Four guided missiles packed with explosive material hurtled into the morning sky. Though the day was brilliant blue and cloudless, no one saw them coming. They were aimed at a nation that did not see itself at war. Moreover, it was a nation convinced that missiles fired in anger no longer posed a serious threat to its security. The weapons were conventional in the strict sense: they did not carry nuclear warheads.

But the weapons and the attackers who launched them were anything but conventional. The 19 hijackers who commandeered four civilian jetliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, were not sent by a state or nation. They were not motivated by any purely secular or political cause. Born of religious zeal, they sought to strike a blow against a power they believed was in thralldom and service to Satan. Motivated by faith, they wanted to strike a blow for Allah.

Religion, which was supposed to have been permanently sidelined by secularization, suddenly appeared to be at the center of world affairs. Seemingly without warning, faith had transgressed the neat boundaries that organized the thinking and planning of our best and brightest policy makers, policy analysts, and scholars. Religious believers were supposed to stay confined to one side of the boundary that sealed private faith off from global public affairs—a boundary that separated the irrational from the rational, the mystical from the purposeful. However, guided by an astonishing combination of zealous faith and coolly calculating rationality, September 11 showed that organized religious believers could act with purpose, power, and public consequence.

And we—not only America, but the whole world of professional policy-making and analysis—were unprepared. As Robert Keohane, a leading international relations scholar, had the humility to admit shortly afterward:

The attacks of September 11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relentlessly secular with respect to motivation. They ignore the impact of religion, despite the fact that world-shaking political movements have so often been fueled by religious fervor. None of them takes very seriously the human desire to dominate or to hate—both so strong in history and in classical realist thought. [emphasis added]

In his own post-9/11 analysis, however, Keohane also had the honesty to say: “Since I have few insights into religious motivations in world politics, I will leave this subject to those who are more qualified to address it.”

This edited volume picks up where Keohane left off. In the light of religion’s global resurgence, most dramatized by 9/11, it attempts a radical rethinking of the relationship between religion and world affairs, hence the title. It brings together scholars who are eminently qualified to analyze how and why religious motivations, actors, ideas, and organizations matter for contemporary world affairs. It addresses some of the reasons that theories of world politics and world affairs have been slow to address religious factors, how and why religious factors are influencing important global dynamics, and how we need to adapt our theories of world affairs to the realities and implications of this resurgence.

*  *  *

There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together.

Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain.

This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn. It still structures much of our study and understanding of the role of religion in world affairs. It does so because many of the concepts and conceptual distinctions on which it was founded remain firmly lodged in the minds of international relations scholars, as Bryan Hehir describes in chapter 1 of this book. The meaning of concepts such as “secularism,” “modernity,” “power,” and “public life” is assumed without hesitation or complication. With equal confidence, a sharp boundary is drawn between these concepts and phenomena assumed to be their polar opposites: “religion,” “tradition,” “theology,” “faith,” and “private worship.”

Much classical thinking and practice in world affairs is thus a form of border patrol. It is concerned with policing and strengthening the fence between two worlds. The first world is the “secular” and “public” world in which international actors—nation-states and the multilateral organizations that bind them together—are presumed to make rational choices in the pursuit of political and economic power. The second world is the “spiritual” and “private” world in which religious actors—everything from church hierarchies to clerical councils to violent organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hizbollah—are presumed to make faith-based choices in the pursuit of nonrational or irrational goals. As with the empirical assumption about religion and economic development, the factual assumption about these two worlds is that they are two separate universes, with little to no mutual contact or interaction. As with the ethical or normative assumption about religion and political democratization, the ethical or moral assumption about these two worlds is that they should be kept as far apart as possible.

However, it is true that what could be called classical secularization theory recognized the reality and legitimacy of some traffic between these two universes. Classical secularization theory assumed the descriptive and prescriptive forms noted at the beginning: it expected the automatic decline of religion in the face of development and required the hermetic isolation of religion in the face of democracy. On one hand, the forces of development and progress would so impinge on the world of religion that religion would have little to do and less space in which to do it. Modern progress would make the security and comfort offered by religion increasingly unnecessary. Modernization, in other words, would infiltrate, occupy, and diminish the world of the spirit, fostering the “disenchantment” that Max Weber made central to his understanding of modernity. On the other hand, secularization theory held that the forces of democracy should reform and regulate religion to make it compatible with freedom—to inculcate habits of autonomy and rational reflection and encourage individuals to forge new identities as democratic citizens. On closer inspection, in other words, classical secularization theory imagined that the religious and political worlds would and should interrelate to a significant extent.

The crucial point, however, is that the secularization theorists who assigned themselves the task of managing the points of contact between the public “secular” world and the private “spiritual” world allowed—and expected—traffic to flow in only one direction.

The result of this stringent and one-way boundary maintenance has been the long-standing exclusion of religion and religious actors from the systematic study of world politics in general and international relations in particular. This has created a paradoxical situation: religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one of the least examined factors in the professional study and practice of world affairs.

For example, the lead journal for political science in the United States is the American Political Science Review (APSR). In its 100th anniversary issue, an article concluded that “prior to 1960 only a single APSR article sought to use religion as a variable to explain empirical phenomena” and that in APSR “from 1980 on, just one article in American Government put religious factors at the center of analysis; and just two in Comparative Politics.” A similar neglect marked the international relations literature. Daniel Philpott, a contributor to this book, judged that in his survey of leading journals of international relations from 1980 to 1999, “only six or so out of a total of about sixteen hundred featured religion as an important influence.” This neglect of religion in research is echoed in teaching. One of the coeditors of this volume, Alfred Stepan, teaches at one of America’s largest and oldest schools dedicated to training graduate students for international careers in government, political analysis, international organizations, the media, human rights, the private sector, and academia: the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently teaching the first general course on the role of religion in world affairs in the school’s fifty-year history.

*  *  *

Rethinking Religion and World Affairs represents a collective effort to rethink religion and world affairs by questioning the sharp empirical and ethical boundaries that have separated the two. A working group of leading scholars and policy practitioners concerned with religion in the contemporary world was convened by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, to devise strategies to transcend this state of affairs. It soon became apparent that thousands of professors never trained in religion and world affairs would be asked to design and teach new courses, media newsrooms to report on religion in greater depth, and legislators, foreign policy makers, humanitarian organizations, development agencies, and feminist and human rights groups to devise new and more appropriate approaches to religion.

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.

Given that “religious freedom” seems to be a troubling concept at the moment, it might be worth returning for a moment to the 1950s, to mark the difference between then and now, if only to highlight the contours of what we now take to be obviously and empirically identifiable as “religious pluralism.” The 1950s was an era of many things—the Beats, the Cold War, and bestsellers like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale, a psychologist and Christian minister, boldly proclaimed that Americans could experience a better life (more friends, more money, more happiness) by cultivating a positive mindset. The book was widely panned, but Peale was very much of his time: as he wrote, everyone—no matter their creed or religion—could benefit from positive thinking. All Americans could do as the first chapter implores: “Believe in Yourself!”

Peale’s book features as an important exhibit in Will Herberg’s 1955 Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Herberg used the popularity of positive thinkers such as Peale as evidence that the social and political forces of sectarian difference were waning. Postwar America brought Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together in new ways—in suburban enclaves, in public schools, and on the factory floor. Herberg’s analysis of religious pluralism and “the American Way” echoed classical Durkheimian and Weberian articulations of secularization. Along with Peter Berger (The Sacred Canopy) and Robert Bellah (“Civil Religion in America”), Herberg extended and confirmed classical theories’ understanding that religion’s privatization (institutionally and individually) coupled with new social interactions among multiple religious individuals contributed to secularization. In the American case, they noted, individuals’ beliefs were increasingly private and atomized (“believe in yourself!”), yet nominal religious identity remained an important marker of the true scope of religious pluralism in American democracy. Or, as Herberg put it, Protestant-Catholic-Jewish pluralism revealed the religion of America to be democracy itself: the plurality of religions points to a “common faith” called democracy, itself the “religion of religions.”

