Newness is a fascinating, and very loaded concept.  It expresses ideas of innovation and progress, as well as rupture and substitution.  Whether presented in the form of prophetic revelations, revolutionary ideologies, or consumer branding, “the New” is always wrapped in a combination of promise and threat – it promises to improve upon the old, while threatening to eclipse and even replace it.  Newness inspires hope as well as fear, with a provocative power that sometimes borders on the messianic.

It is hardly surprising then that evangelical Protestants, for whom “authentic faith” is all about radical rebirth and regeneration, have historically placed so much stock in things new and improved, often against heavy resistance in their own ranks.  There were the “New Light” evangelicals, whose religious enthusiasm inspired mass conversions in the eighteenth century, but also led to historic schisms. In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney promoted “new measures” of revival, generating celebrity while drawing his own share of detractors. The 1940s saw the emergence of the “new evangelicalism” (version 1.0), a self-conscious effort by the likes of Carl Henry and Billy Graham to recover the evangelical brand from fundamentalists.  The “New Christian Right” of the 1970s was a reactionary juggernaut that redefined the arena where evangelical political and cultural activism took shape.

The point is not to downplay the actual newness or significance of growing evangelical centrism—or as I prefer to call it, plasticity—in contemporary US politics and public culture, but rather to think about this shift in relation to evangelicalism’s long and fraught history of constant renovation. This is important because every new movement and shift in the field of evangelical engagement stands in tension with its densely layered past, and this tension can be felt most acutely by participants on the ground. Exacerbating the tension further is the fact that virtually all known varieties of evangelical religiosity, whether they are branded as “new” or “old,” rely on the common (but conflicting) belief among participants that what they are doing is closer in spirit to the ministry of Jesus, and truer to the letter of biblical law.

Several years ago I did fieldwork among socially engaged evangelicals who sought to mobilize popular support for social outreach initiatives in predominantly conservative congregations. The resulting book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, focused on individuals who would likely gravitate toward, or at least be sympathetic to the current “new evangelical” agenda. Yet my research also showed that socially engaged evangelicals occupy very complex positions in the wider milieu of white evangelicalism. They engage in ministry activities that many churchgoers admire and even valorize, but their efforts also bring out lingering disagreements, fears, and doubts about the future of evangelism, and intensify longstanding debates about whether the mission of the church is ultimately meant to be a proselytic or social one.

Rather than representing one side of that debate, the socially engaged evangelicals I observed often found themselves caught squarely in the middle of it, seeking to draw both inspiration and institutional legitimization from multiple strands of Protestant tradition, from the defense of strict biblical orthodoxy and personal pietism to the millennialist optimism of nineteenth-century social reforms and the prophetic justice orientation of Martin Luther King.

All of these influences make up an intriguing mélange of ideals and sensibilities that animate the moral universe inherited by today’s evangelicals.  They are the reasons we perceive evangelicalism as a field in constant flux, oscillating between paths of engagement and separatism, progressive reform and reactionary protest.  The reality is that much of the time these apparently polarized impulses are actually coexisting and overlapping throughout the evangelical subculture, even within the same denominations, churches, and small groups.

For those evangelicals who stand committed to one path of engagement over another, the matter of newness is often unambiguous—in with the new, out with the old, the only way forward.  But for others, perhaps a more reserved majority of non-activists, newness is a motivational framework that is at once extremely attractive and problematic.  This is because any tradition that thrives on newness must also seek to protect the continuity of tradition, paradoxical as all that might seem. As we evaluate the potential long-term effects of evangelicals gradually (and partially) moving away from the religious right, we should remain mindful of the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that will fuel their movements and at the same time restrain or subvert them.  This is not just about a pendulum swinging back and forth from right to left, though this will almost undoubtedly occur over time. In a grander sense, it is about agonistic and heroic quests for newness, and evangelicalism’s enduring struggle to be continually reborn.

Everson v. Board of Education

As Terry Eastland notes in his commentary on these two cases, “most of the religion-clause cases decided by the Supreme Court” in the wake of Cantwell have involved “federal litigation over religion-clause claims against states.” This is in contrast, he observes, to the first 150 years of Supreme Court religion-clause jurisprudence when all of the very few cases heard by the Court “involved claims against the federal government.”

On the one hand, this geographic shift has meant that formalized practices of religious establishment in individual states are henceforth subject to scrutiny and challenge. On the other, the application of the disestablishment principle to the states has also contributed, I’d argue, to the plaints of many Christians that a monolithically secular state is driving religion from public life. What we have is a regionalization of public conflicts over the place of religion and religious people in public life and in the state. This “and” is necessary, for the public is not the state—a confusion that regularly trips up public debates about the meaning and practice of religious freedom in the United States.

Christian dominance in American public life—while a truism—is itself not monolithic in practice. Instead, we might better speak of religious cultures, plural, and of secular negotiations. Particular Christianities are dominant in some states and regions in the U.S. in ways that strain against a larger overlay of mainline Protestantism as the baseline for what both national religious culture and national secular identity have meant historically. I’ll come back to this point.

Although he may seem like too easy of a target, former Senator and, now, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s conflation of the state and the public square is illuminating precisely because it is not exceptional. In a notorious February 2012 appearance on “This Week with George Stephanopolous,” Santorum proclaimed his expansive vision of First Amendment free exercise: “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country. This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion.” Santorum went on to express his visceral disgust at those who would bar religious people from the public square, seamlessly shifting his focus from the state to the public square. Making then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association stand in as the ur-moment of this enforced bracketing of religion from all of public life, Santorum glossed Kennedy’s speech: “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 in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?”

This is, pardon the pun, a rather gross misreading of what Kennedy actually said. But, what interests me here are the following: (1) the way Santorum effortlessly elides the public square with the state and (2) Santorum’s elevation of free exercise over disestablishment as the living pulse of religious freedom. Minimizing—if not outright denying—disestablishment licenses the hyperbole of Santorum’s claim that the state can set no limits on the reach of “the church” into its operations. To be sure, Santorum’s language was very colorful, but his analysis and the ressentiment it bespeaks are broadly shared among evangelical Christians and a growing number of conservative Catholics.

As Janet R. Jakobsen and I stress in our book Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, it matters a great deal to possibilities for agonistic democracy and meaningful religious freedom whether one sees the two components of First Amendment religious freedom—disestablishment and free exercise—as separable or interstructuring. In our view, and we are hardly legal outliers on this question, disestablishment is the structuring condition for free exercise. Otherwise, those who are religiously different or not religious at all may well find their lives not simply less admired and valued than those who belong to the dominant religion; they may find they have diminished legal status.

And yet, in public political debates over the meaning of religious freedom, too often we see the very balkanization replayed by Santorum: proponents of more religion in U.S. public life and in government (and let’s be clear, not just any religion, but of particular Christianities) lean heavily on the free exercise component and underplay disestablishment. Conversely, many secularists—not all secularists, to be sure, but many—stress the absolute separation of Church and State and minimize free exercise.

At least in principle, the appearance of religion in public spaces or the use of religious language and arguments in public debates need not equate to the state’s endorsement of any religion at all nor need it lead to religious dominance. To quote one of my favorite lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia Limited; or, the Flowers of Progress: “That’s the theory but in practice, how does it act?” Not so well, as it happens. This is because U.S. public life operates under conditions of Christian dominance. Particular Christian practices and claims can “float,” sometimes being overtly marked as religious, at other times passing as secular, resulting in a situation Jakobsen and I have elsewhere termed “Christian secularism.”

The public itself (as an ideal) and public spaces (in their messy practices) are prepared in advance to credit Christian assumptions and value claims as integral to public life and national character. In such a context, it can be hard for those who are religiously different and those who are not religious at all to get a word in edgewise. In addition, these same Christian assumptions can pass into the state as the secular logic of universal morality and civic order, as we have seen in numerous state laws and referenda about same-sex marriage. I am writing these words a day after North Carolina voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment One, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Although many liberal and progressive secularists had hoped, even expected, that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 heralded the end of religion’s role in public debates and policy decisions, this hope has not been realized. And that’s an understatement, as any quick perusal of the roiling election-year debates over abortion and same-sex marriage show. Again, witness North Carolina. Or the debates over the provisions for contraception coverage in the Affordable Healthcare Act.

