American Grace

To Putnam and Campbell, the grand irony of their data is this: in a time of unprecedented religious and political polarization, America is more pluralistic and tolerant than ever before. The authors build on Robert Wuthnow’s assessment of the “restructuring of American religion” along political rather than denominational lines in the decades after World War II, and their study pursues many of the familiar themes of the “culture wars” that James Davison Hunter began exploring twenty years ago. Their telling of post-war American cultural history will provoke quibbles from specialists, but the basic storyline of American Grace is sound: the social revolutions of the 1960s set in motion a series of cultural reactions and counter-reactions that have left Americans increasingly polarized over whether or not to impose the authority of holy scripture over one another’s lives, particularly in their bedrooms. That polarization accelerated in the 1980s, and since then frequent churchgoers across all traditions have been more and more likely to favor conservative politics. At the same time, the “moderate religious middle is shrinking,” and growing numbers of Americans are disavowing the rule of organized religion altogether. When pollsters ask these people to describe their religious affiliation, they answer “none”—and they tend to vote Democratic. Despite this widening chasm, the country is not perched on the precipice of religious war. On the contrary, Americans seem to be getting along rather well, and have more and better relationships with people of different faiths. How can this be the case?

This state of affairs suggests that the reality of religion in America may be outpacing the categories and assumptions of those who study it. What, for example, are scholars to make of the “nones” who fervently declare that they still believe in God? And what about all those Americans who not only host summer barbecues with neighbors of different faiths, but also nonchalantly shrug that those neighbors might very well end up in heaven too? The Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) takes the unequivocal position that a “horrible doom” awaits “all those who do not believe in Jesus.” Church leaders practically rent their garments upon hearing that 86 percent of Missouri Synod Lutherans told pollsters that “a good person who is not of their faith could indeed go to heaven.” When Martin Luther proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, this is not what he had in mind. It’s enough to make any scholar wonder if creeds, confessions, and statements of faith are obsolete.

What, in heaven’s name, is going on here? Is the country marching inexorably toward—dare I use that vexed word—secularization? Is America merely in a trough of unbelief something like the fallow period that American churches experienced in the late eighteenth century, soon to rebound in the fervor of revival? Or are human beings, since time immemorial, simply inconsistent creatures?

The answer might be none, or all, of the above—no survey can tell us for sure. What we need is a bird’s eye view, and that requires taking theology seriously, and considering a longer view of the history of Western civilization than any sociological survey can provide.

American Grace adopts a position of respectful skepticism toward theology. The authors dutifully reproduce the questionnaire of “measures of theological belief and religious commitment” included in their survey, but they express surprise that many Americans “have stable views on such seemingly arcane theological issues” as whether a person is saved by faith or by their own good deeds. (Calling this fundamental question “arcane” is a bit like expressing confusion at that obscure rule in baseball that allows a player to score a run by crossing home plate.) Americans might be reluctant to condemn a non-believing friend to eternal hellfire, but this emotional ambivalence does not necessarily mean that they take theological matters lightly.

In fact, survey respondents overwhelmingly ranked theology as the most important reason for switching churches—liturgy or worship style was the second-most important, and political reasons were the least important. Yet Putnam and Campbell seem to conclude that this means theology has become a vessel for politics in disguise. To religious people of all faiths, issues like sexual morality and abortion are not simply, or even primarily, political questions. God has expressed an opinion—and that means that these are theological matters. By asserting that American evangelicals’ primary ambition is their “desire to convert sexual morality into public policy,” the authors obscure the bigger picture. The culture wars are not just about sex and social norms: they represent a contest between those Americans who locate ultimate authority in God and a traditional reading of scripture, and those who believe the freedom of individual choice trumps the dictates of some bearded old man in the clouds.