Today, this analysis of religious pluralism sounds archaic, if it is noted at all. Today, sociologists who study religious pluralism in the United States observe robust religious differences and a plurality of observable groups. The shift is significant, particularly in its implications for how we think about religious “freedom.”

Why did this shift happen? The usual answer is that religion changed. It had been private, but it became public. Something “happened.” Given the benefit of hindsight, many scholars now find the story of radical upheaval in the 1960′s as the engine behind this shift to be incomplete or misleading. But that said, sociologists working at the time observed “religion” working in ways that they had not predicted, and which demanded theoretical revision. Of the many alternatives proposed, the “religious economies” model rose to the fore as the strongest alternative and revision to secularization theory.

Religious economies models focused particularly on the question of pluralization of religions and its effects on religious participation. In a marked turn from classical theory, this model’s proponents argued that religious plurality and vibrancy is a natural consequence of limited or absent state regulation of religion. In the United States, therefore, religious vibrancy can be explained as the consequence of religious groups operating in a religious free market, one made possible (or perhaps better put, revealed within) the First Amendment. Where state regulation is absent, religious groups are free to organize as they wish, and rise or fall based on their abilities to appeal to religious consumers. Religious economies models borrow explicitly from the Chicago School of economics. So, in this model a rational, voluntary, religious actor will consistently seek out the religious option with the compensatory system that best suits her. Individual religious freedom is maximized in a religious marketplace where multiple firms exist. Competition has the effect of increasing religious vitality and fervor rather than marking its decline, and creating an ongoing religious equilibrium. Thus, as the argument goes, a plurality of Protestants—Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, even Mormons—vie for members. Over time, the losing firms are those who can’t attract or hold members, and the ultimate winners are all those people who can maximize their religious potentials in a firm of their choosing.

This is all well and good, detractors note (and there have been many critics). Except, however, for the fact that this free market model also generates a whole bunch of religious losers. These are the people that are not playing the game at all, or are not playing it very well. Jews and Catholics, slaves, Native Americans, and so many others are difficult to place into the religious economies models. Not surprisingly, they often appear to be differently and often not adequately religious (or, by extension, even adequately American).

The illusion of the free market is the subject of Bernard Harcourt’s recent genealogical critique of the Chicago School of economics. As he argues, the concept of the naturally regulating, universal free market recurs in multiple generations of free market economic thought. Where the market is conceptualized as naturally existing, he notes, regulation becomes an enemy: the state’s meddling poses a threat to the naturally developing and self-regulating equilibrium. But this is not all, of course, for as he notes, the self-regulating free market also is threatened by those actors who are not able to self-regulate—those economic actors who are not free and rational, for example. Whether they refuse to act as proper self-regulating economic actors or because they cannot do so, they become unnatural actors. Thus, even as regulation threatens market equilibrium, it nonetheless plays an important role in policing and regulating those actors. The state can protect, rehabilitate, regulate, or penalize them. Harcourt argues, in short, that one of the effects of the logic of the free market is to designate those economic actors who are free of the need for regulation and those who are not so free.

We can take the analogical step to consider how Harcourt’s observation may relate to free market religion. Religious economies models view the failures of various religious groups to participate in the market as problems inherent in the groups themselves—failures, for example, to cast off religious peculiarities so that they can participate in the thriving religious commerce of modern democracies, and real, “free” religiosity. They rarely if ever point to problems that might be inherent in the market itself: that it might not be as free as they imagine, or that it might in fact be regulated, or regulating.

I am hardly the first one to point to the limitations to the religious economies models. As I have noted, the criticisms have been legion. But none of these serious critiques have stuck. One has to wonder, why not?

One reason, I believe, is that even the staunchest critics of the religious economies models share its basic premise—namely that a plurality of religious groups indicates the presence of religious freedom, and that this freedom furthermore indicates the presence of democracy. While it is explicitly articulated in the religious economies model, it is embedded as an operating premise in almost every recent analysis of religious pluralism.

Take, for example, scholars who analyze religious pluralism with institutional models. Sociologically speaking, an institutional model identifies organizational fields (for example, religious, financial, educational, or the like) that are so designated because of the various laws, regulations, cultural norms, and professional rituals that both define its legitimate actors and enable their functioning and coordination. Various regulations and norms operate within and at the boundaries of fields, and have the effect of shaping (or demanding) some measure of conformity by all actors who participate within them. As such, an institutional approach both calls attention to a field’s norms and regulations and to the cultural rituals and habits that normalize them. We could imagine that the study of a religious field, then, would identify the norms of “freedom” shaping actors’ views of their position within a field, and the legal and social structures that demand conformity to them. Altogether, it seems that sociologists drawing on these models would be well positioned to challenge the illusion of the free religious marketplace.

But surprisingly, this is not what we hear. Instead, sociologists who use this theoretical frame nonetheless maintain that the field of American religion is free, both from state control and state support. They likewise argue that the salutary effects of this freedom are such that new entrants to the field are uniquely able to determine their own, “authentic” spirituality. No one compels them to be other than what they truly can be: naturally free religions, able to interact peacefully with each other. As one of the fiercest critics of the rational actor model thus argues, religious groups are “free to find … fertile soil or perish.” In the United States, “each group could embody its religious impulses in the pragmatic organizations that the American experiment made possible. It was a system born of the Protestant impulse, but nurtured in the pragmatic and pluralist democracy of the United States.”

In America, religion finally comes into its own, in all of its manifest plurality. Insofar as religious groups willingly submit to freedom, they certainly change. But their transformation is not into an American norm but into freedom itself. This regulation is self-evident and natural. The free market allows—and in fact trains—religious groups to be free: to cast off the cultural and political baggage or problematic connections to other parts of life. What we confront in these theories, and what ties them together, is much less a theoretical frame of pluralism than a political doctrine of freedom.

Two things are thus worth pondering at greater length than this forum allows. First, we can consider the consequences of our current concept of religious freedom. Our public discourse has, for a host of reasons, abandoned an earlier vision of religious pluralism that focused on the private religiosity of individuals, and that was designated by the shared language of a civil religion or spirituality (and which as even Herberg noted, is so easily transformed into the nightmarish, anti-democratic transgression of religious nationalism). Rhetorically and politically, we need our religions to be more clearly identifiable than that. In order for religions to be free, they must be differentiated, both from each other and, more importantly, from the elements of society that would regulate them and keep them from being free. Except that, as Harcourt’s examples would remind us, this freedom is an illusion. Much like the “positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale, our pluralist thinking hides the mechanisms through which we recognize religions as free or many, and hides the reasons why we find those evaluations useful or necessary.

Second, the “new” sociologies of religion claim to have successfully challenged secularization theory, but it is clear that most sociologists working in this framework now cling even more tightly to one of its central tenets: differentiation. In fact, we could argue that our current political and sociological uses of pluralism depend upon—and demand evidence of—religion’s differentiation from other parts of social life. It is only through differentiation that religion is free. This “fact” of theory and empirical work itself demands further exploration of the twinned and complex visions of religious toleration and economic freedom embedded deeply in liberal political theory, from Locke and Smith to Mill and beyond.

For if the power of the positive religious thinking embedded in religious economies models highlights anything, it is that our concepts of free markets and free religions are tied in deep ways, and not only analogically. I doubt that embarking on a historical or genealogical project will allow us to shed the pluralist thinking that inhabits us. But we might be in a better position to observe and speak of its effects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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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What a strange, provocative experience it has been to dwell with Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon during these unsettling months. The seams of public life seem especially frayed of late—a precariousness underscored by disasters natural and political that keep coming. And yet ours is the radiant moment of endless possibility so central to Lofton’s subject, whose chief promise is that of a self that matters, that experiences abundance and becoming. It was with this coexistence in mind that I plunged into Oprah’s world.

