"State Meets Religious Fervor"

Rick has pointed out some problems with the interesting article by Mark Lilla in Sunday's N.Y. Times Magazine called "Church Meets State."  A couple of other criticisms occurred to me.  The first is that Professor Lilla, like so many others, sees the American founding as a process by which the Enlightenment thinkers managed the unruly anti-liberal religious sects.  (The framers bet, he writes, "that entering the public square would liberalize [religious sects]  doctrinally, that they would become less credulous and dogmatic, more sober and rational.")  The next step, of course, is to assume that controlling or managing those sects is also the major task for today.  But this overlooks another side to the founding, one in which the sects themselves played a leading role.  On the very issue of religious liberty that is of such concern to Lilla, there is now a strong historical record (assembled by Michael McConnell, William McLoughlin, and others) that it was the fervent and "narrow" evangelical sects that provided the biggest push for religious liberty and disestablishment in the years 1776-1833; meanwhile, a lot of more "enlightened" thinkers supported retaining established churches of a mild, rationalistic variety.  If "enlightened" thought often sought to retain established churches, then just maybe it should not be the sole guide to the meaning of the American "liberal democratic order" that swept those churches away.  Maybe the fervent believers also have something central to tell us about the meaning of the American experiment.

Second, although Professor Lilla points out incisively how and why liberal religion has declined and given way to fervent evangelical religion, he seems ultimately to regard this as a wholly dangerous thing.  (That's why, he says, citizens need to be "more viligant about policing the public square" these days.)  But the fervent evangelical spirit that has given us anti-evolution crusades has also given us movements such as abolitionism -- which was, indeed, a direct outgrowth of one of the Great Awakenings whose "ecstatic" and "credulous" spirit Professor Lilla warns about.  Take also the civil rights movement, the touchstone for all modern social-justice efforts.  It owed most of its energy to the fervor of an "ecstatic" and pretty "literalistic" African-American church; and much of Martin Luther King's religious depth and perseverance came from his embrace of some very un-rationalistic, un-Enlightenment Christian concepts like the pervasiveness of human sin and the high costs that must be paid for redemption.  (These elements in the civil rights movement are documented in a great recent book by David Chappell called Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow.)

My former law faculty colleague, David Smolin, has written:

It is very nice for academics to talk about the dangers of making absolutist, divisive, sectarian religious statements in the political arena, but in fact those sorts of statements are necessary if people are going to be motivated to pay the cost of doing what is right, whether the subject is race, the poor, the environment, or abortion. The problem is not merely determining or debating the "right" course of action, but more broadly one of fighting the constant temptation to avoid paying the costs associated with doing what is right.

I think that the political Religious Right has many faults, including overlooking many issues of common good, such as the environment and social concern for the poor, that should be priorities in a Christian social ethic.  But maybe some of the fervor that the Religious Right brings to an issue like abortion is, as in the other cases above, quite valuable in countering the inertia that keeps us from addressing that moral problem.

Tom B.