Putnam and Campbell are hardly alone in their doubts about theology’s role in elucidating American religious life. In their zeal for interdisciplinary breadth, today’s scholars of religion are so eager to pay due respect to political science, economics, gender and race theory, cognitive psychology, and other fields that they sometimes overlook theology as an explanatory factor in human affairs. The religious studies crowd is particularly sensitive about the Protestant bias that has saturated the discipline ever since its origins in missionaries’ efforts to study and convert the heathen. We have spent much energy flagellating ourselves for our semi-conscious Protestant frame of mind—our focus on belief at the expense of practice; our search for coherent intellectual systems defined by Enlightenment standards; our blinkered emphasis on the individual over the community. Our efforts to eradicate that prejudice have left theology all the more passé. Putnam and Campbell, for their part, worry about the possibility that their survey might have selected for religious attributes that are distinctly or predominantly Protestant. They point out that their polls diagnosed religiosity just as accurately in British Muslims as among American evangelicals (though it’s worth noting that British Muslims might not be the best control subjects, since they live and worship in a society still groggy with a Protestant hangover).

The trouble, however, is that it’s not just the ivory tower of religious studies that operates in a Protestant framework. As Tracy Fessenden and others have pointed out, a “Protestant consensus,” a civil religion based in the premises of the Reformation, still saturates American society. Despite the proliferation of Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and “nones” in modern America, I wonder whether American Grace is telling us that America, if not officially a Protestant nation by established church or creed, is still evolving along a historical trajectory that one can trace back to the 95 Theses.

In American Grace, the internal contradictions of Protestantism are front and center. On one side of the cultural divide that the authors describe, conservative Americans’ views on sexual morality stem from their respect for traditional authority and a distrust of human nature rooted in the Protestant emphasis on humankind’s irreparable depravity. Yet that other fundamental principle of the Reformation—individual freedom of conscience—has found its most extreme expression in America’s free marketplace of religion, the country’s founding narrative of individual liberty, and a political culture that allows little deviation from the tenets of classical Enlightenment liberalism. Many religious Americans would say that they have no king save the Lord of scripture—but if the God of the Bible is king, then individual conscience is his formidable royal consort.

Pollsters’ growing tally of “nones”—those Americans who have thrown off the demands of organized religion but still believe in some kind of God—represent the palace coup, the triumph of individual conscience as ultimate authority. This is a conflict driven, not by doctrinal nitpicking, but by the basic question of intellectual authority in human society. The “nones” may not fit neatly into scholars’ preexisting categories, but one thing is certain: they are heirs of the Reformation who have taken Luther’s courageous stand to its logical conclusion. The nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologian B.B. Warfield once observed that “the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the church.” The American experiment might just turn out to be the triumph of Luther’s doctrine of free conscience over his doctrine of human nature—though the battle is far from over.

Sociologist Gene Burns unfolds this shift in the context of Vatican II. According to Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), a key Vatican II document that clarifies the doctrine of papal infallibility pronounced in the First Vatican Council of 1869, the pontiff exercises “infallibility in virtue of his office when, as supreme pastor and teacher of the faithful . . . he proclaims in an absolute decision a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals.” Of these, “faith”—that is, faithful membership in the One True Church—is understood to be obligatory for Catholics only, and beyond the power of democratic governance to enforce. “Morals,” however, because they ostensibly inhere in natural law rather than in Catholic teaching, remain binding on all, Catholic and non-Catholic, without regard for democratic norms. Trading its earlier presumption of unimpeachable temporal power for charismatic authority in the realm of “faith and morals,” the Church since 1965 has come increasingly to pronounce on questions of morality, and overwhelmingly to define morality in terms of sex and gender. Particularly since the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated its condemnation of all forms of artificial birth control, the Catholic Church’s ever more visible commitment to regulating sexuality—a way of consolidating its authority in an era of secularism and religious pluralism—has strengthened its ties with conservative forces in the United States and worldwide. In this way, the ostensibly progressive reforms of Vatican II yielded new reinforcements for an ideological hierarchy in which “morals”—the Church’s teachings on sexuality and gender, understood to be universal and absolute—occupy the highest position, Catholic faith and doctrine the middle ground, and Catholic social teaching on issues like war and poverty the lowest, most discretionary rung.

What remains of the Catholic Church’s aspirations to universality in a secular age, then, inheres almost entirely in the register of sex and gender. For Charles Taylor, the binding-on-all quality of even post-Vatican II Catholic teaching on sexuality—binding on all because purportedly grounded in natural law—finds its enabling corollary in the sex-is-natural message of the Church’s post-sexual revolution critics. Importantly, Taylor locates the ramping-up of sexual regulation and the modes of its resistance much further back, in the Counter-Reformation, which also brings a broader set of considerations to bear on the enormously consequential question of why sex (and not, say, greed or aggression) became the Church’s favored site of prohibition.

