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The French Revolution As Phantom Of The OperaHarry Van Dyke, Groen van Prinsterer's Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution. Wedge Publishing Foundation (Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada) 1989. Pp. 561. $29.50.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
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References
1. Wordsworth, W., The Fourteen-Book Prelude 192 (Book IX, lines 518-32) (Owen, W.J.B. ed. 1985)Google Scholar. The passage reflects Wordsworth's enthusiasm during his residence in France following 1789. Even the Reign of Terror did not, he tells us, shake his faith: “Under worst trials, was I driven to think/Of the glad times when I first traversed France
….” Id. at 210 (Book X, lines 490-91). When the
… terror had ceased,
… everything was wanting that might give
Courage to them who looked for good by light
Of rational experience …
yet in me confidence was unimpaired;
… in the People was my trust ….
Id. at 215 (Book XI, lines 2-7).
2. Id. at 226-27 (Book XI, lines 357-68). In 1804, Pope Pius VII was summoned to crown Napoleon, whereupon Napoleon crowned himself. The term “opera phantom” presumably refers to a “stage sunset such as would be used as part of the machinery of an opera.” Id. at 227 (commentary by W.J.B. Owen).
3. Vernon, 1789 And All That, Washington Post, Nov. 5, 1989, (Bookworld), at 14. Books continue to appear—see Darnton, , An Enlightened Revolution?, (review of two books), New York Rev. of Books 33 (10 24, 1991)Google Scholar (“The question won't go away.”).
4. Lectures VIII, IX and XI (of 15) were edited and translated by Van Dyke (in collaboration with H. Donald Morton), and published in two small books entitled Unbelief and Revolution: The History of the Revolution In Its First Phase - The Preparation (Till 1789) [Lecture XI] (1973) and Unbelief and Revolution: Unbelief in Religion and Politics [Lectures VIII & IX] (1975). Another translation of Groen's Ongeloof En Revolutie (1847; 2nd ed. 1868) was completed in 1963 but never published. See Lectures 206 n. 7. The translation in the LECTURES is in fact an abridgment which eliminates summaries, inessential digressions and redundant examples. Id. at 207 (approximately one-third of the text is left out).
5. Censer, , Revitalizing the Intellectual History of the French Revolution (review of several books), 50 J. Hist. Ideas 652 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6. Lectures, at T 2-4. Van Dyke, following his 292-page commentary on Dutch history, Groen, the lectures, the translation, and the controversial issues raised in the lectures, begins a new pagination for his translation of the lectures (herein denoted as “T”) which corresponds to the 1847 (first) edition, in Dutch, of Ongeloof En Revolutie.
7. Lectures, T 4-5.
8. Id. at T 14.
9. Id. at T 5-6.
10. Id. at T 14. Hampson, Compare, What Difference Did The French Revolution Make? 74 History 232, 234 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar:
[The] Civil Constitution of 1790 had the social effect of a Reformation, in the sense that it deprived a wealthy corporate institution of its autonomous position within the state. Politically, this was the opposite of a Reformation, since it destroyed the basis of the Gallican Church and made the French clergy dependent upon Rome.
11. Lectures at T 7.
12. Id. at T 16-17.
13. Groen cites Haller's Restoration of Political Science for the insight that proponents of popular sovereignty and of social contract doctrines wrongly assumed that the state arose from human consent. “Remove this error, and the state immediately presents itself in its actual form, not as an artificial production but as a product of nature, as the highest form of private rights.” Lectures at T 37. Groen also criticizes Bilderdijk for failing to distinguish between “true monarchy that rests on the personal and in many ways restricted authority of rulers, and the form of autocracy called monarchial government that arises inevitably from the anarchy of the Revolution. …” Id. at T 39.
14. Id. at T 29.
15. Id. at T 42.
16. Id. at T 43-44. With regard to the fourth “principle,” every family head, every corporation, every estate was entitled, within the sphere of its competence, to dispose of person and property, to make rules for its subordinates, to regulate its affairs as it pleased; in short, to exercise a form of government that differs from sovereign authority only in this respect that it lacks independence, which is the distinguishing mark of sovereignty.
Id. at T 48.
17. Id. at T 90-91 (quoting Burke, , Reflections on the Revolution in France, in V Works 80–82)Google Scholar.
18. Lectures at T 96.
19. Id. at T 96-105 (The king “was often powerless;” the Bastille “had fallen into disuse;” the “abolition of abuses was the topic of the day.”).
