A democratic and republican religion

Here is a provocative essay, in The New Criterion, by Fordham law professor Marc Arkin. Among other things, Arkin states:

The tension between secularism and religion is a fundamental and enduring part of American culture, a tradition as longstanding as the Puritan jeremiad itself. Instead, I would argue that the present-day issue is not the absence of religion from the public arena, but that religion has become a commodity like any other product of mass culture, leaving it all but bereft of its power to support independent moral norms.

After an interesting historical presentation, Arkin concludes:

This democraticization—and religious proliferation—may be the inevitable accompaniment of the voluntarism that is American religion’s great source of strength and energy. To be at once “republican and democratic” is an inherently unstable state of affairs, as the founding generation well understood. In that vein, today’s last word should go to Matthew Arnold. In Culture and Anarchy, he wrote, “One may say that to be reared a member of a national Church is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help towards culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man … has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as well.” Of course, Arnold was thinking about an English church of a bygone era, but it remains true that having to confront and conform one’s thoughts to a received body of faith and tradition is a steadying influence in life, if only as a matter of self-discipline and its moral consequences. In succumbing to the forces of democraticization and becoming an indistinguishable part of the wider culture, American religion has to a great degree relinquished that role.

Rick