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Competing Orthodoxies in the Public Square: Postmodernism's Effect on Church-State Separation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Hunter Baker
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Extract

One scholar marks postmodernism's birth with the demolition of a housing project that had been designed with the best principles enlightened science and architecture had to offer. Residents found it uninhabitable. Local government found it impossible to police. What had once been heralded as a magnificent achievement and a boon to the poor ended as a pile of rubble.

Another author claims postmodernism was born when the Berlin Wall fell under the picks and hammers of those who had been hemmed in by the “scientific” ideology it stood for as well as the real blocks and mortar that long separated East and West. When the wall fell, the regime founded on an explicit effort to shed the confines of religion and custom for revolutionary reason did not take long to die. The age of the totalitarian secular orthodoxy died with it.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , 2005 , pp. 97 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2004

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References

1. See Grenz, Stanley, A Primer on Postmodernism 11 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publg. Co. 1996)Google Scholar, (quoting Jencks, Charles, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture 9 (4th ed., Acad. Editions 1984)Google Scholar).

2. Id.

3. See Veith, Gene Edward, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture 39 (Crossways Books 1994)Google Scholar (quoting Jencks, Charles, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture 9 (4th ed., Acad. Editions 1984)Google Scholar).

4. Id.

5. Id. at 27 (quoting Oden, Thomas C., Two Worlds: Notes of the Death of Modernity in America and Russia 32 (InterVarsity Press 1992)Google Scholar).

6. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge xxiii–xxiv (Bennington, Geoff & Massumi, Brian trans., U. Minn. Press 1984)Google Scholar.

7. Id. at 42-43.

8. Moloney, Daniel P., Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 101 First Things 53–55 (03 2000)Google Scholar.

9. If one senses a certain amount of ambiguity in my characterization of postmodernity's relationship to modernity, it is intentional and goes with the territory. George Marsden is rumored to have made light of the problem by once beginning a sentence “Postmodernism … and I guess I can define that any way I want ….”

10. Few writers have really engaged the issue. Stanley Fish and Michael McConnell are notable exceptions and will be dealt with at length later in the article.

11. The point will not be to render an authoritative account of the state of postmodernism in the process. There are many alternate streams of postmodern thought; some that accept the label and others that abjure it. The basic project here is to deal with the way postmodernism has undermined Western confidence in the objectivity of reason and the believability of liberal democracy as a neutral referee in judging competing ideological claims and then to measure the impact of that undermining upon church-state separation.

12. Veith, Gene Edward, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture 33 (Crossways Books 1994)Google Scholar.

13. Id. at 34.

14. Grenz, supra n. 1, at 4.

15. Id.

16. Id.

17. Id. (quoting Westphal, Merold, The Ostrich and the Boogeyman: Placing Postmodernism, 20 Christian Scholar's Rev. 115 (12 1990)Google Scholar).

18. Id.

19. Id.

20. Id. at 3 (quoting Habermas, Jurgen, Modernity: An Unfinished Project, in The Post-Modern Reader 162–163 (Jencks, Charles ed., St. Martins Press 1992)Google Scholar).

21. One should hasten to add that liberal democracy was not the only conclusion reached by lovers of reason. Flush with new confidence after Darwin, champions of western rationalism pushed for scientific approaches to virtually every area of life. Social sciences like economics, sociology, criminology, and psychology took on a prominence similar to that once accorded only to the physical sciences. New philosophies of government emerged, claiming that complete separation from the superstition, ritualism, and repression of faith in favor of a more scientific approach would lead to a new age of peace, social equality, and economic prosperity.

The century that resulted from the new thinking proved to be more bloody, destructive, and threatening to the destiny of human life on the planet than any of its predecessors. Strong man fascism led to the attempted genocide of the Jews and the development of weapons of war that had previously been the stuff of science fiction nightmares. Hard line communism in Russia and China led to the starvation, imprisonment, and political assassination of literally millions of citizens. The underlying lesson was that secular orthodoxies are just as capable as their religious forebears of great violence and repression of individual freedom. Access to near-absolute power, not faith, it would seem, is the key ingredient to reconstituting the worst sins of history.

Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, the entire world observed the cool hostility of the Soviet Union and the United States locked in what seemed sure to be a death embrace. The entire globe anticipated the constant possibility of unrestricted thermonuclear warfare and the consequent end of human life. The horrors of two world wars fought with modern weaponry, the unrelenting threat of the extinction of life on earth and comprehension of the scale of evil committed during the Holocaust helped feed world-weariness and skepticism of the perfectibility of society through social engineering. These events of modernity also helped undermine the broad theory of the Enlightenment, the notion that the exercise of human reason will lead us to inexorable progress and ever greater knowledge of nature, society, and even our selves.

22. Chesterton, G.K., Fancies Versus Fads 101 (Dodd, Mead, & Co. 1923)Google Scholar.

23. Litowitz, Douglas E., Postmodern Philosophy and Law 11 (U. Press Kan. 1997)Google Scholar (quoting Lyotard, Jean-Francois (with Thebaud, Jean-Loup), Just Gaming 82 (Godzich, Wlad trans., U. Minn. Press 1985))Google Scholar.

24. Likely sources include the collapse of the colonial system and the emergence of articulate third-world voices, the extreme turmoil of the 20th century and massive experiments in governing gone astray, and the near complete failure of the social sciences to deliver predictable human outcomes.

25. Grenz, supra n. 1, at 6.

26. Id.

27. Id. at 7.

28. Id.

29. Id.

30. Id.

31. Id. at 8.

32. Id.

33. In order to avoid dreary repetition, “the Enlightenment mind” will be used somewhat interchangeably with phrases like “the modern project,” “modernity,” and “liberalism.” All are meant to refer to an elevated view of reason and its capability to act as a neutral referee in the larger society.