20. Id. at T 107-09. History “teaches that nations sometimes found themselves in a state that was a good deal worse than France was supposed to have been in, yet did not try to solve their problems by means of a revolution.” Id. at T 108.
21. Id. at T 118.
22. Id. at T 120.
23. Id. at T 123. “Gradually … only the republic came to be held as the normal and lawful situation.” Id.
24. Id. at T 124. “The prosperity, well-being and glory of republics became the object of one-sided contemplation; republics appeared as model states that promised the perfection of humanity.” Id. at T 124-25.
25. Id. at T 125.
26. Id. at T 126-27.
27. Id. at T 130.
28. Id. at T 131. Groen discusses Grotius' De Jure Belli Ac Paris, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and the works of Hobbes and Algernon Sidney. Id. at T 132-38.
29. Id. at T 142.
30. See id. at T 143: “Science, unless it echoes popular sentiment, does not easily attain popularity. If it can in some sense be said to shape society, it is even more itself modified and shaped by society.”
31. Id. A more general cause of the Revolution is the “world crisis which was at the same time a crisis in the history of the Christian Church, a period of decay and apostasy, of war against the Gospel in every field of learning and practice.” Id. at T 144.
32. Id. at T 116.
33. Id. at T 144-151. “Protestants, including Calvinists, do not wrest themselves free of papal tyranny in order to bow to the ever-changing opinions of a majority, but rather in order to live according to the norm of the Bible ….” Id. at T 145-46.
34. Id. at T 153, citing Lamennais' Essai Sur L'Indiférence, and mentioning the work of Bonald and Maistre as other examples.
35. Id. at 154, citing Cousin's Historie de La Philosophie du 18e Siecle and Guizot's Civilization En Europe.
36. Id. at T 156.
37. Id. at T 157-58.
38. Id. at T 164-65. “The fundamental principle of submission to God both shored up the tottering authority of governments and shielded the liberties of subjects, thereby arresting the advance of the republican theories with their revolutionary leaven.” Id. at T 169.
39. Id. at T 182; Groen here quotes Guizot, Civilisation En France, I, 33: “the science of the hidden laws that preside over the cause of events … is the physiology of history.”
40. Lectures, at T 184.
41. Id. at T 185.
42. Id. at T 187-88, 199.
43. Id. at T 192.
44. Id. at T 201, 205.
45. Id. at T 205-06.
46. Id. at T 222-23.
47. Id. at T 223.
48. Id. at T 223, 229.
49. Id. at T 229-41.
50. Id. at T 243-44.
51. Id. at T 246.
52. Id. at T 256.
53. Id. at T 267.
54. Id. at T 278. Groen cites Haller, K., I Restauration D E La Science Politique 254 (1824–1835)Google Scholar: “The political system of the philosophers, the unnatural idea that authority derives from the people…took root in almost every brain.”
55. Id. at T 281-82 (citing DeStaël, Mme., I Considerérations Sur Les Principaux Événemens de la Révolution Françoise 1 (1818))Google Scholar.
56. Id. at T 282-94.
57. Id. at T 297.
58. Id. at T 296-97.
59. Id. at T 299-302.
60. Id. at T 304-05 (“they lacked the power to do much more”).
61. Id. at T 308-09.
62. Id. at T 327-28.
63. Id. at T 329. Compare Schama, S., Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution 859 (1989)Google Scholar: “While it would be grotesque to implicate the generation of 1789 in the kind of hideous atrocities perpetrated under the Terror, it would be equally naive not to recognize that the former made the latter possible.”
64. Id. at T 331-32.
65. Id. at T 344-45. “These men, it is said, were not rulers but anarchists, not statesmen but executioners. I shall not deny it; but they were such because they were theorists, scrupulously orthodox in doctrine and in life.” Id. at T 348. James Wilkinson, in his study of the rhetoric of revolution, observes that the “principal orators of the Revolution—Mireabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just—appealed to moral absolutes with ritual regularity.” Wilkinson, , After the Revolution in France: The Rhetoric of Revolution, Salmagundi no. 84, at 16 (Fall 1989)Google Scholar.
66. See Lectures, at T 402 n.3 (added in the 1868 edition by Groen):
Being one in principle with France, Europe could view her revolutions only as mere changes in the form of government, hence as purely internal affairs. Diplomatic protests were uncalled for. On the contrary, the proper thing to do—in 1789, in 1830, in 1848—was to respect the factual embodiment of the sovereign will of the people.