Taylor’s partial answer, wrapped in a disclaimer (“I can’t pretend to be able to explain it”) is, first, to speculate that sexuality became an irresistible target of regulation for the Catholic Church because “violence and anger became less overwhelming realities of life” with the decline of “brigands, feuds, rebellions, clan rivalries, and the like” (it’s gotten so quiet around here, friars . . . so let’s talk about sex); and second to suggest that since sexual prohibition was a “central fact of life” for an avowedly celibate clergy , they’d understandably want to make it a central fact of life for everyone else, too. But what precisely is the Counter-Reformation context, here? Where, in other words, is the legacy of Protestantism in these developments? “What has often been forgotten,” Max Weber reminds us, is “that the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control that was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice and hardly more than formal in favor of a regulation of the whole conduct which, penetrating all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.” Evacuating Christian religious authority from its institutional locations, the Reformation generated its presence “everywhere,” not least in the form of the gendered bodily disciplines that went to the making of sexuality as the defining feature of the modern subject and the defining dilemma of modernity.

One implication of this is that until sex became a very big deal in Christendom, religion may not have been a very big deal in Christendom, either. There was, of course, the medieval Church with its virgins and martyrs, its cinematic splendor and gore. But by what storyline did we come to imagine that everyone, everywhere might be caught up in its net? The “more rigid sexual code [of early modern French Catholicism] directly attacked certain common male practices,” writes Taylor, citing a well established narrative, “particularly the rowdy lifestyle of young men . . . This tension drove many men out of the confessional-and eventually out of the church.” Note the slippage from the (at least potentially) faithful peasant who ardently desires the Church’s communion to the virile rowdy who spurns it, the “everything” of religious identity giving way to the “everything” of sexual identity. But what if the first of these—the religious subject, who cedes his place to the sexual subject in a declension variously celebrated and mourned—were instead a projection thrown back on the past by the same operations that produce the central fact of sexuality in modernity, produce sexuality as the central fact of modernity?

Surely the Catholic Church learned something from the Reformers—surely they have had much to teach each other—about the ways institutional power might be augmented in the appearance of its being relinquished. By the nineteenth century, Taylor notes, “morality takes precedence over everything [in the lessons of the French Catechism], and religion becomes its servant.” If “religion” no longer serves to define the reigning regime of modernity, then “morality”—sexuality—will have to do. And where sex is, can religion be far behind?

In the spirit, then, of Elizabeth Povinelli’s call to Taylor’s readers to do more than attend with renewed care to the “self-authorizing, self-fulfilling sexual subject”-to decide, for example, that sexual purity might in fact serve the cause of self-making as well as libertinism, or vice versa: How might we instead try to circumvent the genealogy-let’s call it the “secularization narrative”-by which a particularly descended form of religious authority still holds us in its grip as that whose imagined primacy has been dislodged by stronger claims to truth, and, so it follows, must either be a) fortified and restored, or b) kept ever again from exercising its repressive sway? For aren’t these the circumscribed alternatives that any iteration of sexuality as the central dilemma of modernity really poses?

This conflation of values and sexuality is particularly important because the polls on which the claim was based did not name any values, but just asked people to rate values in relation to other issues like the economy. In addition, the number of voters choosing values in this poll had actually fallen from a high point in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected. But, the Times was willing not only to accept and promote the idea that values voters had swung the election, but also to promote the idea that the values these voters cared about were sexual in nature and conservative in force. Although there was subsequent criticism of the Times’s conclusion that voters in 2004 were more concerned with “values” than were voters in previous elections, there was little to no criticism of the presumption that “values” equals “sexuality,” and conservative sexuality at that.