The book’s many levels are only partly reflected in the conversations it has begun to generate. Lofton’s most widely discussed contribution is her reading of Oprah as “religious,” and the implications this identification has for the way we think about “religion” and “secularism” and something fuzzier called “spirituality.” Lofton urges us not simply to see in the story of American celebrity dreams an outline of secularism’s frames; she insists on both the collaboration of these categories and the hypertrophy of the religious, spilling beyond the limits of what she calls the “blaring data of tax-exempt religiosity,” whose supposed gravity and grounding in something called “real” religion constrain the scholarly imagination. Rather than seeing in the rituals that attend Oprah a formulaic “empowerment” by which consumers “make meaning” in their lives (one of the duller formulations of the 1970s, still on academic life support), Lofton locates and traces Oprah’s productions to explore the “great divide between what is properly religious and what is not.” Both empty signifier and placemarker of abundance within the “pulverized space” of American dreaming, “religion,” Lofton reminds us, is that by which the projects of the self reach beyond their material limits only to be sold back to us as lifestyle, makeover, transformation, and community. The expressions by which this “religion” takes shape are not just those of celebrity charisma and national fantasy but the stories we tell about ourselves, and which we see writ large in O. Her productions posit for themselves a world in need of their care.

The book is also, however, a critical engagement with its subject and with scholarship. Appearing during a period of reappraisal in Religious Studies (whether or not the field recognizes it happening), the book lays bare certain aversions fundamental to the way (American) religions have been analyzed. While the field grows continually more aware of the collusion of categories once held distinct by the modernist imaginary that still haunts our analytic—not just secular/sacred, but market/home, or self/other—Lofton argues forcefully and correctly that scholars of religion often shield themselves from the implications of this entanglement. More than simply kneading in ever more layers of nuance to pad our tender accounts of our subjects—or expanding what she calls “a checklist of classifications premised on a scientific posture complicit with religion’s eradication”—Lofton reminds us that no method or tone, however fervently defended, can avoid the fact that we are always, already, from the moment we begin, complicit with our subject. This intimacy is never more powerful than when we disavow or overlook it: the scholar in imagined distance or the secular’s disenchantment.

What does this entail? On the one hand, scholars no longer have the comfort of a kind of shallow critique (which Lofton identifies as either reflexive anti-consumerism or blunt constructions of Oprah’s “trap”). Neither, however, can we afford the luxury of scrutinizing these things forever at a distance—always Hegel watching Napoleon’s armies from Jena’s hills. The implications are great here, because of the way the field is haunted by one chief identitarian assumption, rooted equally in the old politics of representation and in methodological caution: authenticity. Lofton is concerned that “in our scholarly ambition to translate our subjects—to, as the phrasing often goes, take our subjects seriously—we have become sycophants to our subjects, reframing every act as an inevitably creative act.” In this she is part of a growing, and welcome tendency in the field.

But why are these considerations of “religion,” “spirituality,” and “the secular” important to us now? It is not simply the case that O makes for provocative material, though she surely does. Indeed, Lofton demonstrates her subject’s superfluity as her powerful cultural production captures themes and concerns central to American religions. But what Oprah provides is not simply data to confirm certain modes of study, nor merely an exemplification of a trend. Lofton urges us to see Oprah as a context in which certain languages and sentiments are conjured and sustained. Beyond the complex weave of the religious and the secular, Lofton practices her own critical arts subtly, by attending to the drab architecture of cultural desires instead of merely hacking away at their most obvious expressions. Religions are everywhere, mirroring (and driving) the excess that gives shape to us, outracing the conventional legal and scholarly disciplines that hope in vain to pin it down. Of Oprah the metonym, we “make of her pieces what we need,” gathering her multiplicities into us. In our relentless optimism, our dreams “programmed into analogy,” our “ideally accessorized moment,” and our “straight-backed righteousness of the spiritually assured,” we are “stunned before her plenty” as before the excess of the secular in which we all float, suspended adrift on common dreams of having it all.

Consider Lofton’s chapter on Oprah’s book club, with its wonderful performance of alternate textual strategies amidst a dazzling reading of reading. What do we learn from what Oprah does to texts? We learn about Chautauqua, and Franzen too. But what seems far more important and illuminating is how Oprah “manages literature’s subversive potential.” As reading and “religion” collapse into one another, Lofton reads literature’s reduction to a heroic overcoming of personal struggles, a sentimental gesture that dovetails with “novelistic retellings of their life stories.” All narrative, all consumption, all expression devolves onto the self in an endless enhancement. And yet, Lofton reminds, these individual projects of accessorization as meaning turn “inevitably, unstoppably, back to her.”

If O becomes “history by the sheer will of her narrations, by the hegemony of her sway,” her readers and viewers may be left only with the relentless quotidian within which the injunction to make oneself over is intoned. Lofton reveals a world in which we find alluring the templates to which we are fitted, a melancholy whose song of empowerment sells us resignation as the hope we know will be dashed. The unreality of the ☺ contained in O’s regimens of reading, dreaming, and self-fashioning leaves us weighed down, as it were, by the sheer abundance of possibility, frozen in a moment of prescribed, radiant optimism. We change our experience of a world which seems built to constrain us.

But, as mentioned at the outset, I wonder if Lofton’s critical project can be so neatly summed up, as before a commercial break. Surely her reading of the strange joy in the impossible endless possible can have no relevance for drab materialism or a culture with its blood up, right? Oprah links up to the American religious past, and to the world of The Secret and the fluid discourse of journeys of self-discovery, but surely she cannot tell us about worldly disorder and rage. Yet Lofton reminds us that Oprah is “the one picture that tells the whole story,” a story broader than her corporate brand, with greater reach than the historical predecessors Lofton deftly names, or even than the first level of Lofton’s own critical discourse. These formulations of the “spiritual” exceed even Oprah’s excessive condition, and tell us more about our own. While we might look to Oprah “to determine the spiritual ambition of her secular conveyances,” we might also look to Lofton’s formulations as a way to understand how apparently non-O modes of public expression come to be, and on what they draw their energy.

We think of the purity of O’s joy and possibility, and the rage of the world they seek to enliven. What accounts for the coexistence of this supreme spiritual assurance and the furors of Fred Phelps, Rep. King, and Governor Walker? It is not simply that dumbfounded joy and hyper-aggression exist in an interesting tension. Somehow, Lofton helps us see us how Winfreyan radiance inexorably bleeds into the toxic, fact-averse, combat-soaked tone of things. These modes held apart share the love of an endlessly primary, endlessly revisable self, which is to all things the only thing. Lofton does not tell us about or describe directly the simultaneity of these impulses; nor do I highlight this possible critical engagement in order to collapse all expressions into a single muddle of religious affect of simulacra. But her work gives us a way of thinking about how affront is the co-conspirator of joy, outrage the outcome of the self’s bubble pricked. At stake in this cartography of O’s endless expanse is the ironic occlusion of the self in these self-assured projects. If Lofton is right that O’s production constitutes “the culmination of the religious now,” this “now” is one in which the triumphant self of autonomy and abundance and make(O)ver is constantly undermined by its own impossibility. As with our heavily mediated social worlds more broadly, Oprah’s generative existence reveals how what it means to be an “I” is to become both subjects and objects of what Bruno Latour calls “belief in belief.” This malleable modern “I” is always within and out of our reach, our certainty of its existence leaving us precisely where we are, with all the disappointments and powerlessness and fury that sometimes entails. But then there is that swelling soundtrack chord, a new dream dreamt for us, always a new now to believe in. Our wishes cannot be the problem, can they?