67. Id. at T 403-28.
68. Id. at 2.
69. Id. at 4.
70. Id. at S (Geyl dismissed the work as “one grand mistake,” a perfect specimen of history-writing critically flawed by religious bias).
71. Id. at 7-13. In the opening paragraphs of Lecture I, Groen speaks of “national humiliation and decline” and widespread material deterioration. Id. at T 1-2.
72. Id. at 14-16.
73. Id. at 16.
74. Id. at T xii.
75. Id. at 26-27. Van Dyke details, in id. at 24-37, (i) the earlier leaders of the Dutch 
, (ii) the battle for church reform which involved Groen's denomination (Dutch Reformed) and resulted in secession by many congregations, and (iii) the controversy over government control of schools.
76. Id. at 52-55. Younger historians considered Groen's Archives “invaluable” (van den Brink) and spoke of Groen as the “pioneer of our present-day historiography” (Fruin) and the “father of modern Dutch historical research” (Huet). Id. at 54.
77. The issues that appeared between September 27 and November 19, 1831, carried the seven-part Overzigt (“Overview”) of Groen's theoretical framework.
78. Proeve over de middelen waardoor de waarheid wordt gekend en gestaaft (“Essay on the Means by which Truth Is Known and Confirmed”) (1834).
79. Groen wrote a tract, the title of which is translated (by Van Dyke) as The Measures Against the Seceders Tested Against Constitutional Law, (hereinafter The Measures) in which he argued that the persecution of the seceders was “ineffectual, illegal, unconstitutional, un-Dutch, and unchristian.” Lectures, at 57 (citing The Measures at 41-45, 47-58). Regarding education, Groen's Bijdrage to herziening der Grondwet in Nederlandschen zin (1840) (“Contribution Toward a Constitutional Revision in Line with the Dutch Spirit”) included an appeal for separate Christian schools free from government control.
80. See generally, The Measures, supra note 79.
81. See G. Groen van Prinsterer, Handbook der Geschiedenis van het Vaderland (first installment, 1841) (“Handbook of the History of the Fatherland”).
82. Lectures, at 61-63.
83. Id. at 95.
84. Id. at 96-97: “This circumstance sheds a curious light on Groen's worldview and for that matter, his conversion—gradually, during the years 1827-1833. Does this imply that the worldview in question is susceptible of demonstration to anyone, regardless of belie[?]”
85. Id. at 99.
86. Id. at 107, (quoting the French text of Study II of Groen's Studiën over de Revolutie … (n.d.)).
87. Lectures, at 113-14 (“we need only think of Burke” on the first point; otherwise, “the religious interpretation of the revolution is common enough among early Dutch leaders”).
88. Id. at 116-19.
89. Id. at 119-34.
90. Id. at 137.
91. Id. at 138. In a general article on historical narrative, Marilyn Butler remarks that in “the Nineteenth Century, learned discourses totalized and simplified ….” For example, Burke “constructed” the Revolution not by inventing it … but by telling it repeatedly, with an intense sensitivity to the cruel humiliation of individual victims.
This story of the Revolution is not a lie, but it is a version characteristic of one type of onlooker, the hostile witness. All its structural elements, which are authorial choices for the sake of meaning and emphasis, betray an interested point of view ….
Butler, , Telling It Like A Story: The French Revolution as Narrative, 28 Stud. In Romanticism 346, 351 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92. Id. at 157. Van Dyke gives the following example of a “sentence” from Lecture IX: Take the system as a whole, in its full import for religion and politics and recalling that its success is expected to usher in an endless future of bliss for mankind, can we have any doubt that here, too, the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the devil is unavoidable?
Id. at T 215.
93. Id. at 183-201 (citing footnotes in the 1868 edition).
94. Id. at 202-03.
95. Id. at 221. Van Dyke defends Groen against many unfair criticisms, but agrees that Groen's assessment of the old regime and modern constitutional law is the weakest part of the lectures. Id. at 217-23.
96. Id. at 226; compare Butler, supra note 91 (discussing, e.g., Burke and Wordsworth). Recall that Groen presents a history of revolution ideas before he turns to actual, “predictable” events. Nevertheless, Van Dyke explains, “Groen's approach is as much aposteriori as it is apriori” Lectures, at 227 (unbelief as the cause of revolution was a working hypothesis).