Here, then, is another echo of the concern Taylor raises. The Reformation makes sexuality a matter of intense ethical concern, standing in for—and sometimes even blocking out—other concerns about the ideal moral life, such as whether it should be lived through a commitment to poverty. This concern with sexual life is refracted through the Counter Reformation, which emphasizes sexual purity such that, as Taylor puts it, “[t]here were mortal sins in…other dimensions as well (for instance, murder), and there were many in the domain of church rules (such as skipping Mass); but you could go quite far in being unjust and hard-hearted in your dealings with subordinates and others without incurring the automatic exclusion you incur by sexual license.”

Thus, for all their differences in what constitutes the ideal of sexual life—marital sexuality or monastic celibacy—both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation produce sex as an overburdened site of moral worry and regulation. And we are not done with this burden; it is carried forward in the secular political life even of the United States, which is supposed to value individual and religious freedom.

As a way to ameliorate this burden, we propose a broad re-envisioning of sexual ethics. This new vision imagines a world in which sexual ethics has meaning for sexual practice, but is not burdened by having to account for the health of the nation, the status of a civilization, or the state of the world (all things which American politicians are happy to connect to sex). We also imagine a sexual ethic in which the question of sex is not one of whether we go “way beyond” or stay within certain “limits,” as Taylor suggests. Rather, we would suggest that we could think more capaciously (even more catholically?) about sex as a site for the production of values. Such a view of things—the possibility that sexual relations are practices through which values emerge and communities are made—is in sharp contrast to the current commonsense: to wit, sex is a moral problem, and conservative religion is the solution, for the sake of the individual and the community. We beg to differ.

Contemporary activists and critical theorists of many stripes—queer, feminist, womanist, gay and lesbian, for example have understood that sex, precisely because it is embedded in interpersonal relations, can help constitute new forms of social life. Paradoxically, then, the extraordinary moral pressure placed on sex—up to and including the fact that these pressures bear down especially hard on those whose sexual practices fall outside what anthropologist Gayle Rubin calls the “charmed circle” of a monogamous and reproductive heterosexuality—may also offer opportunities for reimagining the good life. This paradox helps to explain why some of the same people who are leery of moralizing (because they have so often been on the receiving end of conservative sexual moralism) also want to articulate sex’s values. Crucially, we cannot decide in advance what new forms of social life and ethical relation alternative sexual praxes might give rise to. (These “alternative sexual praxes” include homosexuality; in a culture that values marriage above all, they also include celibacy). What we can decide is that we are committed to freedom and that this commitment includes the realm of the sexual.

Such a project well may appeal to Charles Taylor, not because it is in any way Catholic (the capital “C” kind) or because he would particularly agree with most of the goods and values that such a project might produce. Nonetheless, this project could provide for an opening in secular imaginaries so as to admit into view the value of Catholic sexual ethics, a recognition Taylor currently sees as missing. However, such recognition does not require agreement. If the recognition Taylor seeks is currently “so hard to grasp” (at least for secular public life—we cannot speak for “the Vatican rulemakers”), this may be because we do not have a public life that values either religious or sexual freedom. Ironically, there might be more religious freedom if there were more sexual freedom. One of the ways in which Protestant dominance is maintained in American political life is through the constant invocation of rhetorics based on Protestant sexual ethics.

To accomplish this vision of a broader sexual ethic grounded in a broader notion of freedom, the secular state would need to step back from the business of policing sex (both in public bathrooms and in the courthouses of marriage certifications). And all of us—religionists and secularists—would need to break the stranglehold on our imagination currently exercised by a sexual ethic in which one is either committed to marriage or has no sexual ethic at all (or, at least no recognizable or worthwhile sexual ethic).

The sexual ethic we call for values not just freedom, but multiple forms of freedom— including religious and sexual freedoms. In so doing, it opens the door not just to different ideas about sexual practice, but also to a different vision of the practice of democracy.

It is this “secular” opening we want to pursue here. We want to suggest from the outset that the secular sexual imagination is more capacious than Taylor admits.

Although we do not share Taylor’s Catholic idiom, we too worry about the effects of the sexual ethic developed in the Protestant Reformation, a worry that haunts Taylor’s essay with its focus on the French Counter-Reformation. Like Taylor, we would locate the beginning of a modern sexual ethic in the Reformation and the various contentious and countering movements that it sparked. In fact, we would argue that it was the Reformation that has made sexuality so often stand in for morality tout court in modernity. There is no question that the Reformers actively made a shift away from celibacy and toward a focus on marital sexuality as a site of both moral idealization and concern.