On one level, the hope was for an end to the influence of conservative religion—really, conservative Christianities—on policy-making, particularly in issues concerning sexual life. But, it was also, for many secularists, a desire for the elimination of any trace of religion in the U.S. public sphere, as if religion were a toxin from which they needed or even had a fundamental right to be protected. This too shows too measly an understanding of the scope of religious freedom and the parameters of agonistic democratic engagement. Democracy does not always feel good. In everyday life, we bump up against each other and may well be discomforted by differences we cannot assimilate or will not understand. And this is among the reasons we need courts to protect the rights and freedoms of unpopular minorities: so that bumps will not turn into overt violence or formalized exclusions. Encounters with difference, including with moral difference, are not a hostile take-over nor take-away, nor an instance of “indoctrination”—whether of religious values or secular. (Given the entwinement of Christian values with the values of the secular in the United States, the “or” in that previous sentence needs critical pressure as well.)

In using the loaded word “indoctrination,” I am invoking numerous heated debates about higher education and, in particular, the claim that universities are dominated by liberals and indoctrinate their students into secular values—thereby, severing them from their families of origins. Indeed, just such a claim was made by Rick Santorum in the very same interview in which he declared his nauseated response to Church-State separation.

The word “indoctrination” also makes a curious appearance in Everson. At issue in that case were reimbursements approved by the township of Ewing, NJ, and paid out to parents for money they spent busing their children to schools, whether public or Catholic. A local tax-payer challenged the payments to the parents of parochial school students as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. A split court (5-4) held that the use of such public monies did not unconstitutionally establish religion in the state. Fascinatingly, even the four dissenters agreed with the logic of the decision—namely, for a wall of separation between Church and State. The expansive terms of Justice Hugo Black’s conception of disestablishment could easily have been penned by any one of the four dissenters. Here’s Justice Black, writing for the 5-member majority:

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever from they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between Church and State.” Reynolds v. United States, supra, 98 U.S. at page 164.

I always discuss the Everson case in my undergraduate class on “Religion, Sexuality, and American Public Life.” I sketch the basic issues in dispute for this case, tell them it was a split decision, and then show them the above passage from the majority decision. In light of this purple passage, I ask them what they think the holding was. Inevitably, they think the Court ruled against public funding for buses to Catholic schools.

Like my students, I share the dissenting justices’ puzzlement that the majority could have put a bus-sized hole in the fabled “wall of separation.” But the larger lesson here, beyond providing my students a quick First Amendment jurisprudence 101, is that the sharing of general principles (here, the “wall of separation”) does not yet tell us anything about how they will be set down in practice. Moreover, the wall described in Justice Robert H. Jackson’s dissent seems to call for refortifying dominant Protestant notions of what secularism should look and feel like in practice. He does so via a stunning comparison-contrast between a Catholic emphasis on education as indoctrination into faith and a—well, what exactly?—Protestant/secular/Protestant-secular emphasis on neutrality and the value of mature adult “choice.” Justice Jackson writes:

It is no exaggeration to say that the whole historic conflict in temporal policy between the Catholic Church and non-Catholics comes to a focus in their respective school policies. The Roman Catholic Church…does not leave the individual to pick up religion by chance. It relies on early and indelible indoctrination in the faith and order of the Church by the word and example of persons consecrated to the task.

Our public school, if not a product of Protestantism, at least is more consistent with it than with the Catholic culture and scheme of values. It is a relatively recent development…organized on…the premise that secular education can be isolated from all religious teaching so that the school can inculcate all needed temporal knowledge and also maintain a strict and lofty neutrality as to religion. The assumption is that after the individual has been instructed in worldly wisdom he will be better fitted to choose his religion. Whether such a disjunction is possible, and if possible whether it is wise, are questions I need not try to answer.

The spirit of education conjured in this passage may well reveal its own “romantic yearnings”—to draw on the language of Winnifred Sullivan’s contribution to this forum—for a unified secular culture. However, as the Justice’s toggle between not quite Protestant, but not not-Protestant either suggests (“Our public school, if not a product of Protestantism, at least is more consistent with it…”), this unified secular culture—the fantasy of it, at least—is linked historically and imaginatively to what Robert Orsi has termed a “domesticated Protestantism tolerable within [the secular learning cultures of] the academy” that emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

If this domesticated Protestantism did not need to plead its case in the classroom, this is because its style of personhood and structures of feeling were the very building blocks of secular public education—Protestant building blocks mistaken for walls of separation. Increasing religious diversity in the United States, including diversity among Protestants, has called many of Justice Jackson’s operative assumptions into question. I suspect that the justices in the majority in Everson did not quite anticipate the wild contemporary landscape of American religious pluralism either.

But there are also important connections to Sullivan’s discussion of “The world Smith made.” If religious authorities now find themselves in the ironic position of appealing to the secular state to enforce sectarian orthodoxies, one of the ongoing and crucial laboratories for this contest between discipline and dissensus will be public school classrooms. The mission—a term I choose with great deliberation—Justice Jackson attributed to the secular public classroom is not and never was innocent of religious domination. Those of us concerned about attacks on public education—from budget cuts to the right wing’s politicization of curriculum—would do well to remember and mark the specific histories of domination on which we stand our ground in the name of First Amendment freedoms of religion and of speech.

Evaluating the resulting history in any sort of objective manner is perplexingly difficult, for the history of toleration, like toleration itself, is a deeply partisan phenomenon. Far from being a stable category or experience, toleration is fundamentally a relationship, and inherently an ongoing, ever-evolving relationship, the content of which varies significantly depending on the parties involved. For example, one can say that there was toleration in the Ottoman Empire as well as the British Empire, but one bolstered a form of rule dominated by Muslims, while the latter did the same for Anglicans. Each group lived in a situation of tolerance, but would have found itself living in very altered circumstances in the other’s system. Does that make one or the other less tolerant?

The tendency to see toleration in singular fashion—as “the idea of toleration” (for example in Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration came to the West) or a distinguishing feature of, say, Dutch, British, or American history—obscures the partisan dimension of toleration. We continue to take a single manifestation or interpretation of toleration (most popularly, in theories of liberalism, that of John Locke) as representative of the whole rather than as what it is: merely one manifestation among many. In the case of Locke and the Anglo-American world it is, of course, a highly influential version of toleration. However, to assume that it is then a universal model by which all others, past and present, can and should be evaluated is to confuse the general with the particular: the main problem with the history of toleration I am highlighting here.

Another indication of the partisan dynamic unwittingly preserved in the history of toleration is the tendency to look for a person or place that best embodies the ideal of toleration. Here too, one’s answer depends on one’s predilections. Was it the era of convivencia in Medieval Spain? The Dutch Republic? Sixteenth-century Poland-Lithuania? France under the Edict of Nantes? Britain after the Glorious Revolution? Pennsylvania? Mughal India? Roger Williams? Sebastien Castellio? Erasmus? Pierre Bayle? Baruch Spinoza? The predominance of early modern European history and Protestant thinkers in the scholarship on the history of toleration betrays its close alliance to the history of the rise of Protestantism as well as the rise to global dominance of Europe and the United States. Indeed, into the twentieth century many thinkers made little distinction between the two.

Traditionally, Roman Catholicism has played the role of great antagonist in such histories of toleration. Indeed, many of the earliest histories of the rise of toleration were crafted as denunciatory histories of the Inquisition. Roman Catholics have tended to embrace the cause of religious toleration (or, nowadays, religious freedom) only when they have been a minority faith: Elizabethan England, for example, or colonial Maryland. One need not hold this as a reproach against Catholics, for many of the great advocates of religious toleration have been belonged to a minority faith agitating for greater rights and recognition: Jews and Quakers in Cromwellian England; Lutherans in the Dutch Republic; Baptists most anywhere before the nineteenth century.