97. Id. at 231 (citing T 96, 118, 141, 151, as well as a portion of page 169 of the original first edition of the lectures (not included in the abridged translation in the Lectures)).
98. Id. at 231.
99. Id. at 233.
100. Id. at 224. Groen uses godsdienst to denote religious faith in and service to God or to an idol, but reserves the term Religie as that which embraces godsdienst and politics in a single belief-system.
101. Id. at 236. Where de Tocqueville saw, in the Revolution, an attack on the Christian religion “without replacing it with another,” L'Ancien Régime Et La Révolution 229 (1856), Groen wrote in the margin of his copy of de Tocqueville's study, “Die andere rel. was die van Rousseau” (“that other religion was that of Rousseau”). See Lectures at 236-37 (translations by Van Dyke).
102. Economic factors, for example, “do not receive their due” in Groen, because the focus is on the “march of a single ideology that gathers every other movement in its sweep.” Id. at 240.
103. Id. at 243.
104. See id. at 248.
105. Id. at 255.
106. Id. at 266.
107. Id. at 267.
108. Id.
109. Censer, , Commencing the Third Century of Debate (review of several books), 94 Am. Historical Rev. 1309, 1309 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
110. Censer, supra notes 5 and 109.
111. See Censer, supra note 109, at 1309 n. 2 (list of Lefebvre's studies).
112. See Censer, supra note 5 at 652-53, and supra note 109, at 1309-10. See also Hobsbaum, , The Making of a “Bourgeouis Revolution,” 56 Soc. Res. 5 (1989)Google Scholar. Regarding Marx's own views of the Revolution, see Löwy, , The Poetry of the Past: Marx and the French Revolution, New Left Rev., 09/Oct. 1989, at 111–24Google Scholar.
113. Censer, supra note 109, at 1311: “For the most part, the revisionists' work undermined Lefebvre's classic interpretation but failed to replace it with a new social explanation or an alternative political account.”
114. Id. at 1311-12 (mentioning Vovelle, Bertand, and Guilhaumou).
115. Id. at 1313, discussing Furet's, Interpreting The French Revolution (trans. Forster, E. 1981)Google Scholar; see also Johnson, , Winds of Change, History Today at 3–9 (05 1989)Google Scholar (discussing Furet's negative assessment of the Revolution and Mazauric's criticism of Furet), and Sutherland, , Introduction [to four articles on the Revolution] 16 Fr. Hist. Stud. 259, 260 (1989)Google Scholar (Furet and Hunt, see note 116 infra, as post-revisionists); but see Parker, , Who Made the French Revolution?: An Essay on Current Historiography, 52 Rad. Phil. 2 (1989)Google Scholar (using Furet and Hunt to salvage the Leftist interpretation of the Revolution).
Likewise, Censer's characterization of Furet can be contrasted with Timothy Tackett's identification of Furet as “the leading French representative of revisionism.” Tackett, , Nobles and Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of the National Assembly, 1789-1790, 94 Am. Hist. Rev. 271 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Tackett agrees that Furet sees the Revolution as:
impelled forward through the workings not of a class struggle but of a power struggle. … The revolution was progressively democratized and radicalized as successive factions of patriots each claimed to be the authentic voice of popular sovereignty, the true mouthpiece of the general will. Political struggle thus became a battle of rhetoric and of ideology—but with no class content.
Id. at 271-72.
116. Censer, supra note 109, at 1316 (discussing Hunt's, L.A.Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984)) and 1317–18Google Scholar (discussing Hunt's, “The Political Psychology of Revolutionary Caricatures,” in French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789-1799 at 33–40 (1988)Google Scholar); Censer also mentions Baker, K., Inventing The French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture In the Eighteenth Century (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar as an example of discourse analysis, id. at 1312; see also Censer, supra note 5, at 655-59, for a discussion of Baker's essay, and Maza, , Domestic Melodrama as Political Ideology: The Case of the Comte de Sanois, 94 Am. Hist. Rev. 1249, 1249–50 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (criticizing Baker's approach, called “structural-linguistic” and identified with Furet, for its assumption that the Revolution is a political event and its consequent reliance on political texts rather than novels, plays, etc.)
117. See Smitskamp, , Het boek “Ongeloof en Revolutie” in Een Bundel Studieën (ed. Suttorp, L. (1949) at 26Google Scholar (“Groen reduces all of history to the single denominator of a battle of principles with the same grandiose one-sidedness with which Marx and Engels reduce the entire course of history to a struggle of classes”).
