"Church Meets State"

In Sunday's New York Times, Mark Lilla had this review of Gertrude Himmelfarb's latest, "The Roads to Modernity."

[T]he argument is that, unlike the anticlerical philosophes of the French Enlightenment, the British and American thinkers of the 18th century looked favorably on religion as a support to modern democracy. They saw that it could assist in forming good citizens by providing moral education and helping people be self-reliant. By teaching people to work, save and give, religion could prove a ballast to the self-destructive tendencies of both capitalism and democracy. There is, therefore, nothing antimodern or even antiliberal in encouraging American religion and making room for it in public life.

As intellectual history, this is a sound thesis. It is, however, incomplete, which is why we should be wary of drawing contemporary lessons from it. In truth, the leaders of the British and American Enlightenments shared the same hope as the French lumières: that the centuries-old struggle between church and state could be brought to an end, and along with it the fanaticism, superstition and obscurantism into which Christian culture had sunk.

The review proceeded pretty well, I thought.  But it ends badly:

The leading thinkers of the British and American Enlightenments hoped that life in a modern democratic order would shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith. American religion is moving in the opposite direction today, back toward the ecstatic, literalist and credulous spirit of the Great Awakenings. Its most disturbing manifestations are not political, at least not yet. They are cultural. The fascination with the ''end times,'' the belief in personal (and self-serving) miracles, the ignorance of basic science and history, the demonization of popular culture, the censoring of textbooks, the separatist instincts of the home-schooling movement -- all these developments are far more worrying in the long term than the loss of a few Congressional seats.

No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so. If there is anything David Hume and John Adams understood, it is that you cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge.

Now, I yield to no one when it comes to eye-rolling about "End Times" literature, but the suggestion that, say, the (entirely reasonable) desire of many faithful citizens to home-school their children "in Baton Rouge," or the (entirely reasonable) frustration of many sentient citizens with "popular culture," has any instructive connection with the death-dealing fanaticism of those who sever captives' heads on videotape in Baghdad is, well, unconvincing.  I agree with Lilla that (a) religious beliefs are relevant to political capacities and practices and, therefore, (b) religious beliefs matter.  But I'm more concerned about Lilla's call for Times readers to "polic[e] the public square," and the threat such a call poses to democracy, properly understood, than I am about the persistence of belief in miracles.  Nor, it should be noted, and contrary to Lilla's suggestion, is it the case that movements away from "mainline" liberal Christianity represents a "dumbing down" of the Faith.

Rick