One of the great transitions between the early modern and the modern period is the role that toleration, or religious freedom, has come to play in various groups’ battles for wider recognition, acceptance, or power. In the earlier period, it was rare for someone to argue in favor of toleration or religious liberty per se, without attaching it to the cause of a particular group. At the same time, when an individual did do so, such as Baptists or Separatists who regularly spoke in favor of toleration of Jews, Muslims, and a variety of Christians, it clearly fit their partisan needs as members of a group that either had given up pretensions towards universal appeal or, in the case of the early Quakers, were convinced of the persuasive power of their message in any situation free of constraint. Likewise, when members of a Protestant establishment, such as Hugo Grotius or William Chillingworth, spoke up in favor of tolerating a variety of opinions, it was also with the assumption that eventually the variety of opinions would coalesce around the truth, which they never doubted resided more in their official church than any other.

Ever since the Age of Revolutions in the late eighteenth century, figures have increasingly spoken out in favor of religious tolerance and freedom per se. However, here too one can easily detect a partisan dimension. American Protestants did not fervently advocate religious freedom in the nineteenth century because they anticipated the flourishing of Buddhism in the United States but rather because it helped to justify the predominance of Protestants in a nation without an established church and a growing Roman Catholic minority. Likewise, Roman Catholics have not now embraced the cause of religious freedom because they believe it will diminish their position within the United States. None of this is pointed out in an effort to discredit or demean the various advocates of religious liberty. It is simply to point out that they are not all advancing the same cause, their use of similar terminology notwithstanding. The struggle over religious freedom today has significantly different connotations than it did in 1780s Virginia or 1650s England or 1520s Saxony.

By treating toleration as a distinct, identifiable phenomenon rather than a problem that needs to be explained, we are in danger of depriving toleration of any analytical power while preserving it as the polemical tool that it has always been. My point is not to say that others have it wrong and I (or some particular philosopher) have “it” right. Rather, it is to just emphasize how unstable a category toleration is. And that should not be surprising given the relational nature of toleration. I doubt if there ever can be a situation in which what is really at stake is an abstract quality that stands above the constituent parties. That would simply be a different twist to the relationship (like the self-proclaimed secular state in India or Turkey or France). To deploy the term tolerance without specifying the context and make-up of the toleration in question is simply to adopt and champion a particular partisan stance, often one with deep roots in European history. It is not to employ a powerful, never mind objective, category of analysis.

The partisan dimension of religious tolerance need not be read as a sign of hypocrisy or a fatal flaw in thinking. Rather, it should be accepted as inherent in the topic of toleration itself. For toleration, however described, whether as an ideal state of being, or religious freedom, religious liberty, secularism, or pluralism, is not an objective status or transcendent condition. Toleration is a relationship—and a deeply, inescapably partisan one, for it involves a relationship between two or more different parties, none of whom will all be equally satisfied with whatever their particular relationship happens to be at a given moment. It is extremely difficult if not downright impossible to write a history of toleration that is not partisan. The least we can do, I would suggest, is be honest and open about this difficulty.

There is, of course, a history of toleration out there. Anyone can immediately conjure up certain associations and images when that phrase is invoked. However, exactly what comes to mind would, I am certain, vary significantly depending on the mind in question. Is it the struggle of Jews for recognition in Pieter Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam? Of Catholics in Ireland? Of Mennonites in Switzerland? Remonstrants in the Dutch Republic? Greek Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire? Episcopalians in Scotland? Muslims in English Tangiers? Hindus in Portuguese Goa? Or Dutch Protestants in Japan? And so on. Is it really our job to champion one narrative over the other?

Rather than evaluate the relations (some more fraught than others) between different religious groups along a presumed universal scale of tolerance, we should focus on the specifics of the situation at hand. Once we can appreciate how the “rise” of tolerance in a particular place, such as Ireland, would affect the relationship between the various groups involved (in this case, a demographic majority of Roman Catholics versus smaller populations of various Protestants, including Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and the Church of Ireland—but not, before the nineteenth century, Jews, Muslims, or other non-Christians), then we can embark on a fuller discussion of what it is we are talking about when we talk about religious freedom (as Saba Mahmood suggests with regard to the Middle East).

The challenge for today’s world, in which global awareness and implications are unavoidable in a way they were not in the sixteenth century, is to come up with a method to approach the history of toleration that can capture its perpetual, ongoing, and, I would say, never-ending nature. However widespread and powerful religious unity and conformity was in medieval Europe, one can still find exceptions—bits of diversity that kept questions of toleration alive long before the appearance of Protestants. And if one goes back further, to the late Antique period, then one returns to a world of religious diversity in which the Roman Catholic Church was but one of many contenders (indeed for the fervently Christian Roger Williams everything went downhill once the emperor Constantine converted and fused his church with his empire). Toleration in some form or another has been around for a long time. It will not go away, though it will change. We need to move away from models of rise and fall, progress and decline, and towards a way to capture the perpetual motion machine that tolerance really is. Only then will the ideas of long-gone Protestants retain relevance in a world where it is now Catholics who are taking the lead as advocates of religious freedom.

Several of the posts inaugurating this discussion of religious freedom, including Elizabeth Hurd’s and Peter Danchin’s, note that intrinsic to the modern understanding of this concept is the idea that religion is a matter of private conviction rather than of public performance, a matter of belief rather than of ceremonial. This understanding of religion has commonly, and correctly, been traced to tendencies that became dominant during the Reformation, as signaled by the Protestant critique of the Catholic ritual economy of salvation. It has less often been observed, however, that the separation of religion from such external matters was frequently expressed through more ancient Christian ideas, such as the distinction among the natural, civil, and ceremonial portions of the Mosaic Law. The last category had supposedly been abrogated by the Gospel and Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, which ended the sacrifices and other rituals of Judaism, all of which were regarded as no longer necessary for salvation. During the Reformation, many Protestants reinterpreted these ideas, posing again the question of the relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical powers, both within the Israelite kingdom when it existed and, subsequent to the promulgation of the Gospel, within a radically different economy in which, in Paul’s terms, “grace” was opposed to “law.”

Recently, historian Eric Nelson has argued that the notion of a “Hebrew Republic” as a model for thinking about the ideal relationship between Church and State influenced the development of religious toleration. Nelson is right to focus on the importance of such theological debates to modern ideas of polity, and especially of freedom of religion. It is clear that, even at a time when there were few Jews in England, and prior to the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, imaginations of the Hebrew Republic were central to the articulation of the idea of religious freedom by many British Protestants. However, this Republic has often served as a negative example, of a time when law and religion were inappropriately commingled, to the detriment of both. The more “spiritual” dispensation of the Gospel represented, at the same time, the birth of a State that was secular in the sense of being clearly divided from the matters of conscience that, as opposed to the externals of Mosaic ceremonial, were now regarded as constituting the essence of religion.

I have become increasingly convinced that what marks this Reformation discourse of secularism and religious freedom as Christian is precisely its use of Judaism as a foil or counterexample, in addition to its transformation of other associated theological distinctions such as Paul’s oppositions between “flesh” and “spirit” or “law” and “grace.” But it is also clear that these transformations did not constitute a simple continuity with what had come before. Indeed, to borrow Charles Taylor’s characterization of the development from Christianity to secularism, this represented something like a “mutation” of tendencies already present. This characterization is apt, as long as we do not take it to imply any standard of orthodoxy: all living organisms are, in a sense, mutations.

During the same period that Taylor identified as central to the transition between Christianity and secularism—namely, Deism—we witness an exacerbation of several tendencies that were bound up with the self-definition of Christianity as against Judaism. I will identify and briefly discuss three such tendencies: internalization, universalization, and the critique of heteronomy.