118. Van Dyke notes, for example, that Furet discredits historians who “fail to differentiate the field of forces before and after the Revolution from the forces operative in or during the Revolution,” thereby collapsing two different levels of analysis. Lectures, at 246 n. 95 (citing Furet, supra note 115, at 18). “On Furet's standpoint, Unbelief and Revolution is a textbook example of such collapsing.” Lectures, at 246 n. 95. Also, Groen's conception of a revolutionary spirit of an age contrasts the Augustin Cochin's (1876-1916) view, followed by Furet, that a revolutionary minority nursed the Revolution along. Id. at 198 n. 42 (“Unbelief and Revolution foreshadows the … interpretation of … Cochin); see also Censer, supra note 109, at 1313 & n. 11 (Furet follows Chochin's lead) (citing Furet, supra note 115, at 164-204, and Cochin, A., Les Sociétés De Pensée Et La Democratie: Etudes D'Histoire Révolutionnaire (1921))Google Scholar.
119. See Censer, supra note 5, at 653. One group of such scholars, including Furet, “sought to understand the transformation of the ideas of eighteenth-century French people, and to document those shifts that might explain the coming of the the revolution.” Id. (citing G. Bolléme, et al. (1965) and M.T. Boussey, et al. (1970), Livre et Société Dans La France Du XVIIIe Siecle).
120. Zylstra, , Voegelin on Unbelief and Revolution, Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde, 05/June 1976, at 155–65Google Scholar.
121. Id. at 156 (quoting Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution 3 (ed. Hallowell, J. 1975))Google Scholar.
122. Zylstra, supra note 120, at 163. “Like Groen van Prinsterer, Voegelin realizes that there were many partial factors—on the political, economic, and social plane—that entered into the French Revolution. But [these] ‘are overshadowed by the fundamental spiritual issue which the Revolution has revealed for the first time in full clearness …’.” Id. (quoting Voegelin, supra note 121, at 176).
123. See Censer, supra note 109, at 1322, where the respective approaches of Doyle, Sutherland, Schama, and Bosher are called common-sensical, “typical of historians for whom theory is relatively unimportant”: “In particular, they make no attempt to deal with current debates about the relation of discourse to reality. They simply agree that [social, political, economic and intellectual] factors coexist, one alongside the other.”
124. Citizens, at 161. Groen, in a footnote added to the second edition (1868) of the lectures, disagrees with a critic (of the first edition) who states that “the ideas of Rousseau … do not begin to function until the revolution is well under way.” Lectures, at T 286 n. 33, quoting Fruin, R.J., Het Antirevolutionaire Staatsregt Van Mr. Groen Van Prinsterer Ontvouwd en Beoordeeld 17 (1953)Google Scholar.
125. Citizens, at 858.
126. Id. at 859 (“From the very beginning—from the summer of 1789—violence was the motor of the Revolution,” and not an unpleasant “aspect”).
127. See, e.g., id. at 591: “It is often said that such were the dire straits in which France found itself that some sort of purge was needed if the Revolution was to be preserved. … But what kind of Revolution merited preservation? One in which law had prostrated itself before the crudest form of bullying…?”; and id. at 858: “Militarized nationalism was not, in some accidental way, the unintended consequences of the French Revolution: it was its heart and soul.”
128. Berman, , Law and Belief in Three Revolutions, 18 Val. U. L. Rev. 569 (1984) (Edward A. Seegers Lectures, 11 8-10, 1983)Google Scholar.
129. Shaffer, , Law and Religion (Book Review), Christian Legal Soc'y Quarterly 26 (Winter 1989)Google Scholar.
130. Berman, supra note 128, at 470.
131. Id. at 569, 626.
132. Id. at 619, 621-22. Earlier in the article, Berman remarks that he is “not now talking about ‘causation’. I am not arguing that legal changes are caused by religious or ideological changes. I am talking rather about interconnections, interrelationships, whether or not causal.” Id. at 571.
133. See id. at 623-25.
134. Kirkwood, , Consolidation of Power and the Napoleonic Codes: Comment on the Enlightenment, The French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Codes, 18 Val. U. L. Rev. 665 (1984) (response to Berman, supra note 128)Google Scholar.
135. Id. at 670, 672.
136. Id. at 673.
137. Id. at 668, 672. The term “bourgeois vision” appears in a quotation from Tigar, M. & Levy, M., Law and the Rise of Capitalism 256 (1977)Google Scholar.