This shift entailed not just a shift in ideals, but an intensification of moral concern. Sexuality is so central to the Protestant vision that in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Reformer John Calvin takes on the three vows of monastic life, obedience, poverty, and celibacy—only by criticizing celibacy. (Having completed a long critique of celibacy, he lets it stand in for criticism of the other two, which he does not pursue, “Lest we seem to criticize every little point too spitefully.”)

Sex provided a means of distinguishing the Protestant way of life from its Catholic forbears. Not only did the idea that Protestant clergy should marry distinguish them from both celibate clergy and the monastic life of Catholic religious calling, but marriage and the idea of the individual householder provided a fundamental distinction between the Protestant vision of human being—as the individual who stands alone before God, responds to God’s individual calling, and manages an individual household—and the Catholic vision of communal being. It was not just a vision of moral purity that was wrapped up in the Protestant sexual ethic; an entire way of life was crystallized around the vision of the individual householder and his commitment to marriage. This was a distinctly gendered vision; and whatever else one wants to say about the Catholic ideal of sexual purity and monasticism, a spiritual calling to celibacy provides women a legitimated means to resist marriage and some of the strictures of gender roles.

We thus agree with Taylor that the singularity of this Protestant vision, including its disregard for the spiritual and material practice of celibacy, creates a set of problems for modern life, just as does the Counter-Reformation’s singularity of focus on sexual purity. But our concern is not just with the loss of spiritual and moral possibility; our concern is also with how this particular vision of sexual life and, indeed, of modern life as a whole becomes intertwined with the nation-state, including with presumably secular nation-states like the United States.

Despite the putative separation of church and state, one of the major places in the U.S. where religion and the state remain entwined is around sexuality, specifically at the point of marriage, where religious officials are actually empowered to act on behalf of the state. And whenever politicians talk about marriage laws, they nearly always do so with reference to religious commitments—and the political affiliation or philosophy of the policymaker doesn’t much matter in terms of this outcome. Whether it’s George Bush invoking his Christian views in a Rose Garden press conference to explain his support of an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Constitution before the 2004 elections, or Democratic presidential hopefuls naming “religion” as the reason they support civil unions but not gay marriage; whether it’s former Senate majority leader Republican Bill Frist calling marriage a “sacrament,” or Democratic Senator Robert Byrd reading from his family Bible on the floor of the Senate in the 1996 debate over the Defense of Marriage Act: when it comes to sex, a particular set of religious (and, we’d argue, specifically Reformed Protestant) assumptions inform the law of the land.

And yet, if marriage is really a religious concern, we wonder why the secular state is in the marriage business at all. The secular state’s commitment to marriage seems to fail the Constitutional promise of the First Amendment on all counts. If the state’s interest in defending traditional marriage is based on religious principle, as so many politicians claim, it fails what is termed the “disestablishment” clause: the principle that the government should not establish or endorse any particular religion or any religion at all. Moreover, when the state restricts the marriage franchise to heterosexual couples it also fails the religious freedom clause, which generally prohibits government interference in religious practice. This is so because many mainstream Christian churches as well as Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish congregations do perform marriages between same-sex couples. Nevertheless, religiously-sanctified same-sex marriages are not recognized by the state.

Why is the state picking and choosing which religious “sacraments” to recognize? We believe the state should not be restricting freedom in this way, and, therefore, should not be legalizing marriages of any kind. The state could find ways to support relationships without abrogating either religious or sexual freedom, whether by offering civil unions to everyone or though other forms of support. Freedom may be the most idealized keyword in U.S. public life. Nevertheless, when it comes to sex, the high value set on freedom comes crashing to the floor. As the contradictions of U.S. laws regulating marriage show, a robust religious freedom is a condition of possibility for the realization of sexual freedom. As long as specifically Protestant notions of the good life and of good sex versus bad sex form the bedrock of “secular” commonsense, not to mention supposedly “secular” law and policy, American ideals of freedom and equality are cramped at their root.