Lofton writes that Oprah “conjures a religious space in regard to her country’s mythic dream, becoming a site of ritual and moral transaction for a nation possessed by the idea of a plural marketplace for everyone’s dreams.” Oprah’s traces and makings are not simply those of a conjoined spiritual and secular; they are simply ours, whether we like it or not. They are, perhaps improbably, a necessary condition of the shapes of public life today. And they resonate powerfully in the context into which the book is published, one in which the book’s comparative possibilities and implications deserve careful elaboration. Lofton shows us the scope of their influence through her study of O, in the breadth and suppleness of her comparisons.

It has now been twenty-five years since Richard John Neuhaus wrote The Naked Public Square—an effort to understand what lay behind renewed religious mobilization on the right. Neuhaus did not think the public square was actually “naked”; in fact he thought this an impossibility, for there could be no such thing as engaged democratic public life that didn’t depend on and connect to citizens’ deeper moral commitments. In the U.S., he argued, public life would necessarily involve religiously motivated and religiously framed participation, because a democratic public sphere was necessarily open to all citizens and open to them in terms they themselves had a central role in defining—and, in America, religion was important to most citizens. But, Neuhaus suggested, when so many believe in a public sphere stripped of religion, they actually, ironically, cede much of the democratic impulse in the public sphere to groups like the then prominent Moral Majority of the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The peril in this is not simply that the Moral Majority is conservative. It is that “it wants to enter the political arena making public claims on the basis of private truths.” As Neuhaus continues: “The integrity of politics itself requires that such a proposal be resisted. Public decisions must be made by arguments that are public in character.” This is precisely the issue taken up in the present volume, most directly in Jürgen Habermas’s opening contribution.

Neuhaus’s argument was a call from a conservative but centrist position in American politics to recognize the power of religion in the public sphere. Such calls came earlier in the United States. But even in Europe—where religious practice declined most and secularization theory seemed most to apply—the issue of public religion is now very much on the agenda, partly because of anxiety over migration and Islam. It is often framed as contestation over the heritage of the Enlightenment. Many misleadingly assume the Enlightenment was essentially secular. And certainly there was a largely secular branch of eighteenth-century philosophy that had huge historical influence, not least when amplified by the anticlericalism spawned in France by the alliance of the Catholic Church to antirepublican reactionary politics. But the Enlightenment was also a movement among religious thinkers. Jonathan Israel calls this the “moderate” Enlightenment. The term is apt (though not Israel’s implication that the “radical” Enlightenment was simply a more extreme and thereby purer, less compromised version of the same thing). The project of religiously informed public reason was understood to depend on a certain moderation not of faith but of enthusiasm. This was the term—along with fanatic —used to describe Puritans and others in seventeenth-century England who insisted with absolute confidence on what was revealed by their “inner lights” and brooked no public compromises. The ideas of the enthusiasts as well as religious moderates and both monarchists and antimonarchists all circulated in a vibrant public sphere made possible by a combination of preaching and other oral performances and printed circulation of sermons, pamphlets, and other texts.

Those who developed the idea that the public sphere was central to modern, especially democratic, society often described their own work as enlightenment—advancing the intellectual maturation of humanity—and in these terms they embraced resistance to enthusiasm. Emphases on education, discipline, and orderly conduct of public debates shaped elite views of how the public sphere should advance. Sometimes these became matters of class distinction; liberal elites feared the debasement of public life if nonelites were admitted. The inclusive ideal of publicness has recurrently confronted arguments that exclusion was in fact necessary. Some of these have centered on religion. But, equally, religious thinkers have often held that public reason is not only an arbiter of policy decisions but also a vital means for advancing all sorts of understanding, even of religious convictions and their implications. Religious voices have remained active in the modern public sphere, sometimes in pursuit of enlightenment and sometimes in reaction to the Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment secularism. Even in Europe, secularization of public political debate only became pronounced after World War II.

Nonetheless, in both academic and public understanding, both the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern public sphere came to be understood in overwhelmingly secular terms. Jürgen Habermas’s classic book, to which we owe today’s commonplace usage of the term public sphere, is an influential case in point. Habermas offered a genealogy in which the eighteenth-century literary public sphere informed the development of a public sphere of rational-critical debate that gave individuals in civil society a way to influence politics. He generally ignored religion in his historical account of the public sphere, as he has acknowledged. And, until recently, religion did not figure in his further considerations on communicative action and the organization of modern society. So it is significant that Habermas in the last decade has begun to argue that finding ways to integrate religion into the public sphere is a vital challenge for contemporary society (and theories of contemporary society). His work is appropriately a point of departure for the discussions in this book.

Habermas’s argument is an elaboration of the fundamental premise that the public sphere of a democratic society must be open to all. It is imperative to include religious citizens both as a matter of fairness and as a matter of urgent practicality. Religiously informed actors, including Christian fundamentalists in America and Islamists in Europe, matter so much in contemporary political life that we endanger the future of the democratic polity if we cannot integrate them into the workings of public reason. Further, Habermas sees political liberalism as in need of new moral insights and commitments and recognizes religion as a potential source of renewal. Such renewal should not take the form of a direct appeal to religious doctrines or comprehensive worldviews in ways that foreclose public debate. His opening examination of Carl Schmitt’s political theology is precisely an attempt to put to rest the notion that political authority can derive either directly from religious revelation or from the self-founding sovereignty of an absolutist state. Insisting on a homogeneous mass society as the basis for the constitutional state, and relying on the shifting moods of such a society for political motivation, can only in the most superficial sense be seen as involving democracy. Schmitt’s approach is both impossible, because society has become irretrievably pluralist, and directly authoritarian despite its democratic disguise. Political religion could have similar implications. What prevents this is commitment to public reason—and on this Habermas is in accord with Neuhaus. Religious and nonreligious citizens meet as equals, and religious ideas inform the public sphere through argument rather than through simply dissemination (let alone topdown authority).

Because the public sphere is for Habermas a realm of rational-critical argumentation and propositional content, admission is a matter of ability and willingness to participate in open debate. He worries that religious commitments inhibit this, both because faith or revelation are reasons that can’t hold weight for those who don’t experience them and because religious ideas come in language that is not accessible to those outside particular traditions. Accordingly, he calls for the potential truth contents religious people bring to public discourse to be “translated” so that they are stated in ways not dependent on specifically religious sources. Translation should not be a burden only on religious citizens, but an ethical obligation for nonreligious citizens who should seek to understand what is said on religious grounds as best they can. But not all that religious citizens have to say is “translatable”; the residuum can be allowed in informal public discourse, but an institutional filter must exist to keep it out of the formal deliberations of political bodies.

Habermas’s arguments leave the worries that the translation proviso is necessarily asymmetrical and that the call to recognize explicitly religious voices in the public sphere is at least partially instrumental—a call to include ideas because they are useful while implicitly doubting that they may be true.

Charles Taylor’s approach speaks to each of these worries. Taylor approaches religion in the public sphere indirectly, as it were, through competing meanings of secularism. He has addressed other dimensions of the topic in A Secular Age. Here his focus is specifi cally on what sort of stance toward religion is required of a modern democratic state with a diverse population. He agrees with the notion that states must achieve neutrality, but sees two problems with most discussion. First, there is the tendency to fixate on religion, as though it posed radically different questions from all other sorts of differences among citizens. It doesn’t, suggests Taylor. And the issue is not just a misunderstanding of religion but also a misunderstanding of the relationship of both culture and personal agency to public reason. Deep differences requiring translation—and perhaps further work to reach common understandings—are not limited to religious differences. Reason is always rooted in culture, experience, and what Taylor has called “strong horizons of evaluation” (that citizens seldom make fully explicit in either public reason or their own private reflections). “The point of state neutrality,” he writes, “is precisely to avoid favoring or disfavoring not just religious positions, but any basic position, religious or nonreligious.”