Internalization is the easiest to grasp, and the most obvious. Indeed, as noted above, the redefinition of religion as “belief” or “conscience” has been widely pointed to as a dominant tendency in the modern treatment of religion. Deists simply took this much further, condemning nearly all ceremonial as irrelevant to the essence of natural religion. While John Toland used the irrelevance of ritual to salvation as an argument for the naturalization of the Jews and the toleration of their peculiar forms of worship, others, such as Thomas Morgan, contended that, as religion had nothing to do with external practices, the idea of an “established religion” (as opposed to an “established Church”) was a contradiction in terms. Although he argued against ecclesiastical oppression, Morgan redefined religion as pure freedom and argued that it could, in principle, never be coerced.

The self-definition of Christianity as a universal dispensation, which went back to Paul’s idea that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek,” also accelerated with the Deist condemnation of anything resembling particularism, including not only the strange ritual laws observed by the Jews but also the miracles and revelations on which these laws were based, which violated natural law. Deists instead grounded natural religion on the eternal, and universal, foundation of human reason. In keeping with this distinction, Matthew Tindal, who argued that Christianity was merely a “republication” of the religion of nature, invoked the bifurcation in antique Gnosticism between the New and Old Testaments, between Christ and the God of the Jews. With this rejection of its Jewish heritage, Christianity could become truly excarnated and realize its full potential for universality.

At the same time, this bid for universalism constituted a rejection of what were, according to Tindal, the “merely positive and arbitrary” ritual laws of Mosaic tradition. What Deists most objected to in these laws was the manner in which they violated human autonomy, which depended on our ability to know and perform the moral law. Anathema to this notion of autonomy, and therefore abhorrent to Deists, was the idea of a God who could command us against reason and instinct, of a Yahweh who demanded blood sacrifices and promulgated his statutes as arbitrary fiat. Carl Schmitt was right to point to radical Protestantism and Deism as moments of exclusion of both the miracle and the sovereign “exception”; however, in so doing, he was defending the prerogatives of the God of the Hebrew Bible, at least as understood by Deists.

A number of these ideas were taken up and systematized by Immanuel Kant, who defined Enlightenment in opposition to heteronomy, or the acceptance of external authority. Kant’s thorough identification of religion with both reason and the internal sense of duty, led him, in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, to label Judaism as “really not a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people…under purely political laws…[that] are directed to absolutely nothing but outer observance.”

The redefinition of religion as freedom of conscience simultaneously “liberated” religion from control by the State and rendered this freedom nugatory. Indeed, the same collapsing of religion into conscience or a purely internal condition, which led Thomas Morgan to argue for the impossibility of an “established religion,” is entirely compatible with any degree of enslavement of the body, now shorn of any spiritual value. That this is true is shown by Thomas Hobbes’ use of very similar arguments in the name of an absolute sovereignty in which the ecclesiastical power has been collapsed into the civil. I therefore think Peter Danchin is right to invoke Michel Foucault’s description of Kant’s kingdom of ends as a “contract of rational despotism with free reason.”

In this we arguably see one of the distinguishing features of modernity that cannot be explained on grounds internal to the theological debates that form part of the genealogy of religious freedom. Instead, there is the possibility of reading these trajectories I have outlined—toward internalization, universalism, and autonomy of conscience—as epiphenomenal to the rise of bureaucracy or the Panopticon. While the line between inner and outer, private and public, is inherently unstable, it is in these extreme theological formulations of religion as utterly incorporeal that we witness the construction of religion as precisely that object which cannot come into conflict with the State. In other words, this redefinition of religion represented a strategy for conflict avoidance, in the sense that it served the pragmatic objective of avoiding the possibility of intersection and friction between Church and State, and that it was flexible (or slippery) enough to be deployed differently, according to convenience, in different contexts.

Although these theological debates ended long ago, we are arguably still witnessing their aftermath. The Smith case (on peyote) discussed by Winnifred Sullivan in her post highlighted an “endgame” very similar to that outlined by Morgan or Hobbes: the point at which religion vanishes from the perspective of civil society or ceases as an independent power. The push-back against Smith signals a rejection of this (dis)solution of the problem of religion. At the same time, the inadequacies of this solution, as applied to other cultures that do not share the same set of theological presuppositions nor the same trajectory of modernization, have become increasingly apparent. Where we go from here is a question that cannot be answered by genealogy.

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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But writing for an audience that includes non-specialists and specialists alike—and specialists from many different fields at that—risks raising expectations for what we will cover. Jon Butler, for example, takes us to task for not including enough history; Molly Worthen suggests that we need more theology. Similarly, other reviewers have called for more constitutional law, political philosophy, and organizational sociology. Not to mention the members of many different religious groups who have written to ask why their group—the Quakers, say, or the Eastern Orthodox—are not featured more prominently. We readily concede that American Grace does not cover all of these subjects in depth. Perhaps, however, other authors will build on the themes, arguments, and data of American Grace to examine these other subjects in greater detail. And one of us (Campbell) is currently engaged in another project to go deep in examining one such topic discussed at length by Jon Butler—Mormonism.

David Hollinger, in contrast, does not call for anything, but instead hints at a lament for the state of religion as we describe it. We have been struck by his comment that the form of religion we describe is “bland” or, more pointedly, that blurred religious boundaries mean that Americans do not take their religion very seriously. Other critics, too, have commented on the tolerant religiosity described in American Grace, but unlike Hollinger, argued that such a religion is hardly worthy of the name. Wilfred McClay, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted that “Surely there is something ironic about preferring a form of religion that asks us to admire and study the great prophets and preachers while warning us against imitating them and their true-believing faith.” Like Hollinger, theologian Charles Mathewes accepts our empirical description of American religion, but unlike Hollinger, he rejects the idea that “bland is beautiful.” In a panel discussion at the 2011 American Academy of Religion annual meeting Mathewes argued that “American Grace is very bad news for American religion and civic life, because churches seem unable to offer a thick counter-narrative to contemporary society.”

If Americans do not take their religion all that seriously, or fail to insist on its superiority to other religions, does this mean that religion has lost its ability to inspire change—either for individuals or society as a whole? Of all the questions to arise in the commentary surrounding American Grace, this is perhaps the most interesting, important and, ultimately, impossible to answer. Have we reached the end of prophetic religion? Is ecumenism ineluctably unable to stir souls? Must a prophetic religion be intolerant of those who disagree? Our own history suggests not. The civil rights movement certainly involved a prophetic call for personal and social reform, yet united Americans of many different faiths. America would be a meaner place without the recurrent challenge to accepted ways that religiously-rooted social movements have posed throughout our history, but we’re unconvinced that prophetic religion is intrinsically incompatible with religious pluralism.

It would be churlish of us to offer point-by-point responses to such thoughtful and generous commentaries. But one point has come up in the discussion of American Grace, including the essays of both Worthen and Butler, that warrants a reply. Both raise a red flag over the following sentence in the book:

The First Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no law to curtail the free exercise of religion, but these sparse words do not fully reflect the way in which religious diversity is encoded in America’s national DNA.

In a recent symposium on American Grace, another commentator suggested that there are historians waiting to attack us in a dark alley because of this line, and that we probably regret ever having written it.

To the contrary, we have no regrets—although we have both decided to avoid dark alleys, at least when we know there might be historians around. At the risk of straining a metaphor to the breaking point, our point is simply that just as humans have a genetic code that shapes, but does not determine, their growth and development, so too was America set on a path that eventually led to our current state of—relative—religious harmony. For the Founders, religious diversity might have meant Presbyterians and Episcopalians, but the constitutional architecture they designed has enabled the conditions for harmony among a much wider array of religions. While constitutional guarantees are undoubtedly a necessary cause of religious tolerance, they probably are not sufficient. This is not a story of nature only; nurture mattered too. The constitutional prohibitions on the establishment of religion and wide protection for the free exercise of religion have interacted with other features of American society—immigration, civil society, public schools, the Cold War—to bring us to the point where, to borrow again from the language of genetics, the latent potential for religious tolerance has been “expressed.” None of this is to ignore the deadly manifestations of bigotry directed toward specific religious groups in America’s past, nor the current (albeit muted) antagonism toward Muslims, Mormons, and atheists. Just as our genes do not determine our destiny, these examples remind us that America’s DNA does not guarantee religious tolerance.

