move in and out of religious affiliations with dizzying frequency. While in other societies religious identity is more often perceived “as a fixed characteristic,” they explain, in the United States “it seems perfectly natural” to refer to one’s religion as a mere “preference.”

All this mobility in an immigrant-receiving society with multiple ethno-religious groups creates, especially in recent years, high levels of religious diversity within families. One half of Americans today are married to someone who came from a religious tradition different from their own, and when you start counting cousins and in-laws you have extended families in which most people are intimately connected with several individuals from a variety of communities of faith. This reality leads Putnam and Campbell to their charming “Aunt Susan Principle.”

Just about everyone has an Aunt Susan, the kind of relative who is so saintly that you know she will get to heaven (if you believe there is such a place, but let’s put aside differences of opinion about that), even if she is an atheist or a Presbyterian or a Buddhist or something else that you are proud not to be. Familiarity and love conquer sectarianism and breed tolerance. The “My Friend Al Principle” encapsulates the same situation for non-family acquaintances. You greatly admire Al, your office co-worker. So, you have no doubt he’ll make it to heaven even though he happens to be a Jehovah’s Witness (horrors!) and you are an Episcopalian.

Putnam and Campbell well understand that American society is sharply polarized by religion, and that this polarization often parallels political polarization. They believe they have solved the paradox of how a religiously polarized society can also be a religiously tolerant society. The answer is that Americans do not get too deeply entrenched in any one, particular religious affiliation.

But some people do. “True believers” is American Grace’s term for those who are intensely religious, and as a result have little use for folks with beliefs different from their own. Putnam and Campbell insist that only about ten percent of Americans are true believers, but the true believers turn out, predictably, to be among the least tolerant of same-sex relationships, non-marital co-habitation, abortion, divorce, and of all kinds of pluralism. Even apart from these extremists, however, conservatism of this type is more prevalent within the most homogeneous and stable of religious groups, such as Mormons and evangelical Protestants, than among the most fluid, such as Jews, ecumenical Protestants, and agnostics. Here, American Grace is consistent with Robert Wuthnow’s findings concerning “exclusivist Christians” in America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity.

This demonstrable tension between intensity of belief and pluralistic tolerance is where the beauty of blandness becomes visible. Putnam and Campbell are not as forthright as they might be about the implications of their work. Clearly, they understand religion as a fine thing, providing needed networks of belonging and systems of meaning. Indeed, American Grace is a relentlessly generous book, filled with hope that the intolerance and sectarianism found among the “true believers” can be contained. The authors warn that the future is far from certain, and that the current association of religion with conservative politics might well be reversed. Religion in this book is, by and large, warm and wonderful. But their research leads to the conclusion that the warmest and most wonderful kinds of religion—and the kinds most compatible with a diverse, democratic society—are the kinds of religion that adherents regard as disposable, as something one is willing to trade away.

I hasten to acknowledge that American Grace offers an imposing and altogether welcome array of detailed information and wise reflection about countless aspects of religious life in the United States today. This very rich work’s value should not be reduced, as I risk doing here, to its most obvious and most general implication for the sociology of religion.

American Grace reminds me of one of the most striking findings in another recent sociological study, Christian Smith and Patricia Snell’s Souls in Transition: Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Invoking H. Richard Niebuhr’s legendary put-down of liberal Protestantism’s drift away from doctrinal particularity, Smith and Snell remark that today’s younger Christian believers apparently feel no objection to “a God without wrath” who “brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Harry Emerson Fosdick “would be proud,” Smith and Snell allow mischievously, to listen in on the religious chatter of today’s young adults, including evangelicals whose grandparents hated Fosdick, because even if they’ve never heard of Fosdick they talk just like him.

Putnam and Campbell offer their own families as both normative and representative of life in our own time, which might be called “the era of Fosdick’s revenge.” Campbell is a Mormon with Protestant and Catholic ancestors. Putnam was raised a Methodist but converted to Judaism, while his sister married a Catholic and had three children all of whom are now evangelicals. Will all these Putnams and Campbells, like Aunt Susan and friend Al, get to heaven? Only if they remember the chief lesson of this book: don’t take your religion too seriously.

In the economy of marriage (the exchange of women) under conditions of polygyny—which FLDS members so infamously practice and which was the catalyst for its schism from mainline Mormonism—there will inevitably remain a “surplus” of unmarried, unmarriageable men. The situation is intensified by the hoarding of wives at the elite level: some churchmembers report that Warren Jeffs had taken scores of them. And such demographic conditions will persist unless males leave or are pushed out of the local marital economy. (Or else, according to Freud’s vision in Totem and Taboo, the boys might violently displace the patriarchs and inaugurate a brave, new—wrenchingly ambivalent—order.) In any case, the structuralist interpretation of the necessity of ejecting a surfeit of males from a local marital economy is often cited as the argument that makes sense of the dynamics that produce the Lost Boys: they are the innocent victims of their fathers’ patriarchalist polygyny.