Taylor’s second point follows from this. Given the importance and variations of deep commitments that orient citizens, there is no solution to be found by means of an institutional arrangement demarcating where deep values may be asserted and where they may not. At best, formulae like “the separation of church and state” are shorthand heuristics. But much more important for democratic societies is exploring ways to work for common goals—like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Constructing a democratic life together may depend more on being able to engage in such shared positive pursuits than on any institutional arrangement (or, indeed, agreement on all the reasons to engage in common pursuits). This also suggests that we should not understand the public sphere entirely in terms of argumentation about the truth value of propositions. It is a realm of creativity and social imaginaries in which citizens give shared form to their lives together, a realm of exploration, experiment, and partial agreements. Citizens need to find ways to treat each other’s basic commitments with respect; fortunately they are also likely to find considerable overlaps in what they value.

Like Habermas, Taylor is concerned with identifying ways in which the public sphere can help to produce greater integration among citizens who enter public discourse with different views. Habermas stresses agreement and clearer knowledge while Taylor stresses mutual recognition and collaboration in common pursuits. But both see excluding religion from the public sphere as undermining the solidarity and creativity they seek. In different ways, Judith Butler and Cornel West ask about the limits of optimistic visions of the public sphere in which harmonious integration is the apparent telos.

Butler emphasizes occasions when it is impossible to achieve intellectual (or political) integration, including agreement on truth and value. Religious sources of ethical insight may matter enormously precisely when deliberation in the public sphere fails. Deep differences may remain—and remain troubling and troubled. Religion may provide a guide to action in the face of divisions it cannot undo. This is true especially when the realities of state power and geopolitics bring people into the same place, not necessarily by choice, and into social relationships, though they do not understand themselves to constitute a single people or polity. Pluralization is not always a challenge to be overcome.

Butler offers the idea of cohabitation as an alternative, or perhaps a crucial supplement, to that of integrative public reason. It is an understanding of what is both possible and ethically right that she draws from Jewish tradition, shaped by the historical experience of statelessness, subjection, and partial autonomy under states Jews did not control. The ethic of cohabitation thus has an internal relationship to being Jewish—and on this basis criticizing state violence that is at odds with cohabitation must be “a Jewish thing to do.” Butler sees this as more than simply distinguishing “progressive” Jewish positions from others, because it entails taking seriously the limits of any identitarian concept of Jewishness—of identifying Jews with a nation-unto-itself in the manner of much nationalist rhetoric rather than with the position of people always already engaged in relationship with non-Jews.

Cohabitation guides an ethics on which Jews should act independently of whether it is met by a symmetrical commitment on the part of non-Jews, though they may hope that it will be. It is thus a religious contribution to the public sphere that does not depend on agreement but applies in its absence. Its significance comes from underwriting recognition of the importance or at least inevitability of continued life in the same place, even when values, identities, and practices cannot readily be reconciled. It is an understanding of what is materially necessary and an ethics following from this that does not depend on theory or discourses of justice—and may even be impeded by the attempt to ground all action in resolution of claims to justice. Taking cohabitation seriously indicts attempts to base politics exclusively on consensus, even when this is approached as a matter of the most inclusive possible public reason.

Cornel West, blues man in the life of the mind, jazzman in the world of ideas, challenges conceptions of public life limited to rational arguments, ethical consensus, and even cultural harmony. The secular need to hear the music of religion, he says, but also vice versa. Mutual understanding is achieved through empathy and imagination, learning the rhythm of each other’s dances and the tunes of each other’s songs. This sort of knowledge is tested in action, not in propositions; the capacity to understand each other is not derived from arguments. Of course, this partially prediscursive ability to understand each other may be the condition of good arguments in which participants feel they make progress toward knowledge.

West hopes for reconciliation and mutual understanding, but he doesn’t see religion offering this in a neat package. In the first place, he joins the others in this book in suggesting that we live in a multiplicity of different intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks. We are called to find ways to relate well to each other, ideally to understand each other, but not to erase these differences. Indeed, participation in the public sphere offers not just collective benefits but also the personal good of existence enriched by greater ability to put oneself in the shoes of others. This is not simply an instrumental good conducive to potential agreement; it is valuable in itself. More than this, West insists that the Christian message (at least, and he doesn’t rule out similar messages from other traditions) is not simply a logic of equivalence—Rawlsian justice—but of a superabundance of love. Justice would be good, I think he is saying. It would be a big improvement. We should feel “righteous indignation against injustice.” But in itself justice cannot be entirely definitive of the good.

Perhaps most important, West calls on us to find resources within our traditions, including especially our various religious traditions, to disrupt harmonies that disguise underlying discord. He calls on us to bear witness to suffering (even when we do not yet know how to end it). He insists that prophetic religion has a place in the public sphere, for its very disruptions are calls to attention that make people see realities that make them uncomfortable. Calls to attention are not arguments or propositions that should be subjected to critique; they are performances of a different sort. Prophetic religion is neither consensus building nor simply dissent; it is a challenge to think and look and even smell (funky) anew; it is not a matter of gradual evolutionary progress but of urgency. The demand prophecy makes on us is not that of faith but that of truth—or, rather, potential truth, for the prophet articulates not only the evils at hand but the possibilities of a future in which we are damned for what we have done and a future in which we have the chance to do better.

To say that religion has power in the public sphere is not to say that it can be easily absorbed or that it should be. It is a basis for radical challenges and radical questions; it brings enthusiasm, passion, indignation, outrage, and love. If enthusiasm is sometimes harnessed to unreflective conviction, passion is also vital to critical engagement with existing institutions and dangerous trends. The public sphere and the practice of public reason have power too. And they not only take from religion but also offer it opportunities to advance by reflection and critical argument.

The public sphere is a realm of rational-critical debate in which matters of the public good are considered. It is also a realm of cultural formation in which argument is not the only important practice and creativity and ritual, celebration and recognition are all important. It includes the articulation between deep sensibilities and explicit understandings and it includes the effort—aided sometimes by prophetic calls to attention—to make the way we think and act correspond to our deepest values or moral commitments.

Read Craig Calhoun’s full essay—along with chapters by Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West—in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, an SSRC volume edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and just published by Columbia University Press.

On January 25, thousands of men and women marched into Midan al-Tahrir—Liberation Square—in central Cairo. Over the past two weeks, we have seen the number of protesters in the square increase until, on Sunday, February 6, it was estimated to have reached two million. For thousands of Egyptians, the square became the place where they spent their days and nights, chanted against the current regime, and worked together to assert their views and rights. Thanks to satellite TV channels such as al-Jazeera and Internet sites like Facebook and Google Maps, we became virtual participants in what happened in the square, following the events, day and night, from our homes in different parts of the world. One may have felt hopeful when the protesters asserted their views, or may have felt sad when seeing an injured young man, or may have felt angry when watching someone throw a firebomb or assault a protester with a baton.

In front of our own eyes, Midan al-Tahrir has transformed from a site for the protesters to gather and express their demands into a central part of the protesters’ broader struggle for legitimacy, visibility, and political rights. Midan al-Tahrir is living up to its name as the Liberation Square; the protesters are insistent that they will not leave their spatial and symbolic location until President Mubarak steps down. Over the past few days, many of us have heard people on the television chanting, “Mish ha nimshi, huwa yimshi” [We will not leave, he should leave], most recently in response to the army’s request that the protesters go home and allow normal life to resume in Cairo.