In his essay Torpey reminds us of the tensions arising from Islam’s presence in America, obviously a flashpoint of controversy for the current state of inter-religious relations. We say only a little about the public’s attitudes toward Muslims in American Grace but are now able to say more. Since the publication of our book we have collected another round of data, by returning to the same people we interviewed in 2006 and 2007. (Results from our latest round are soon to be published as an epilogue in the forthcoming paperback edition of American Grace). In this latest survey we dug deeper into Americans’ feelings about Muslims, by asking our respondents if they would approve of a mosque being built in their neighborhood. For comparison, we also asked how they would feel about a Christian church or Buddhist temple. The results are a classic case of interpretation hinging on perception. On the one hand, one could say that Muslims are welcomed. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that they would be fine with a mosque in their neighborhood. Yet on the other hand, Muslims are less welcome than Christians or Buddhists. More Americans object to a mosque (35 percent) than a church (8 percent) or Buddhist temple (25 percent).

While it presumably comes as no surprise that a mosque evokes a more negative reaction than other houses of worship, those who—like us—care about the state of inter-religious relations should still be concerned about the negativity toward Muslims. We are even more concerned, however, about the partisan flavor of anti-Muslim feeling. When we employ an arsenal of demographic, social, religious, and political characteristics to predict unease with a mosque, we find that politics matters most. One’s level of religious commitment matters not at all, while there are only slight differences across religious traditions, with evangelicals slightly more opposed to a mosque than anyone else. It is partisanship—whether someone identifies as a Republican or Democrat—that has the biggest impact on attitudes regarding a mosque and thus, by implication, toward Muslims. When holding everything else constant, 56 percent of strong Republicans are bothered by a mosque, compared to 24 percent of strong Democrats. That is a huge gap.

The overlap between partisanship and anti-Muslim sentiment is a potentially explosive combination, especially if opposition to Islam were to become a regular feature of conservative political rhetoric. While, today, such sentiments are only on the fringes of acceptable discourse, more incendiary anti-Islamism might very well inhibit the inter-religious bridging in personal relationships that, for other religious groups, has led to their place in the religious mainstream (cf. Catholics, Jews). Non-Muslims might be reluctant to befriend Muslims, while Muslims might be socially marginalized and thus radicalized.

In other words, there is nothing inevitable about religious tolerance, in spite of the nation’s metaphorical DNA. Mormons are an especially timely example. They are one of the most religiously insular groups in America and, accordingly, face opprobrium in some circles (cf. Mitt Romney).

Our newest data also reveals a second major finding—“creeping secularism”—which also raises questions about the future trajectory of religious tolerance in America. In American Grace we detail the growth in the Nones, the religiously unaffiliated, who are concentrated among younger Americans. Now, with our latest data, we see evidence that the rise in Nonery is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What we term “the second aftershock” has, in fact, measurably strengthened since the first of our Faith Matters surveys in 2006. Secularism is surging among the Millennial generation. The youngest Americans—18 to 25—are far more secular than even those age 26 to 30. Not only are they the most likely to disclaim a religious affiliation, they are less likely to attend religious services, believe in God, believe in hell, and say that religion is not important in their lives. Young people are drifting, maybe even running, away from religion. And the public has noticed the slow and steady creep of secularism; just in the last five years, more and more Americans report a diminished role for religion in American society.

We also find further evidence for a key claim in American Grace, namely that America’s receding religiosity, especially among the young, is largely due to an allergic reaction to the mixture of religion and conservative politics. As a result, the religious-secular divide has a partisan flavor, suggesting a parallel with the partisan nature of anti-Muslim sentiment.

There is, however, a big difference between attitudes toward Muslims and the non-religious. While only a small percentage of non-Muslim Americans are personally acquainted with a Muslim, a growing percentage of religious Americans know someone who is “not religious”—rising from 44 percent of Americans in 2006 to 51 percent in 2011. Just as homosexuals coming out of the closet and revealing their sexual orientation to family and friends is one cause of the increasing support for gay rights, so too as more secular and even atheist Americans express their views to close acquaintances, tolerance for secularism seeps through the broader population. This degree of bridging seemingly bodes well for the health of relations between religious and secular Americans.

On the other hand, the label of “atheist” remains anathema to most Americans. While younger Americans are more favorable toward atheists than their elders, on average they still view them negatively. Like attitudes toward Muslims, the negative perception of atheists can be explained by the simple fact that very few Americans know a self-described atheist. There just are not that many atheists to go around, although the creeping secularism in American society suggests that their ranks are growing.

Just as growing acceptance of Muslims is not a given, neither should we assume the inevitability of full inclusion for non-religious Americans, whether atheists or not. Mutual tolerance would suffer if heated rhetoric about the “other side” were to separate Americans into religious and secular bunkers. In American Grace, the basic story is that while our politics may be polarized along religious lines, our personal relationships are not. If polarization at the personal level were to replicate the polarization of our politics, hostility would replace acceptance.

How likely is it that America fractures along religious lines? Notwithstanding the alternative scenarios we have described, we are optimistic enough to think that, in time, Mormons, Muslims, and atheists will be fully accepted into the mainstream of American society. But likely is not the same as inevitable.

Which brings us back to public sociology. While our primary objective has been description and explanation of the state of religion in today’s America, we are also willing to offer a prescription. It is our hope that Americans continue to forge interlocking personal relationships across religious—and non-religious—lines. If American Grace nudges its readers toward building more such bridges, so much the better. A house divided cannot stand, no matter our national DNA.

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.

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.

Consider, first, Kahn’s comparison of modern democratic revolutionaries and early Protestants. To paraphrase: the trans-temporal, collective subject of the revolutionary sovereign, instantiated in every citizen, is a secularization of the mystical body of Christ, which the Protestant Reformation, in an act tantamount to “revelation,” had already transferred from the king and the sacraments to the inwardness of believers contemplating the scripture. Kahn is describing a double displacement of a mystical presence (from sacral monarch and sacerdotal forms to Protestant saints, and from Protestant saints and the Word to democratic subjects and their constitution) and then tracing a line of descent back to the sixteenth-century quarrel over the Christian concept of transubstantiation. A great deal of scholarship has been written about the Protestant legacy in American culture, and certainly the radicalization of some Protestant teachings, such as the importance of secular vocation, the internalization of religious discipline, the priesthood of the laity, and the lordship of God alone, lay the conditions for the English revolution of 1642-1651. Most eighteenth-century Americans counted themselves part of the Dissenting tradition, and they came to see their own quest for independence from the crown as continuing the Reformation and carrying forward the earlier Puritan revolution in England. (Even Tom Paine made use of evangelical rhetoric.) What they stressed, however, was not Kahn’s invented analogy to the transfer of the mystical presence but the righteousness of both religious and political resistance; both priestly power and political tyranny (whether of King Charles I or of the colonial authority) were illegitimate and deserved to be felled.

Kahn is simply invoking Protestant “legacyism” to unify his theory that revolution must involve a transfer of the sacred.  This narrowness of insight leads him to overlook (or not mention) significant facts about the Protestant Reformation (more specifically, the Puritan Revolution) that would have emphasized its modernizations rather than its atavisms. Thus, take Kahn’s assertion that the Puritan settlers imbued Americans with a permanent reverence for law. This is a statement so abstract as to mean multiple things, but the general sense, I gather, is that Americans have incurred some sort of cultural debt to the Puritans that they exhibit in their attitudes toward the Constitution and toward jurisprudence. One wonders how, for instance, decisions of the Warren court verify Kahn’s assertion: Engel vs. Vitale or Abington School District vs. Schempp (which, respectively, declared unconstitutional the formal observance of prayer and assigned Bible reading in public schools). Are these examples proof that when the Court refers to “the nation,” “national life,” or “the people” in its decisions, it is invoking a secularized theological concept? Of course, Kahn would counter that his notion of “political theology” encompasses concepts that, while not manifestly theological in content, amount nonetheless to “secularized” (displaced from their origin in) theology. The problem here, as with Schmitt’s logic, is that one can make a “secularization” of any idea by striking an analogy to a theological one if the only ground for the comparison is the analogy itself.