138. See Berman, supra note 128, at 619 (“The philosophes … were reformers, not revolutionairies.… Their critique … became part of the belief system [of revolutionaries]”); see also Groen, Lectures, at T 222-23:
[When] I claim that this doctrine [of the sovereignty of Reason and the People] was the cause of the Revolution I am not referring to the Revolution ideas as they were basked to ripeness in the brain of the philosopher, but rather to these ideas as they got entangled in a struggle with historical reality.
139. Kuyper, A., Lectures on Calvinism 7–8 (1898) (Stone Lectures at Princeton)Google Scholar.
140. Id. at 8.
141. See Dooyeweerd, H., Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options 9 (trans. Kraay, J. 1979)Google Scholar. Ground-motives in this conception are reflected in the art, legal processes, scholarship, and political structures of a society.
142. Just as Kuyper found Calvinism antithetical to Modernism, Dooyeweerd's biblical motive may be contrasted with the other three—humanistic—motives. For a more detailed summary of Dooyeweerd's philosophy, see my Disclosing Tilt: Law, Belief and Criticism 81–91 (1989)Google Scholar.
143. See id. at 92-104 (citing works by Dooyeweerd's disciples and revisionists, including Albert Wolters, James Olthuis, Jacob Klapwijk, and Bob Goudzwaard).
144. With respect to the former, parallels are evident in Kuhnian conceptions of natural science, in the neo-Marxian critique of culture (although Marxists are often criticized for not recognizing their own worldview), and with respect to law in critical legal studies.
145. See Skillen, The French Revolution and the Present Crisis in the West, Background Paper #89:2, Public Justice Report.
146. Id. at 1.
147. The Dreams of Reason, The New Republic, 04 17, 1989, at 35–39Google Scholar.
148. Id. at 39.
149. Skillen, supra note 145, at 4.
150. Darnton, , What was Revolutionary about the French Revolution?, New York Rev. of Books, 01 19, 1989, at 10Google Scholar.
151. Skillen, supra note 145, at 6.
152. See Sowell, T., A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)Google Scholar (reviewed in Scanlon, Down from Liberalism, New York Rev. of Books, April 28, 1988, at 28).
153. Skillen, supra note 145, at 14-15.
The ideal of an autonomous humanity that is unconstrained by God or by the church or by mysterious spirits, was the driving force behind both the “science ideal” [contrained vision] and the “Freedom Ideal” [unconstrained vision]. Sowell's contrast …, therefore, does not probe deeply enough. It remains confined to the inner tensions within modern humanism.
Id. at 17.
154. Id. at 18.
155. See generally Skillen, , Going Beyond Liberalism to Christian Social Philosophy, 19 Chr. Scholar's Rev. 220 (1990)Google Scholar, Religion and Education Policy: Where do we go from here?, 6 J.L. & Pol. 503 (1990)Google Scholar.
156. Skillen, , A New Idea in a New Nation (Book Review), 56 Christianity Today (09 18, 1987)Google Scholar. See also Baer, , The Supreme Court's Discriminatory Use of the Term “Sectarian”, 6 J.L. & Pol. 449, 467 (1990)Google Scholar (arguing that the Court equates religion with sectarian, narrow, bigoted, etc., thus failing “to see how secular views can be direct competitors of religious views, competing for the hearts and minds of citizens …”).
157. Id.
158. Skillen, , Biblical Politics Revisited, Public Justice Report, 10 1989, at 4Google Scholar (response to letter to editor arguing that Christian “policy positions should be couched in secular terms as much as possible”). See also Antonides, H., Is There Room For a Christian Presence in the Public Square 24 (1987)Google Scholar (“we must object to the argument that the Christian faith is a private matter and therefore has no place in the public realm”).
159. Neuhaus, R. J., The Naked Public Square 80–81 (1984)Google Scholar.
160. Id. at 82. In Neuhaus' view, however, “there is not an absence of religion, but, rather, the triumph of the religion of relativity. It is a religion that must in principle deny that it is religious. It is the religion that dare not speak its name.” Id. at 87. See also Skillen, J., The Scattered Voice: Christians At Odds In The Public Square (1990)Google Scholar (assessment of the diversity of Christian opinions regarding religion and the state).
161. Marshall, , Politics Not Ethics: A Christian Perspective on the State, in Servant or Tyrant: The Tasks And Limits of GOVERNMENT 12 (1989)Google Scholar.