Time and space

These last events have been analyzed by social scientists, journalists, and policy makers mainly by looking at their temporal dimensions and exploring the historical forces that promoted the protests. Yet, the past two weeks have shown once again the importance of space in the operation of power, the challenging of political systems, and the constitution and legitimization of specific publics. We have witnessed young men and women pour into city streets and squares and onto bridges to protest unemployment, poverty, corruption, police brutality, election fraud, and political stagnation. They come from different classes and neighborhoods to inhabit the same spaces and to express a collective discontent with the political and economic conditions of their country.

It is illuminating to ponder the recent events in Cairo’s Midan al-Tahrir as we try to understand the relationship between space, power, belonging, and resistance, as well as the productive interplay between physical and virtual space. Communication technologies such as the Internet (especially the websites Facebook and Twitter) and mobile phones aided the organization and publicizing of the protests in Egypt. At the same time, the marches, rallies, and the demonstrations of millions of Egyptians have brought a sense of visibility and immediacy that other means of communication alone would not have been able to secure. As I write this piece, the strong link between virtual and physical space continues to be central to the making of publics that are seen, heard, and legitimized.

Midan al-Tahrir

The history of Liberation Square endows this location with special spatial, political, and symbolic value. The square (which is actually a circle) was originally named Midan al-Ismailia, after Khedive Ismail, who ruled Egypt during the second part of the nineteenth century and who was eager to Europeanize Cairo. The Midan (literally, an open space) was built to regulate the increasing traffic of Cairo. After the 1952 revolution, the nearby barracks that housed the British occupying troops were torn down and the area became widely known as Midan al-Tahrir (Liberation Square). Over the years, the Midan has been the site of several important protests, such as the 1977 bread riots (when Egyptians protested President Sadat’s attempts to increase the prices of some basic necessities, especially bread) and the 2003 protests against the war in Iraq. Yet, never had it been the site of the type and scale of protests we see today.

Midan al-Tahrir, the area of which now encompasses the original circle, an open space, and several important buildings, is centrally located in Cairo. It is currently the nexus of the Egyptian capital’s  metro system, a major stop for cabs and city buses that connect different parts of Cairo, and in close proximity to many important national, political, and educational institutions, including the Egyptian Museum, the National Democratic Party headquarters (recently burned down by protesters), the Headquarters of the Arab League, part of the American University in Cairo, and the Mugamma, a notorious building that houses many government bureaucracies). On its edges, one finds fancy hotels (such as the Semiramis Intercontinental and the Nile Hilton), international fast-food restaurants (like Pizza Hut and KFC), as well as cafés, airline offices, travel agencies, and newspaper stands. The Midan is very close to the Nile Corniche and is frequented by many Egyptians in transit, on their way to work, to shop, or to take a leisurely walk along the Nile. It is also a space that is frequented by men and women, young and old, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, and “religious” and “secular.” In short, the Midan represents the blending between the old and new, the West and East, and the national and the global, as well as the mixing of different genders, classes, and religious groups.

Who will leave first?

“Either they answer our demands, or we are not leaving this square no matter what.”
—Egyptian protester

All of the aforementioned factors contextualize the importance of Midan al-Tahrir as a site for public gatherings in Egypt. Yet, it is also important to trace how, over the course of the past two weeks, the Midan itself has shifted from being simply the location of the protest movement to being itself part of the struggle over legitimacy and visibility.

On January 25, the Day of Anger, it was estimated that approximately 15,000 men and women managed to march to Midan al-Tahrir. Paradoxically, the government tried to contain the protests by shutting down Internet and mobile services, which seems only to have motivated more and more people to get out to public spaces, including Midan al-Tahrir, to voice their discontent. Despite initial clashes with the police forces, the protesters continued to grow in numbers, and the police soon had to withdraw, to be replaced by the army, who declared that they would not shoot at the protesters. The Midan was consolidated as a site with specific boundaries to be protected and maintained after the protesters were attacked by baltagia (thugs) on February 2. Incidental evidence indicates that at least some of the attackers were paid by Mubarak’s supporters or members of the security force dressed in civilian clothes. The assailants attacked protesters with rocks, whips, clubs, knives, firebombs, and even guns. While only a few people were killed, thousands were injured. These attacks were met by strong resistance from the protesters, who soon managed to chase the attackers away and erected barriers and fences to protect the square and regulate access to its vicinities. The attacks also generated more sympathy with the protesters and further increased the number of people (including intellectuals, artists, and movie stars) who frequented the Midan to support them.

During all of this, the Midan has become the symbolic as well as the physical anchor that represents right vs. wrong, change vs. stability, and the nation (el-Sha’b) vs. the system (nizam). The way in which this space has been managed and regulated by the protesters is becoming central to how they see themselves as a group. They have repeatedly expressed their pride that they were able to fend off the baltagia and protect their Midan. Men and women work together to clean the square, protect the property (stores, buildings, and the Egyptian museum) in and around it, offer medical services to its inhabitants, and support each other. The feeling of solidarity and belonging is so strong among the protesters that many are willing to sacrifice their lives to protect the Midan and its people. In many ways, the square mirrors what is happing in other Egyptian urban neighborhoods, where ordinary citizens have taken charge of their streets, alleys, and housing blocks to offer protection, provide basic services, and secure order.

Since February 2, a strong association has been established between staying in the square and victory, on one hand, and leaving it and defeat, on the other. As one protester put it, “If we leave, they’ll hunt us one by one. We know that. . . . It is safe inside the square because people are willing to sacrifice their lives at the frontlines.” The protesters have strongly linked the Midan to the future of Egypt by insisting that they will not leave it before Mubarak leaves office. Despite increasing pressure by the political and military institutions, the protesters are still holding to the Midan and are planning more and bigger rallies.

Currently, all attention is directed at Midan al-Tahrir. During the coming days, we will remain glued to different media, watching and observing how the events unfold. The Midan has become the center of resistance and the struggle to change the political system in Egypt, and a lot hinges on what happens there. As I write this, the Midan is a powerful space that is full of exciting possibilities and potentialities. No doubt about it, whatever the outcome, it will have a tremendous impact, not only on Egypt, but also on the rest of the Arab countries and, perhaps, the world at large.

Like the United States, Poland is a religious society, with 96 percent of the adult population declaring belief in God, and 70 percent attending religious services at least once a month.  Unlike the United States, Poland is ethnically and denominationally homogenous—it is 96 percent ethnically Polish and 95 percent Catholic.  This lack of religious pluralism has not diminished contention about the place of religion in the public sphere, an issue that has been hotly debated since the fall of communism and throughout the construction of a legitimate national state.  Should Poland be “united under the sign of the cross,” as many on the Right have argued, or should the state embrace confessional neutrality?  Should there be an invocatio Dei in the new Constitution?  Should crosses be present in classrooms, state institutions, or other broadly conceived “public spaces”?

These questions became especially salient in the debates surrounding the controversial erection of hundreds of crosses just outside Auschwitz in 1998-99. Ultra-nationalist Poles chose the cross to mark Auschwitz as the place of Polish martyrdom—as opposed to the place of the Jewish Shoah—and as a strategy to defend an explicitly Catholic vision of Polishness, which had slowly but surely been eroding since 1989.  Despite having garnered significant support from the four corners of Poland and beyond, the action backfired because most Poles no longer saw the cross as a sign of freedom and dissent from an atheist party-state and its totalitarian regime.  For Liberal intellectuals from the Left and Center, the cross now stood for the rejection of the principles of the Rechtsstaat, in which particular allegiances are relegated to the private sphere.  For liberal Catholics, the cross had become a sign of intolerance toward “Others,” used as a provocation contrary to the Christian meaning of the symbol.  For many members of the clergy and Episcopate, the crosses at Auschwitz were a shameful expression of Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism.  The Church hierarchy attempted to restrict the semantic orbit of the cross in order to regain discursive and ritual control of the symbol by emphatically promoting a “correct theology of the cross” in various venues.