Consider, for instance, this statement: “The concept of sovereignty is incomprehensible if stripped of its theological origins.” Here is a case where the imperative to pinpoint an origin—a foundational point of authentic ownership—obscures a much more complex interaction of social and intellectual forces. Nathan Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity, has demonstrated how American national identity was “an impromptu creation” in which the past was re-written to make the Constitution its culmination. So far, this seems to support Kahn’s thesis. However, “the theological,” in this case, was not a foundation but a poly-vocal discourse in which social class defined lines of dissent over the identity of the sovereign and the limitations of the Constitution of 1787. Fears of elitism and centralization and fears of mobility and fragmentation enlisted diverse religious proponents. In the post-revolutionary period, Hatch argues, revivalistic evangelicalism posed an epochal populist challenge to the Whig predilections of Old Light Calvinism and Unitarianism. The attitudes of the moderate British Enlightenment and of the Federalists, which had their religious support in the New England colleges, were made to give way before a more radical democratic vision. Populist preachers, aligning the right to religious free conscience and egalitarian forms of worship with political liberties, gave religious credence to Jeffersonianism, and the evangelical masses laid claim to the birthright of the nation. This process was also accompanied by additional transformations in social practice that had nothing to do with religious observance and no manifest theological intention. Elected legislatures and large assemblies, Charles Taylor underlines in A Secular Age, emphasized “representation” rather than “incarnation.” These practices helped to legitimate the discourse of popular sovereignty by building on the continuity of past colonial institutions, such as elected assemblies, that had earned respect, not because they were sacred, but because they had protected local liberties against the imperial government.

Kahn’s “genealogical” technique yields no evidence persuading me that American political ideas originate in and are indebted to theological sources. Through his architectural technique, however, he does point to evidence supporting another notion of secularization: that ideas and symbols from a religious sphere of discourse can be commuted to a profane or non-theistic sphere of discourse, and vice versa, through the internal secularization of religious traditions. Religious messages, images, and stories routinely circulate in the U.S. through entertainment, mass media, literature, the arts, campaign writing and fundraising that are not under ecclesiastical control or exclusively religious in allegiance. The dissemination and transformation of religion, or the relocation of “the sacred” or “the spiritual,” through consumption, new technologies, democratic populism, and the emergence of the public sphere have been the subjects of abundant monographs in Cultural Studies and American Studies.

Unfortunately, the term “the sacred” is one of the most obscurant in our critical lexicon, and it often agglomerates phenomena that should be examined discretely. Talal Asad, in his Formations of the Secular, has criticized the common use of “the sacred”—designating a mythical, mysterious force that imposes itself upon subjectivity and space—and shown that it is constituted in the nineteenth century through misunderstandings of ancient sacramental practices. Anthropologists in comparative religion, working from the idea of “taboo,” fashioned the term “the sacred” to stand for a universal essence common to all religions. The term was subsequently taken up by theologians, and in the twentieth century it was expanded (by figures like Mircea Eliade) to designate the religious sources of all cultural and social formations. Kahn seems unaware of Asad’s criticisms and contributes to further mystification of this already abused term.

If Kahn were less devoted to spelunking the secular for its hidden “sacred” springs and more absorbed in identifying the practices of public religions, then he might have provided a more rounded account of America’s “social imaginary” and the variety of connections between theology, rhetoric, and the secular spheres that it has actually afforded. The current sociological theory of the “deprivatization” of religion is a model that does not precisely describe the U.S., since the melding of the secular and the religious has always been endemic here (though more visibly since World War II, because of the rise of the Religious Right). The interpenetration of the two has much to do with the rationale of prophecy: “an American idiom that is capacious and embraces many kinds of politics,” as George Shulman writes in American Prophecy. To borrow a term from Shulman, the mythology of the popular sovereign is a form of “vernacular theology,” woven out of the language and logic of prophecy, and many communities in America’s Biblical culture use this vernacular with different intentions. Kahn’s “architectural” technique presumes that the social imaginary produces a common, sanctified image of the sovereign, whereas in fact, as Shulman indicates, prophecy—joining the revolutionary past to an ongoing project of redemption—has frequently functioned to contest the identity of the sovereign rather than solidify it.

One such example, already mentioned, is the struggle that ensued in the post-revolutionary period between Federalists and Jeffersonians, in which populist preachers argued for the further democratization of church and polity by tracing their cause to both the revolutionary generation and the meaning of Biblical revelation. To fail in this project, as they charged of gentleman elites, was to betray the heroes of 1776 and the Protestant God who had elected them to enact His will by bringing about political and religious equality. In the run up to the Civil War, Confederate nationalists put forward a different image of the sovereign, which rejected the democratizing tendencies of the post-revolutionary populists who had carried the argument at that time. As Drew Faust has shown, in Confederate Nationalism, Southern elites justified secession as an act of “purification,” since the North, they alleged, had betrayed the sovereign and declined from the revolutionary generation’s republican virtues. Southern jeremiads framed these arguments in politicized prophetic idiom that imbued war death with providential significance, as if echoing patriotic narratives being elaborated by Northerners. Both bled and prayed, but the causes their sacrifices sanctified, the sovereign wills they obeyed, were different nations. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural straddles the dichotomy, but Kahn looks past it.

Most vividly, in our recent history, the civil rights and black liberation movements, reaching back to the legacies of abolitionism and the Social Gospel, reconfigured prophecy to unmask what James Baldwin called “the national innocence.” Most Americans, Baldwin explained in an address at Kalamazoo College in 1960, tend to envision their democracy descending uninterruptedly from an ancestor who was a “cross between a Celt and a Teuton,” who worshipped a “Puritan god,” and who bequeathed the wisdom of “New England” and the hope for high material status. To correct this misprision, social prophets in the fifties and sixties forced a revaluation of sacrifice and its soteriological relation to the problem of sin. Sacrifice can be interpreted as the price paid for sins under the judgment and wrath of God, or it can be understood as virtuous self-giving for a transcendent cause or contest with evil. Kahn tends to emphasize only the second meaning, but social prophets have often used the trope of judgment to contest the nation’s claim to be righteous and just. Pointing to God above the sovereign, they expose the exclusions and traumas—the repressed history—on which nationalism is founded. Pricking the bad conscience of Christians and democrats, who must atone for their self-deception and injustice, social prophets seek to transform the image of the national identity so that it can be more ethnically or racially inclusive. In the process, as Shulman has brilliantly demonstrated, social prophets empower disenfranchised communities by allotting to them the mission of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice mythically attributed to patriots. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. each called attention to caesuras in American history, ruptures between the faith of the revolutionary generation and those of its sons who have not completed but, in fact, traduced it. The cause of the founding fathers inspirited those whom the nation had sinfully, illiberally, forsworn to acknowledge as having a claim to its birthright. For King, the downtrodden’s chosen sacrifice, in the present, became the price of expanding freedom so that the promise of the nation’s founding ideals could be fulfilled. Since the sixties, liberation theology, mostly in academia, has also spoken on behalf of the silenced and the unrepresented through a prophetic discourse far more varied in its permutations than Kahn’s mono-myth of the popular sovereign. The plurality of these communities belies the uniformity of the American “We” to which Kahn repeatedly refers in his text.