Yet this structuralist account seems inadequate. After all, in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss used the same logic to account for occasional homosexual pairings among the Nambikwara of Brazil as a “substitute solution,” an aberration necessitated by a scarcity of women created by the traditional perquisite of the office of chief: polygyny. It did not occur to him to think of monogamous homosexuality as anything but a “substitute” for heterosexual monogamy. But when we think of male homosexual pairings among the Nambikwara as a structural side-effect of the chiefly exception that proves the rule of the exchange of women, then we are likely to ignore its specific pleasures and desires and the forms of self-authorization it cultivates.

Because, epistemologically, we ought to see the individuals belonging to the aberrant “surplus” population of Nambikwara men intimately associating in the “normal” way (here, heterosexual monogamy for everyone but the chief), we cannot see—politically, say—that they may be citing the norm as an alibi by which to authorize themselves to form variant intimate associations. So the structuralist interpretation blinds itself to its own normative operations in two interrelated ways, in terms of knowledge and of power: it cannot recognize Nambikwara homosexuality as intelligible except as aberration, and it cannot see Nambikwara homosexual partners as empowered but rather only views them as radically constrained. When we call members of homosexual unions among the Nambikwara “victims” of chiefly polygyny, then we ignore the practices of authority that these supposedly “aberrant” forms of intimate association cultivate with and against chiefly sovereignty and Nambikwara gender regulation.

Similarly, it is unhelpful to see these boys as “victims” of structural effects of FLDS polygyny. To be clear: I am not suggesting that the Lost Boys engage in gay sex; Nambikwara-like homosexual pairings among the Lost Boys have gone unmentioned in news stories of them. (Fraternity is the trope invoked. “The kids I took in were like little brothers to me,” one Lost Boy was quoted as saying in a salon.com piece. “I loved them and I was doing everything I could to help them, but it was like trying to fill up the ocean with a teaspoon.”) Rather, I am analogizing the Lost Boys to Nambikwara same-sex partners because the ejection from FLDS communities of the former and the homosexuality of the latter have both been interpreted as “solutions” to “problems” in local marital economies. It is the unspoken politics of such interpretations that interest me.

To interpret the Lost Boys as “victims” of polygyny is misdirected for at least two reasons, and knowledge and power are wrapped up together in them both. First of all, many news reports coyly intimate, or at least they lend themselves to the suggestion that Warren Jeffs and his henchmen were seeking mere pretexts to eject teenage boys in order to stave off a surplus of men that would interrupt the smooth machinations of their polygynous designs. In such a story, even though the boys may have been caught red-handed with a DVD of a nearly soft-core Hollywood film, say, then the boys are still only “victims” of a bad, unsupportive culture. Such an interpretation eclipses the real contestations of power at work. There seems at work, namely, the implicit and later explicit partial rejection of Jeffs’s political-theological sovereignty by way of these boys’ performative struggles of self-authorization. Again, in and around the Lost Boys’ ejections, there is not only constraint; there are also trials of power and freedom, which we ignore when we acknowledge the boys as nothing other than victims.

Much more deeply troubling, though, is that heterosexual monogamy is the tacit norm that governs the very rhetoric of victimization. The Lost Boys are victimized by polygyny, which can only be understood as “wrong” in its divergence from those norms organized by heterosexual monogamy. Moreover, the very idea that the young men represent an aberrant “surplus” suggests another aspect of the norm at work: they are not productive within the local “fringe” marital system (and are only productive within dominant American society as negative examples to shore up the workings of the norm of monogamy); the Lost Boys are being wasted; their manhood is not being used. Having been ejected as surplus or waste by their own fringe community, then they must be made to fit in elsewhere. And here is how dominant liberal democratic American society can both express its moralizing intolerance (for polygynists) and its welcoming tolerance (for polygyny’s victims) in the same double gesture, while at the same time masking the power of its own regulatory norm of monogamy.

In short, it is incorrect to see the Lost Boys as victims of polygyny without also seeing them as victims of a dominant form of hegemonic heterosexual monogamy. For it is not the case that culture does its dirty work only in Colorado City, Arizona and other polygamous communities, but never in mainstream America. It is not the case that constraint and terror operate only there in a fringe community and that freedom reigns here in dominant American society. Marriage is not an illiberal and involuntary institution there and a liberal and voluntary one here. Just because the sovereignty of Warren Jeffs in his community is rendered visible by the terror of his rule does not mean that power is non-existent where it is less visible. Violence and terror are very much in evidence on “this” side of FDLS too: although racist lynching as an instrument for regulating intimacy across color lines is—barely—a thing of the past, violent bashings of lesbians, gays, and transgender persons are on the rise.

