Mirror of Justice

This appeared recently in the Chronicle Review, and I thought it was well worth re-printing:

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN

God Talk and American Political Life

American civic life is indecipherable if severed from its entanglement with American religion -- most important, Protestant Christianity of a Methodist variety. (This Methodist variety was various indeed, with dozens and dozens of spinoffs.) As Alexis de Tocqueville observed about the young nation in Democracy in America, the action of religion on politics, and politics on religion, was "something new" under the political sun, as the rich associational intermingling took place absent a struggle for ascendance. That reciprocal relationship continues in American civil society today. Everybody now recognizes the fact, but it presents difficulties for scholars. It is almost impossible to argue that one influences the other disproportionately.

Religion in its dominant American forms of Protestantism has paid a price for its cultural centrality, of course. One charge against the Protestant mainline is that in the past 40 years it has "followed" the culture and its tendency to value individualism and play down a sense of community. Rather than offering a bracing alternative to rapacious individualism, Protestantism has fallen in line. One important task of religion is to challenge the political world and what it makes most important, to raise questions when politics overreach. You cannot do that very effectively if you are simply absorbed within the forms of politics and lose a robust "separateness."

Here is one place where the rubber hits the road. The First Amendment of the Constitution's section on protecting the free exercise of religion has come increasingly to mean "free religious expression," something that refers to a subjective belief. What the framers had in mind may have been more robust -- not just freedom of individual conscience but a form of institutional autonomy, real libertas ecclesiae. It is very difficult for religion to serve as "salt and light to the world" (that, at least, is what Christians are called to do, which is of some cultural import since the United States remains overwhelmingly Christian) if religion has no independent, vigorous institutional site. Yet we remain suspicious -- or many do -- when "churches" act, especially if the church in question happens to be Roman Catholic. In that I see not only the continuing echoes of our historic anti-Catholicism but a real fear, even animus, against the notion of "church" or "institutional religion." We are happier with "spirituality," but, as one wag put it, "What does that mean? That I've watched many episodes of Touched by an Angel?"

Let's circle back to Tocqueville. He had in mind not only the subjective freedoms of believing citizens but also the mutual interaction of religious institutions and associations. That is what appears to have withered. And it is through religious institutions and communal bodies that the "politics" of religion comes through. It isn't a politics that dictates a particular policy outcome in any simple sense but that instead presents to a highly subjectivist culture an alternative understanding of persons and the common good. That may be the most important "political" contribution of all. If there are changes in the relationship of religion to American society, they very likely lie in accommodationism rather than continuing and sustained challenge.

Of course, America's elites don't mind if "religion," speaking institutionally, shares their enthusiasms. But as soon as "religion" trenches on their turf -- on the abortion issue, say, or the cloning and destruction of human embryos for research -- they voice cries of the illicit intrusion of religion into politics.

As to new directions for research: Here the issue of religion in civil society has certainly been joined. But there are fewer scholars than there should be reminding both religious and political forces how fractious the engagement can andI would insist -- ought to be. American society has all sorts of ways of working this out. But one party to the deep moral questions that vex us should not be forced to operate under a cloud of suspicion that it speaks from, and to, a "sectarian" perspective that is unacceptable in American life.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago.

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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 9, Page B7