There is, however, yet another, more fearsome, dimension to prophecy, also overlooked by Kahn, which might have had a bearing on his auguries about America’s prospects. The sacralizing of the American nation-state that concerns him has another dimension: messianic, millennialist, and apocalyptic. To return to Kahn’s own example—Lincoln’s sacrificial presidency—scholars have described how the North converted the president’s death and the attrition of the Civil War into a sign of redemption from sin that conferred upon the nation the divine mission of redeeming the world itself from evil. Already existing beliefs—that world salvation had begun with Christ, been continued with the Reformation, and given an earthly agent in the young republic—received a confirmation and an apotheosis. In the twentieth century, this belief in the nation’s messianic mission has coupled itself with secular liberalism’s project of universalizing human rights, by force if necessary. The rhetoric leading up to and justifying the Second Gulf War is one recent example, but the admixture of the two logics of redemption, millennial eschatology and secular teleology, has elicited valid suspicions of expansionism (markets, client states, geo-political influence) and accusations of ethically disproportional (mass destructive) means whenever the U.S. has embarked on a mission to make part of the world “safe for democracy.” During the Cold War, the realist Hans Morgenthau (who had thoroughly studied Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political) argued, in “Human Rights and Foreign Policy” and elsewhere, that the U.S. should resist the temptation to militarily impose its principles on the rest of humanity (meaning, the Third World), and Protestant realists writing for Christianity and Crisis magazine, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett, called down the Judgment of God on what they perceived to be American hubris. After Vietnam, New Americanists such as Sacvan Bercovitch linked American neo-imperialism to the country’s Protestant eschatological idioms. One might question the motives behind certain of these critiques of messianism (as I have queried those of the Christian realists in my book God-Fearing and Free), but, notwithstanding caveats, it is a fact that America has committed political evils in the name of saving the world as well for the cause of preserving itself. And the cause has often been identified in expressly theological language as a sacred obligation.

This has implications for the prognosis Kahn has made about the future of American democracy. He is no less skeptical of the latter than he is of liberalism. Kahn is a believer in the sovereign (there is no politics without it), but he thinks the myth of popular sovereignty obscures the actual locations of power. It is institutional elites, abetted by mass media, who actually exercise the power to decide, even if they defer rhetorically to the popular sovereign. Yet Kahn does not appear to believe that a reversal of this power relationship is possible or even desirable. Certainly, he is no populist. In an essay written for Boston Review in 2002, “Democracy Won’t Help,” Kahn answers “pleas for a new American politics, one of mature deliberation among public-minded citizens who are willing to take a sober second look at their aroused passions,” by calling them utopian and misplaced. Discussion, whether in the public sphere or in Congress, will not alter the minds of the masses. Kahn believes that the U.S. has a moral obligation to use its power for the defense of strangers, to stop massive human rights violations, such as those in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Kosovo; however, he believes the American people, by and large, are unwilling to make commitments of life and limb for something as abstract as human rights. A people cannot love a “universal,” and that, according to Kahn, is what a stranger’s humanity is. The alternative he proposes to discussion is strong executive leadership; without waiting for democratic or Congressional approval, the President can deploy “America’s immense military might,” and then mobilize the masses, pull them behind him, make them accept the exception. This recommendation follows from Kahn’s argument, in Political Theology, that the President play a Christological role when mediating the sovereign presence and committing it to sacrifice. As this mediator, he can inspire “love” for moral right that the “universal” cannot.

Whether we live in the age of Bush or the age of Obama, reliance on charismatic presidential leadership is hardly an attractive option. The twentieth century had already seen an expansion of presidential power and a concentration on “the drama of the presidential personality,” justified by the need for the use of force and, since World War II, the assumption of a permanent war economy and wartime government (see Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling:  American Literature and Presidential Government). The president, expected to rise above particular interests and embody the popular will, invokes the messianic promise of America, recycling rhetoric of New Israel or sacrificial bloodshed. Woodrow Wilson, who took Lincoln as his inspiration, transformed the meaning of World War I into revelation, confusing the goal of multilateral peace with the world-historical destiny of the U.S. as political agent of millennial peace, an eschatological vision that, having the status, in Wilson’s mind, of a faith, may have contributed to his staunch and self-defeating refusal to compromise on the terms of Congressional ratification of the League of Nations. Wilson has often been faulted for his “idealism,” but if Wilson is guilty, his successors have no less abused his Biblical idiom and redeemer role. After committing U.S. air and naval forces, in 1950, without seeking authority from Congress, Harry Truman assured Americans, “We will win [in Korea] because God is with us.” Eisenhower, sanctified as a type of “Moses” or “Daniel” by evangelist Billy Graham, who baptized the thirty-fourth president in the Oval Office following his inauguration, led the nation in a prayer from the Capitol before committing the country to an escalated arms race, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, author of the doctrine of massive retaliation, cited as his favorite Biblical quotation, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.” In John F. Kennedy’s celebrated 1961 inaugural address, he recalled Americans to “the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God” and required “high standards of strength and sacrifice” of his countrymen and allies. His frequently bellicose administration, which was committed to defeating (not containing) Communism, risked nuclear brinksmanship with Russia in defense of that civil religion. This was “God’s work,” as was the use of secret forces (JFK glamorized the CIA) to skirt public scrutiny. Allen Dulles (Director, 1953-1961), who saw the intelligence agency as the chief executive’s elite cadre, had chiseled into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32).” Dulles had in mind the truth of secret channels serving a public kept ignorant for its best interests, and in his book, The Craft of Intelligence (1963), he finds the genesis of his profession in the soothsayers, oracles, prophets, and holy men who revealed the future so that the ruler could act in harmony with divine intention. Lyndon Baines Johnson, building on the mystique and mythology of Kennedy-as-martyr (the Dean of the National Cathedral called the late president’s assassination a “new crucifixion”), would use his predecessor’s legacy to justify, among other causes, increasing American military involvement in Vietnam. Johnson exhorted Americans to re-consecrate the “God-given vision and determination to make the sacrifices demanded by our responsibilities” (remarks on the National Day of Prayer, 1965). Surely the American public has often been poorly informed, distracted, or ideologically blinded about the issues at stake in these periods, but charismatic executive leadership, especially in the Christological guise, has been no reliable substitute.

Kahn’s political theology describes the pathology of the imperial presidency, but he seems to think it is our boldest alternative, liberalism being such a leaky vessel and democracy so fundamentally irrational. At stake for Kahn, it seems, is the institutional elite’s ability to recognize political evil, see its rootedness in the duality of the human will, and therefore take steps to moderate and re-direct the country’s political behavior. Schmitt rued the Enlightenment (its secularism, humanism, rationalism) for eliminating the moral drama inhering in the political by making government mundane, concrete, positivistic. Kahn also shares the desire to reinvigorate our political life by restoring a sense of its “metaphysical” dimension, intuitively grasped by theology and its sacral texts. If Kahn were to pay more attention to actual prophetic speech instead of “secularized theological concepts,” he would see how public religions can work compatibly with liberal democratic politics, as the Social Gospel, the SCLC, the Catholic Worker movement, the Fellowship for Reconciliation, the National Council of Churches,  Clergy and Laymen Concerned, and Call to Renewal have done so in the past, to affirm norms, advocate for them, and contribute to the arguments over how they should be applied. The condition of greater cooperation is a healthy and tolerant public sphere, and this condition will not be fulfilled by impugning the Enlightenment’s legacy, especially when the denigration is premised upon a critique of Enlightenment and an account of secularization as tenuous as Kahn’s and Schmitt’s. Kahn makes some well-taken local arguments about the inconsistencies between liberal theory and democratic myth-making, between popular sovereignty and the actual locations of decision-making in American life, but America has thankfully never been quite the kind of political-theological project he depicts, and that has a good deal to do with the secular, humanist, rationalist traditions that Kahn disdains. Any liberal democracy that would rely for its political conscience on galvanizing nationalistic beliefs in shared experiences of pain, sacrifice, and mythic transcendence would be as spurious as Schmitt imagined most modern Western states to be, though they would be deserving of condemnation for reasons that Schmitt, the reactionary, considered too worldly to be moral.