Hence, monogamy regulates the lives of the Lost Boys in another way. Not only does the norm of monogamy implicitly generate them as victims of polygyny, but also monogamy structures the very field of intelligibility of their lives together “outside” of FLDS. This is what I meant when I suggested earlier that their lives together—the intimate association that a butt hut represents—could be rendered invisible even to themselves. For, with regret, I cannot but conclude that so much about our dominant culture of intimacy in the United States—the norms that regulate intimacy and render only some versions of it intelligible—is stacked against the Lost Boys’ coming to see their relationships of love, support, and mutual dependence as anything but a way-station to “normal” lives in heterosexual monogamous marriage.

These boys especially—bearing the full brunt of all the moralizing discourse around polygamy’s abuses that circulates in American mass media—would be the most unlikely candidates for viewing their butt huts as (non-sexual) polyandry. Their form of intimate association is polyandrous—it is polyandrous now—but a hegemonic culture of monogamy renders it invisible as anything other than a temporary aberration. The butt hut as a mode of intimate association ends up looking like a structural aberration of both polygamy (of which it is a contingent expression of a necessary side-effect) and of monogamy (to which it is simply abnormal) rather than an enduring possibility.

And no amount of successful agitation for state sanctioned same-sex marriage could ever create the conditions for non-normative intimate associations, such as that found in butt huts, to thrive. For even an expanded institution of marriage only gives the force of law to altered norms—it therefore does not disrupt normativity but rather further entrenches it. When a norm is fortified with the force of law, operating through the late modern nation-state’s police and administrative powers, then citing the norm (marriage) as an alibi to authorize oneself to associate differently is difficult at best—especially when the regulative powers of governmentality work alongside the force of law as supports to the state. After all, historically, the modern nation-state has built itself up by colonizing and/or zoning out of existence and intelligibility other forms of association.

What could advance both state sovereignty and extrastatist governmentality more readily than inviting state institutions and law to define and to regulate more forms of association? The pluralization of associative forms earned Carl Schmitt’s censure in The Concept of the Political because “pluralism consists in denying the sovereignty of the political entity by stressing time and again that the individual lives in numerous different social entities and associations . . . [that] control him in differing degrees from case to case, and impose on him a cluster of obligations in such a way that no one of these associations can be said to be decisive and sovereign.” Hence, extending Schmitt, we can say that the late modern nation-state secures its political sovereignty by calling into existence a pluralism of associative forms and arrogating to itself a monopoly on enforceable decisions about which forms of association are licit and which illicit, how the licit ones are to be subordinated and disciplined, how the illicit ones are to be policed and punished, and so on. And, ironically, state institutions do not by themselves do this work of constituting the sovereignty of the political—the quasi-depoliticized normalization and regulation of intimacy and sociability saturate the social field “beyond” or “underneath” the state.

The desire for same-sex marriage, expressed as a yearning for official “recognition” for some lesbian and gay couples, willfully misrecognizes the operation of the powers of political sovereignty and governmentality. And since homophobia continues to pervade dominant American culture, legalized same-sex marriage might very well render butt huts and other homosocial intimate associations less available, not more. Because legalized same-sex marriage would participate in the sanctioning and codification of monogamy (merely making different combinations of the sexual identity of the partners possible so long as the partners number only two), it would contribute to rendering singles and queer non-monogamous intimate associations less visible and materially less available. Paradoxically, at the same time, legalized same-sex marriage, working in tandem with homophobic regulatory norms, would make some forms of same-sex intimate association too visible and therefore render them more coherent as objects of disavowal. (I can’t live with other guys like this—I don’t want to be associated with that.) In any case, legalized same-sex marriage, far from pluralizing the forms and diversifying the practices of intimate association, would narrow and diminish them.

Lost Boys in butt huts contend not only with the visible sovereignty of Warren Jeffs but the spectral sovereignty and governmentality operative in the United States, and I fear that, although they have reached a kind of impasse with the regime of FLDS, they are on the losing end of the battle against the hegemonic norms of intimate association in mainstream American society. I do not mean to glorify the lives of the young men keeping house together (after a fashion) in butt huts. By all accounts, the Lost Boys are subject to intense financial, emotional, legal, and other pressures. The circumstances which they endure seem in many respects unlivable, even as the intimacy they have cultivated is what allows them to survive. But we aid them not at all—indeed we do them and many others greater harm—by advancing and strengthening a normative conception of personhood that dismisses their now polyandrous bonds as nothing more than a mere rest stop on the road to a normal future.