34. This metaphor derives from imagery used by Professor Barry Hankins in his lectures at the Baylor University J.M. Dawson Institute for Church-State Studies.

35. Fish, Stanley, A Reply to Judd Owen, 93 Am. Political Sci. Rev. 925 (12 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Fish, Stanley, Mission Impossible: Settling the Just Bounds Between Church and State, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 2258 (12 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quoting Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)Google Scholar, repr. in John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus 17 (Horton, Hohn & Mendus, Susan eds. 1991))Google Scholar.

37. Id. at 2261.

38. Id.

39. Id. at 2262 (quoting Locke, supra n. 36, at 45)).

40. Id.

41. Id.

42. Id.

43. Id.

44. Id. at 2263.

45. Id. at 2266.

46. Id.

47. Id.

48. Id. at 2269.

49. McConnell, Michael W., ‘God Is Dead and We Have Killed Him!’: Freedom of Religion in the Post-modern Age, 1993 BYU L. Rev. 163, 165 (1993)Google Scholar.

50. Id. at 163-164.

51. Id. at 164.

52. Id.

53. Id. at 165.

54. Id.

55. Fish, supra n. 35, at 925.

56. Id.

57. Id.

58. Id.

59. Id.

60. Id.

61. Id. at 925-926.

62. Id. at 926.

63. Id.

64. Id.

65. Id.

66. Id.

67. Id. at 929.

68. Id.

69. Id.

70. Id.

71. Id.

72. The Holy Bible, Gen. 3:18 (all Biblical citations are from New Intl. Version)Google Scholar.

73. The Holy Bible, Matt. 7:1Google Scholar.

74. McConnell, supra n. 48, at 175-176.

75. Id. at 176

76. Id. at 177.

77. Id.

78. Id. at 177-178.

79. Berg, Thomas, Church-State Relations and the Social Ethics of Reinhold Neibuhr, 73 N.C. L. Rev. 1614 (04 1995)Google Scholar.

80. McConnell, supra n. 48, at 179.

81. Id. at 181.

82. Berg, supra n. 72, at 1634.

83. Id.

84. Id.

85. McConnell, supra n. 48, at 182-183

86. Id.

87. Id. at 186

88. Id. at 182.

89. Id. at 182-183.

90. Id. at 183.

91. Id.

92. Id. at 184.

93. Id.

94. Id.

95. Id. at 188.

96. Id. at 187

97. Id.

98. Id. at 188.

99. Id.

100. Teitel, Ruti G., Symposium: New Directions in Religious Liberty: Postmodernist Architectures in the Law of Religion, 1993 BYU L. Rev. 97, 99Google Scholar.

101. Id. at 101.

102. Id. at 103.

103. Berg, supra n. 72, at 1626.

104. Of course, Richard John Neuhaus may deserve credit for cementing the association between church-state matters and the term “public square” given his groundbreaking book, Neuhaus, Richard John, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. 1984)Google Scholar and magazine, First Things, which runs a regular feature titled “The Public Square.”

105. Teitel, supra n. 93, at. 107.

106. Id. at 114.

107. Rosenberger v. Rectors & Visitors of U. Va., 515 U.S. 819, 824 (1995).

108. Id.

109. Id. at 825.

110. Id.

111. Id. at 825-826.

112. Id. at 826.

113. Id. at 827.

114. Id.

115. Id. at 828-837.

116. Br. of Pet. at 18-19, Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of U. Va., 515 U.S. 819 (1995).

117. Oral Argument of Michael W. McConnell on Behalf of the Pet. at 1, Rosenberger v. U. Va., 515 U.S. 819 (1995).

118. Id. at 9.

119. Br. of Pet., supra n. 109, at 23 (emphasis mine).

120. Id. (citations omitted).

121. Rosenberger, 515 U.S. 819, 863 (1995).

122. Lamb 's Chapel v. Ctr. Moriches Union Free Sch. Dist., 508 U.S. 384 (1993).

123. Good News Club v. Milford C. Sch., 533 U.S. 98 (2001).

124. Id. at 103.

125. Id.

126. See Locke v. Davey, 540 U.S. 712 (2004). The Court's recent decision in Locke v. Davey that seems to underscore the collapse of free exercise that has been so obvious since the Smith decision. If the litigant in Locke had been able to tie his claim to free speech somehow, the state merit scholarship would probably still be his whether he decided to study theology or not. An interesting consequence of the case is that Joshua Davey is now a student at Harvard Law School.

127. Good News Club, 533 U.S. at 102.

128. Id. at 103-104.

129. Id. at 108.

130. What about Locke v. Davey? Supra n. 119. Doesn't that case disrupt the trend of an Establishment Clause relaxing its strictures in the face of postmodernity? The answer is no. The Establishment Clause was not held to bar Davey's use of the state merit scholarship to pursue his studies in devotional theology. The Court merely held that Washington state could bar such funding. This case actually augurs a renewed federalism in church-state cases. Steven Smith has asked why church-state separation has to be treated exactly the same way in Massachusetts and Louisiana. Smith, Steven D., Getting Over Equality: A Critical Diagnosis of Religious Freedom in America 66 (NY U. Press 2001)Google Scholar. It now appears the Court may be asking the same question. A situation where different states have varying standards on religion/public square issues is perfectly consistent with postmodernism, where communities determine meaning for themselves.

131. See generally Empi. Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).

132. Id. at 881-882.

133. See generally Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993).