Glendon's Tocquevillian Approach

I recently delighted in watching Mary Ann Glendon deliver the 2011 Harold Berman Lecture at Emory University on YouTube. The full text of the lecture, "Religious Freedom: A Second Class Right?" is also downloadable from Emory Law journal. It is of course now just as relevant as then, if not more so in light of Obergefell. Glendon's  ever optimistic Tocquevillian approach is an able response, or better, extension of Ross Douthat's ND lecture, posted by Rick  yesterday.  Here's Glendon: 

The point I wish to emphasize is that to ignore the associational and institutional dimensions of religious freedom not only harms the religious groups and the individuals to whom those groups are important; it also has implications for our democratic experiment. A society that aspires to be both free and compassionate cannot afford to neglect the health of the families, religious groups, and other communities of memory and mutual aid that are our principal seedbeds of character and competence.  As Emory’s John Witte and Christian Green point out in the introduction to their latest book, the religious institutions and other mediating structures that stand between the state and the individual not only help to create the conditions for the realization of civil and political rights but also provide many important social goods including education, health care, child care, and employment, among others.  And they often can do so far more efficiently, effectively, and humanely than agencies of the state. 

 

I believe that is why Harold Berman wrote twenty years ago that he hoped for a reinterpretation of the First Amendment’s religion language that “would permit not only ‘religion’ to cooperate with ‘government’ but ‘government’ openly to cooperate with ‘religion’—without discrimination for or against any belief system (and hence without establishment) and without coercion (and hence without restriction upon free exercise).” 

 

Having dwelt thus far on disquieting legal and cultural developments, I am glad to be able to report that some of the news the Pontifical Academy heard from social scientists last spring was quite encouraging—especially the new research that bears on the relation of religion and religious freedom to what one might call a country’s moral ecology. Allen Hertzke, for example, reported on pathbreaking studies that challenge the oft-repeated claim that religion is a particular source of social division and strife. That claim—almost a mantra in secular circles—implies that religion is practically a suspect category. 

 

Yet an important and growing body of empirical evidence reveals that the political influence of religion is in fact quite diverse, sometimes contributing to strife, but often fostering democracy, reconciliation, and peace. Some studies indicate that violence actually tends to be greater in societies where religious practice is suppressed and that promotion of religious freedom actually advances the cause of peace by reducing interreligious conflict.  Further research will be needed to discover the mechanisms that link religious freedom to religiously motivated violence or to its reduction in diverse societies. But the results thus far should give pause to those who claim that religion is inherently divisive.

 

For one thing, those who automatically associate religion with strife may be confusing religious conflicts with identity politics. It is often “the sacralization of identity”—rather than religion as such—that lies at the heart of conflicts to which religious labels have been attached.  The religious rhetoric and symbolism associated with such conflicts may have more to do with issues of individual and group identity than with theological differences.

 

A second important set of findings suggests a positive correlation between religious freedom and other important human goods.  The Pew Forum’s Brian Grim has found that “[t]he presence of religious freedom in a country mathematically correlates with . . . the longevity of democracy” and with the presence of civil and political liberty, women’s advancement, press freedom, literacy, lower infant mortality, and economic freedom.  Correspondingly, there is a significant correlation between the denial of religious freedom and the absence of these economic, social, and political goods. While more research is needed on these linkages, they provide encouraging empirical support for Pope John Paul II’s intuition that the state of religious freedom is a kind of litmus test for the state of human rights generally.

 

Now, if we put the news from the social scientists on changing religious attitudes together with the recent findings on the positive role of religion in society, we arrive at what Professor Hertzke calls “a profound paradox”—that just when pathbreaking work has begun to document the societal benefits of religious freedom, the longstanding social “consensus behind it is weakening, assaulted by authoritarian regimes, attacked by theocratic movements, violated by aggressive secular policies, and undermined by growing elite hostility or ignorance.” 

 

To this I would add a second paradox—that just when longstanding, elite attitudes toward religion are allegedly spreading through the population in general, several prominent secular thinkers have had second thoughts. Philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Marcello Pera have called attention to the importance of the Judeo–Christian heritage in sustaining liberal democracy, while Bernard-Henri Lévy has expressed concern about the spread of bias against Christianity. 

 

No serious thinker, of course, disputes that the preservation of a free society depends on citizens and statespersons with particular skills, knowledge, and qualities of mind and character. But many secular theorists have simply assumed that a free society can get along fine without religion and that the more closely religion is confined to the private sphere, the freer everyone will be. Some have maintained that the experience of living in a free society is sufficient in itself to foster the civic virtues of moderation and self-restraint, respect for others, and so on. 

 

That complacent opinion is becoming harder to sustain, however, with so many of the country’s families, schools, religious groups, and other seedbeds of civic virtue currently in distress.  It is hard to resist the conclusion that our liberal societies have been living for quite a while on inherited social capital—and that, like profligate heirs, we’ve been consuming our inheritance without bothering to replenish it.

That is why thinkers like Habermas and the Italian philosopher–statesman Marcello Pera have begun to speak out about the political costs of neglecting a cultural inheritance in which religion, liberty, and law are inextricably intertwined, and to question whether liberal states can afford to be indifferent or hostile to religion. They have begun to ask questions like: Where will citizens learn to view others with respect and concern, rather than to regard them as objects, means, or obstacles? What will cause most men and women to keep their promises, to limit consumption, to answer their country’s call for service, and to lend a hand to the unfortunate? Where will a state based on the rule of law find citizens and statesmen capable of devising just laws and then abiding by them? What is the role of religion in supporting the commitment to common values—the minimal social cohesion—that every free society requires?

 

Habermas has gone so far as to concede that the good effects that some philosophers have attributed to life in free societies may well have had their source in the legacy of the “Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”  In his case, it was concern about biological engineering and the instrumentalization of human life that led him to conclude that the West cannot abandon its religious heritage without endangering the great social and political advances that are grounded in that heritage. “The liberal state,” he has written, “depends in the long run on mentalities that it cannot produce from its own resources.”  A professed atheist and political leftist, he stunned many of his followers when he announced he had come to think that "[t]his legacy [of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love], substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk."

 

In a similar vein, Pera writes, “Without the Christian vision of the human person, our political life is doomed to become the mere exercise of power and our science to divorce itself from moral wisdom; our technology to become indifferent to ethics and our material well-being blind to our exploitation of others and our environment.” 

 

And so, the wheel of elite opinion may—just possibly—be coming back full circle to the views of those who, like George Washington and Alexis de Tocqueville, held that the free society was profoundly dependent on a healthy moral culture nourished by religion (by which they understood Judeo–Christianity).  In Democracy in America, Tocqueville—himself a religious skeptic—urged his fellow intellectuals to lay aside their bias against religion. Lovers of liberty, he said, should “hasten to call religion to their aid, for they must know that the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of mores, nor mores founded without beliefs.” Religion, he continued, is “the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge” for the maintenance of freedom itself.