Global Christianity, Global Critique

James K. A. Smith, seeking to trouble what he calls the “tidy and triumphalistic divide between secular critique and religious irrationality,” cites Saba Mahmood’s argument that what secular “critical reason remains blind to is its own disciplinary formation, its moral and structural unconsciousness.” In a more broadly sensual register, C.J.C. Pickstock suggests that “liberal theologians,” exemplified by Karen Armstrong, end up unwittingly underwriting a desensitized “modernism [that] denies the cognitive relevance of emotions, desire, commitment, and ritual performance.” And in an argument with very different—and not expressly theological—goals, Birgit Meyer names a “Protestant lens,” shaped by liberal Protestant thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Max Weber, that misreads Pentecostalism because it is “blind to the importance of sensation.” There are many good reasons to critique liberalism in its various guises, but anthropologists of Christianity should be particularly wary of too easily assuming that theological critiques of liberal Christianity—whether from the perspective of Radical Orthodoxy or from that of Pentecostalism­—are the same as anthropological or historical analyses of liberal Christianity, or that liberal Protestants and Catholics have not had their own robust, if imperfect, traditions of global critique.

That the metaphor of blindness should come so easily to scholars writing in relation to contemporary theorizing about the apostle Paul, himself traditionally portrayed as having been struck blind on the road to Damascus, might be understood as the latent effect of a powerful story. But in these scholarly narratives, the blindness of Protestants, of adherents to secular reason, and of liberal theologians is not redeemed by a visionary encounter—instead, their blindness persists as a position of handicap or ignorance, diagnosed by those critics who have the eyes to see.

For Pickstock, this means writing, not in the ethnographic present, but in the theological present, to effect a “recovery of the Christian liturgical tradition.” She seeks to demonstrate at once the uniqueness and the universality of Christianity and its ongoing liturgical blend of the senses and reason. Beginning with a seemingly offhand description of Christianity as a “great religion,” Pickstock does not catalogue any other religions among this group. In a meditation that is largely theologically declarative within a Christian scope, one of Pickstock’s few comparative statements contends that the “principle of solidarity” effected by Christian ecclesia disturbs worldly hierarchy and maintains a balanced tension between individual and tradition: “The spiritual does not obliterate the political, as for Hindu caste hierarchy, nor does the loyalty to the sovereign political center obliterate the dignity of the person, as for modern secular post-Hobbesian politics.”

Obliteration—the blotting out, rendering invisible, or annihilation of something—is a strong word to encapsulate both Hinduism and the modern secular in opposition to (an idealized) Christian solidarity. Obliteration, however, is not a word or image that fits well with what anthropologists such as Nicholas Dirks have shown to be the highly articulated and visible historical relationship among caste, the modern secular, and Christianity. Can the categories of spiritual, political, sovereignty, and person really obliterate one another, or are we ourselves responsible for what we see and the practices of recognition and illumination that we cultivate in conversation with a diversity of others?

With a focus on Pentecostal challenges to the “self-congratulatory,” “cool rationality of secular criticism,” Smith also argues with ritual to hand. Smith contends that paying attention specifically to Pentecostal worship, in which “bodies matter,” illustrates the hopeful and prophetic critique implicit in Pentecostal social imaginaries, compared to the rest of the world: “In many ways, the broader culture lacks the imagination to imagine the world otherwise, and it is the Pentecostal vision of a coming kingdom that can both contest and loosen up the petrified imagination of a world culture bent on consumption, violence, and the pursuit of power and exploitation.”

It seems that not only secular liberals are living with blinkers on—indeed, the entire world culture, Pentecostalism excluded, suffers a fate worse than physical blindness in its inability to see with its mind’s eye anything other than rampant greed and destruction. Working with rather tightly bounded categories—in which, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., can only be understood as theological, and not as secular—Smith’s goal is not to think through an “anthropology of the secular” but to use the liberal secular as a container for all that is not prophetic, not sensual, and “unquestioned.”

In stark contrast to the varieties of Christian universalism offered by Pickstock and Smith, Birgit Meyer suggests her concept of “sensational forms” as a path to understand how all “politico-religious formations,” and not just Christianity, are processes of mediation. This, too, one could argue, is a kind of universalism, working with (anxious) commitments to the categories of politics and religion, instead of dogmatic commitments to Eucharistic rites or Pentecostal eschatologies. But, with my admittedly disciplinarily focused eyes, Meyer’s is the universalism I best recognize as my own, even if I do not entirely agree with her account of what she calls the “Protestant lens” (largely because much early liberal Protestant “Religionswissenschaft” was obsessed with feelings, emotions, and bodily tremors, even if the desire to evaluate “good” and “bad” religion was not one in which Catholic pieties or newer Protestant “enthusiasms” fared well).

As Goldstone and Hauerwas suggest, the scholarly “lexicon” for analyzing Christianity has been profoundly shaped by “dominant strands of Protestantism”—a legacy of categorization with which all scholars of religion must contend, as Meyer shows. A diagnosis of liberal, secular blindness does not countenance the ways that anthropologists and religious studies scholars—some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish, some Muslim, some “secular,” etc.—have long been pointing to the historical and political situatedness of such intellectual categories as religion, magic, Christianity, and the senses in the course of acknowledging the limits of any attempt to categorize human commonality and diversity. Scholars with such different disciplinary formations and agendas as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Stanley Tambiah, Robert Bellah, Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad, and Leigh Eric Schmidt have undertaken this task under various rubrics and influences, including secular reason, anthropology, and liberal Protestantism. As Simon Coleman contends in his contribution to the volume, the Christian underpinning of anthropological discourse, while formative, “is not the only possible genealogy to trace.”

Anthropologists, dedicated as they are to a project of thinking about local knowledge and cultural difference undergirded by a commitment (again, an anxious one) to a notion of a “universal” human being, should be immediately suspicious of concepts such as “world culture,” or of any wholesale dismissal of a group—including liberal theologians and liberal secularists—as blind or otherwise sensationally challenged. Quite apart from how such generalizations and dismissals ignore the multiplicity of what blindness can mean in the sensorial life of an individual, the rhetoric of blindness seems too easy—and too categorical.

In this regard, Goldstone and Hauerwas’s argument about “disciplined seeing” might offer a more helpful perspective. Clearly rooted in a theological commitment to “the Church,” Goldstone and Hauerwas offer the proposition that “aspect-blindness,” what Wittgenstein called the condition of “human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something,” is a kind of partial seeing with potentially devastating consequences. In the case of the rationality of the modern bureaucratic state, they argue, “aspect-blindness turns out to encompass more than a debased ethical disposition; it turns out to name an indispensable modality of effective governance.”

In the close reading of Luke-Acts (largely contra Badiou’s Paul) that follows, Goldstone and Hauerwas propose that aspect-blindness might prevent anthropologists who are not themselves Christian from being able to adequately narrate Christianity in a manner that Christians themselves could recognize. Quoting the work of Kavin Rowe, they concur: “The resurrection of Jesus actually creates a new mode of seeing—‘light.’ To miss the resurrection of Jesus, therefore, is to forfeit the ability to see.” In their conclusion, however, Goldstone and Hauerwas suggest that despite its damaging and obscuring effects, “aspect-blindness might well be our normal condition.” Though Goldstone and Hauerwas may not agree, I contend that in a world in which Christianity is one way (really, multiple ways) of seeing and sensing amidst many others, the task of the anthropologist is not only to “faithfully” recast that vision but to place it in global, local, and temporally comparative perspective.

Being aware that we all have elements of aspect-blindness, but also that through the responsible exercise of disciplined seeing we have something worth saying—or worth exposing to the critique of others—is a starting point that anthropologists have long endorsed, if only imperfectly practiced.  In this regard, anthropology as an academic discipline shares a common disposition with the “critical liberalism” described by political theorist Courtney Jung: “The intuition that lies at the core of critical liberalism is that blindness to injustices, in which even people fighting to right wrongs fail to recognize patterns of unfairness all around them, is a permanent feature of social and political life.” The temptation to return to Paul being too great, I close with a reference to one of Paul’s letters that has been of profound importance to Pentecostalism, which, while acknowledging aspect-blindness, promises, as I cannot, that such impaired vision will be overcome: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”