That very summer, however, the Łódź court rendered a judgment on a related civil case filed a year before.  A self-proclaimed atheist had sued the city for displaying a cross at city hall, arguing that it infringed on his private wellbeing.  The suit was grounded on Article 25 of Law 2 of the 1997 Constitution of the Polish Republic, which concerns the religious and philosophical neutrality of public organs.  Yet the lawsuit was rejected, the court having ruled that the cross, as a traditional symbol in Polish culture, had been objectified to the extent that it could not constitute a threat to any individual.  The Court of Appeals maintained the regional court’s decision, arguing that in the Polish patriotic tradition, the cross expressed a specific set of moral and historical values:

Personal wellbeing cannot be understood […] without reference to the tradition, culture and historical experiences of the collectivity in which physical persons live and function. In addition to its religious meaning […], the symbol of the cross has been inscribed in the experiences and the social consciousness of the Polish Nation—as a symbol of death, pain, sacrifice, and as a way of honoring all those who fought for freedom and independence in the struggle for national liberation during the Partitions and during the war against invaders. The symbol of the cross has for centuries designated the graves of ancestors and the places of national memory. In non-religious collective behavior, [the] meaning of the cross as an expression of respect for, and unity with, the liberators of the Fatherland even has precedence [my emphasis] because other universal means to express respect have not been developed.

Moreover, according to the Court, the cross was expressly related to secular, state institutions:

In addition to its religious meaning, the symbol of the cross in Polish society expresses moral order, on which the idea of the state and society is based. Throughout history […] the cross has been, in the Polish tradition, linked with the legislative and judiciary powers. This fact does not in itself prevent dialogue among people representing different worldviews.

The symbol’s religious semantics were overshadowed in both courts’ decisions by its secular, “merely” cultural, and civic connotations.  Yet, its secularity made it no less “sacred.”

Does this case—in which the cross was deemed tolerable because it had been sufficiently secularized, and thus was not evocative of religious sentiments—suggest a diminution of the public centrality of religion?  Or, conversely, does it present a hypertrophy of religion, with the cross so omnivorous and all-encompassing as to devour the principles of the Rechtsstaat entirely?  Perhaps the cross’s religious meaning, however occluded by its “merely cultural” connotations, is the champion left standing, not only at Auschwitz, but over the nation as a whole?

Sullivan asks whether the incapacity of national symbols to replace religious ones suggests the failure of civil religion and secularization.  “Civil religion,” following the Durkheimian tradition, refers to the social sacralization of a given group’s symbols.  In the modern era, according to this view, civic, or state symbols like the flag acquire religious significance and are worshiped by citizens as totems.  The Polish case points to a different and somewhat overlooked process.  Because of Poland’s peculiar political history, it was not political ideals, institutions, and symbols that were sacralized and that became the object of religious-like devotion (following the paradigmatic French revolutionary model), but religious symbols that were first secularized, and then resacralized as national.  The cross in Poland is therefore a sacred secular symbol.  It is sacred, not only because of its Christian semantics (or even in spite of them), but because since the nineteenth century it has traditionally represented Poland.  Instead of religion yielding to nationalism or nationalism becoming a religion, here religion becomes nationalism.

In cases where national identity is experienced and expressed through religious channels, the estimation of religious decline or ascent in relation to nationalism is a quixotic mission.  When the religious is secularized and then resacralized in national form, the relationship between national symbols and religious symbols is particularly difficult to tease apart, as much for social scientists as for judges.  It may be precisely this ambiguity, or this ability to pivot in different directions, that constitutes the cross’s (and other analogous symbols’) source of “civil religious” power.

The national sacralization of religious symbols, however, is meaningful and garners consensual support only in specific contexts.  Even in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, it has been fiercely contested since the fall of communism and the establishment of an independent state.  Such symbols could certainly be “secularized” again.  “Secularization,” in the sense I am using the term here, would mean, however, returning to a more distinctly (or theologically orthodox) religious interpretation of Catholicism in Poland.  The de-politicization of religion has indeed been the objective of many Catholic groups in the last two decades.  Ironically, this would restore the “truly” sacred status of what has become, in their view, a merely national religion. After Catholicism’s long public career, many Polish Catholics now lobby for its privatization.

—Phillip Blond

This past November, a new think tank called ResPublica was launched in London, in the opulent surrounds of the Royal Horseguards Hotel. It’s not every day that a think tank appears, of course, but even so this one attracted an unusual amount of attention. The meeting room in which the launch took place was overflowing. David Cameron, the Conservative Party Leader, modernizer, and hopeful Prime Minister, provided the opening remarks, and introduced its director, Phillip Blond. In the lead-up to the launch, Blond got prime coverage on television, in the broadsheets, and throughout the blogosphere, building on what had actually been almost a year’s worth of buzz over his rise to the top.

ResPublica’s signature approach is what Blond calls “Red Toryism,” which he outlined in the February 2009 issue of Prospect as “the tradition of communitarian civic conservatism,” and about which we’ll soon hear more. (Blond’s book, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It, is set to be published in London this April, just before the British general election.) As Blond once described them in an interview, these communitarian Red Tories are “rather lovely people who say: ‘I’m a little bit Red, I’m a little bit Tory. I’ve been a conservative all my life, but I want to look after poor people.’”

Blond has been described by the New Statesman as the Conservative Party’s “philosopher-king,” but it is probably more accurate to say he’s part of Cameron’s scholastic stable—something like Tony Blair’s Tony Giddens. He is not every Tory’s Tory, to be sure. But his “progressive conservatism” has been useful as Cameron and his allies (the Cameroonians) try to erase the Conservative Party’s lingering image of being the Nasty Party.

Perhaps not surprisingly, media portraits of Blond have often been built around a few talking points, some glib, others intriguing. Firstly, and for fun, that Blond is the step-brother of the actor Daniel Craig (with much being made of the Blond/Bond pun). Secondly, and more seriously, that, in his capacity as a Red Tory, Blond doesn’t much like Tesco and other monopolist corporations; he wants a return to the butchers and bakers of yore, rooted in community networks. Blond talks up the virtues of society and talks down any and every liberal tradition of individualism (including Thatcherism). And finally, that Blond is an Anglican theologian who left his job at a provincial university to make his mark in the Westminster Village.

It’s this last point I want to focus on here, as a way of reflecting in part on Blond’s political vision as it has been set out thus far, and in part on how that vision relates to the secular arrangement in early twenty-first-century Britain. To date, what has grabbed the most attention in terms of Blond’s faith (other than the fact that he has one in the first place) are his opposition to abortion and his lack of enthusiasm over gay couples being able to adopt. These are important issues, but in and of themselves they do not get to the heart of the matter. What is most notable about Blond’s foray into the public square is the extent to which his theology would seem to demand the radical transformation of the public square itself. It is not just that Blond is fed up with New Labour and Conservative complicity in fostering neoliberalism, and it is not just that he wants to bolt cultural conservatism onto an economic progressivism. It is that the very language of politics, as well as that of culture—and thus the very terms of the secular system in which they operate—have to be reconfigured at the ontological level. This, at least, is what one would expect on the basis of his theology.

As many readers will know, Blond is not just any Anglican, or any theologian. He is a student of and advocate for Radical Orthodoxy, the Anglo-Catholic (yet ecumenical) “project” that came in part out of Peterhouse, Cambridge in the 1990s, and is perhaps best known through the work of John Milbank (who taught Blond at Peterhouse). In recent years, Milbank has garnered attention outside theology through his regular sparring with such continental atheist philosophers as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. But his most important achievement to date (which, incidentally, has not received nearly enough attention from social scientists), is Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. In that book, Milbank took a swipe at almost every theological and social-theoretical tradition stretching back to the days of Duns Scotus. The framing argument is that theology should not accept social theory’s terms of debate: religion (God) cannot be understood in terms of the social, but only in terms of itself. Inasmuch as theology has accepted a secular arrangement, it has ceased to be true theology. Secular social science—indeed, any secular norm—is, we might say, abnormal and, ultimately, a failure in its own terms because it harbors metaphysical impulses. “The secular episteme is a post-Christian paganism,” he writes. Theology has to become the master social science, the channel through which all social thought passes. “It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.” The importance of this account, in Milbank’s view—and why it both must be and deserves to be universal and encompassing—is that it will allow us to replace an “ontology of violence” with an “ontology of peace,” the latter being the true position of Christianity. Secular reason, as expressed in social theory and the compromised theologies that it tolerates, is always ultimately nihilistic, always based on this ontology of violence.

Blond’s take on this all is expressed quite passionately in his introduction to Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. It is worth quoting the first paragraph at length:

We live in a time of failed conditions. Everywhere people who have no faith in any possibility, either for themselves, each other, or for the world, mouth locutions they do not understand. With words such as ‘politics’, they attempt to formalise the unformalisable and found secular cities upon it. They attempt to live in the in-between and celebrate ambiguity as the new social horizon, always however bringing diversity into accord with their own projections. Always and everywhere, these late moderns make competing claims about the a priori, for they must be seen to disagree. Indeed such thinkers feel so strongly about the ethical nature of their doubt that they argue with vehemence about overcoming metaphysics, about language and the dangers of presence. […] Blind to the immanence of such a world, unable to disengage themselves from whatever transcendental schema they wish to endorse, these secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be, that what was promised to them—self-liberation through the limitation of the world to human faculties—might after all be a form of self-mutilation.

In transforming this theological manifesto into a political one, Blond has had to “formalise the unformalisable” to a certain extent. He cannot move in the think-tank world by talking about metaphysics and presence, still less—this being Britain—by talking about God. So what has not appeared in the Red Tory rendering of his work is a clear sense of whither the secular city, or, for that matter, whither the church. Indeed, what struck me most at the ResPublica launch, since I attended with his theological work in mind, is that neither Blond nor anyone else (during the Q&A session) made mention of religion, or even faith in the most generic, banal of ways. The closest Blond got was to say things such as:

A capitalism based on trust does not require external regulation or control. A capitalism based on reciprocity—free, open, honest exchange—has little bureaucracy or state power associated with it. A civil economy drives down the cost of suspicion that self-interest creates and crowds in good rather than bad behaviour. A culture of internal ethos rather than external regulation creates a whole new model of social capitalism that radically reduces the barriers to market entry that suspicion creates, and it prices in the very things that human beings most value and like about each other: trust, human affection, and open and honest behaviour. We can create a civic economy based on trust, sustainability, and reciprocity.

Sounds great! And as an anthropologist, it was hard not the hear echoes of Marcel Mauss in his words. Indeed, in a perverse way, Red Toryism does not seem all that far off from David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which also wrestles with the legacy of Mauss. The anarchism is actually not surprising. What it means in a radically orthodox sense is not no governance but no state, a point made by the American exponent William T. Cavanaugh in his essay in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. In a radically orthodox view, the problem with the state is that it leads to an “atomization of the citizenry.” The state is elemental to an ontology of violence (think Hobbes, think Rousseau), but anathema to an ontology of peace.

But as with any lovey-dovey statement about how wonderful we can be, the question to put to Blond is, how do we engender such trust? How can we create such a civic economy? The point is that Blond is not spouting empty rhetoric. Unlike many politicians, who are compelled to just sound inspiring and optimistic, Blond actually does have an answer: be radically orthodox.

I want to make a couple of things clear. First, I’ve never spoken to Phillip Blond, and I certainly don’t have the ability to read his mind. Second, I’m not a conspiracy theorist; I do not claim that Blond is covertly trying to foist a radically orthodox social arrangement on us through a political proxy set up in the secular city. What I am saying is that this double register of Radical Orthodoxy and Red Toryism is a near perfect encapsulation of the paradoxical location of religion in British politics: best hidden in plain view.

It is difficult to have a discussion or debate about the place of religion in British politics these days without someone bringing up the famous remark by Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair’s spin doctor) that “we don’t do God.” Campbell said this to a reporter from Vanity Fair who asked Blair about his faith; Campbell did not wait for Blair to answer. Since that time, “we don’t do God” has circulated as the a priori aperçu in all discussions of religion and politics: political talk cannot be religious talk. One problem with such a summary, though, is that British politicians do talk about religion—even if not in the same way as, say, their American counterparts. Blair did on occasion, and he made no secret of his strong faith.  In his first Labour Party Conference Speech as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown stressed that he got his values from his father, a minister in the Church of Scotland, and at one point quoted the Gospel of Mark.

Don’t get me wrong: too much public religiosity in politicians makes most Britons uneasy. It was only after he stepped down that Blair could openly be as Christian as he in fact is. And yet, what I think makes Britons more uneasy is the thought that religion is shaping things behind the scenes. Indeed, it’s not public religiosity in their politicians that bothers the British, but private religiosity, or, perhaps more accurately, the possibility of a “covert” religiosity at work. In my view, the key exchange on religion in politics in the past ten years is not that between Campbell and the Vanity Fair reporter. It’s one between the BBC’s bulldog Jeremy Paxman and Blair himself. It was February 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq War, and Paxman was chairing a question and answer session with Blair and an audience for Newsnight, the program he hosts. Paxman asked several questions, too, including one about Blair’s faith:

Paxman: … I want to explore a little further about your personal feelings about this war. Does the fact that George Bush and you are both Christians make it easier for you to view these conflicts in terms of good and evil?

Blair: I don’t think so, no, I think that whether you’re a Christian or you’re not a Christian you can try perceive what is good and what is, is evil.

Paxman: You don’t pray together for example?

Blair: [Blair smiles] No, we don’t pray together Jeremy, no.

Paxman: Why do you smile?

Blair: Because – why do you ask me the question?

Paxman: Because I’m trying to find out how you feel about it.

Blair: Possibly.

Smile. “Possibly.” What the transcription of this exchange cannot fully relay is the extent of Blair’s annoyance, the extent to which Paxman’s not-so-innocent question cut Blair to the bone. It is this exchange, in which Paxman and Blair almost square off on the question of whether the world’s leaders seek answers to the world’s issues by appealing to the divine, that captures a more central tension in how politics in Britain should or shouldn’t work. In this imagination of the secular, Politics has to be separate.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Blond has found favor in the political world with a politician who is, at best, what I referred to earlier as “just an Anglican.” Blair would surely be more interested in discoursing on theology with Blond than would Cameron. The most explicit David Cameron has gotten about his faith is to say that it’s a “fairly classic Church of England faith, a faith that grows hotter and colder by moments… If you are asking, do I drop to my knees and pray for guidance, no… But do I have faith and is it important, yes. My own faith is there, it’s not always the rock that perhaps it should be.”

When Cameron introduced Blond at the ResPublica launch, he said it was the largest such launch he’d ever been to, and that ResPublica would be “very important.” He also said that he did not agree with all of Blond’s positions, and would doubtless not agree with all of ResPublica’s platforms. But with that, Cameron left, apparently unable to stay for Blond’s speech.

Blond has maintained the public stance of an admiring outsider with a critical eye. He is not a full blooded Cameroonian. “We live in a time of crisis,” Blond begins in “Rise of the Red Tories,” his article for Prospect that provides the outline of his public-policy political vision. A time of crisis set within a time of failed conditions. What will be interesting to see is if and how Blond brings these times into synch, and in which res publica.