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Two Concepts of Secularism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
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Extract

Looking back over the century just ended, it is not easy to assess the status and prospects of secularism and the secular ideal in the United States. As is so often the case in American history, when one sets out in search of the simple and obvious, one soon comes face to face with a crowd of paradoxes. The psychologist Erik Erikson once observed that Americans have a talent for sustaining opposites, and he could hardly have been more right. Such Janus-faced doubleness, or multiplicity, is virtually the American specialité de la maison.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 13 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Religion, Politics, Policy , January 2001 , pp. 47 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2001

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References

Notes

1. Erikson, Erik H., Childhood and Society (New York, 1950), 285Google Scholar; and Kammen, Michael G., People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

2. “How is it,” asked Samuel Johnson in his 1775 anti-American tract Taxation No Tyranny, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” For a more systematic investigation of his insight, see Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

3. Twitchell, James B., Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; McElroy, John Harmon, American Beliefs: What Keeps a Big Country and a Diverse People United (Chicago, 1999).Google Scholar

4. McClay, Wilfred M., The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar; and “The Hipster and the Organization Man,” First Things, no. 43 (May 1994): 23–30.

5. For a useful compendium of polling data regarding Americans' religious beliefs and practices, see Lindsay, D. Michael and Gallup, George Jr., Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs (Atlanta, 2000).Google Scholar Up-to-the-moment polling data of a similar character are also readily available at the internet website of the Gallup Organization, whose address is http://www.gallup.com. See, for example, the survey press release for 6 May 1999, which states that nine in ten of Americans pray to God, and three of four do so on a daily basis. “Creative destruction” is the coinage of the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpter, in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1950), 81–86.

6. See, for example, Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Wittich, Claud (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979)Google Scholar, and Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Fields, Karen (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. An especially important formulation of the secularization theory is Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

7. A succinct but useful recent examination of the perdurability of religious faith, a book that represents a reversal of the position that the author put forward in his earlier work, cited above, is Berger, Peter L., ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999)Google Scholar. See also Caplow, Theodore et al. , All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion (Minneapolis, 1983)Google Scholar; Greeley, Andrew, Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; and Martin, David, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization (London, 1969).Google Scholar

8. Carter, Stephen L. has been especially effective in bringing this condition into relief, in such works as The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York, 1994)Google Scholar, and his 1995 Massey Lectures at Harvard, , The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).Google Scholar

9. A useful guide to the relevant Supreme Court decisions, with excerpts and commentary beginning with Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) and carrying the story up to and including Lee v. Weisman (1992), is Eastland, Terry, ed., Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define the Debate over Church and State (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1993)Google Scholar. See also Frankel, Marvin E. and Foner, Eric, Faith and Freedom: Religious Liberty in America (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. Required reading is Neuhaus's, Richard John highly influential The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, 2d ed., (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986).Google Scholar

10. A perspective reflected in, among others, Kaminer, Wendy, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Kramnick, Isaac and Moore, R. Laurence, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; and Clarkson, Frederick, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Me., 1997).Google Scholar

11. Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994), 234.Google Scholar

12. On the influence of Roman Catholicism in Eastern and Central Europe, see especially the work of Weigel, George, including The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, and his biography of Paul, John II, Witness to Hope (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

13. Rosen, Jeffrey, “Is Nothing Secular?” New York Times Magazine, 20 01 2000, 40–45Google Scholar. For some historical perspective on the provenance of such professions, see Novak, Michael, “Faith in Search of Votes,” New York Times, 19 12 1999, A25.Google Scholar

14. An excellent overview of these matters can be found in Glenn, Charles, The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Carlson-Thies, Stanley W. and Skillen, James W., eds. Welfare in America: Christian Perspectives on a Policy in Crisis (Grand Rapids, Mich, 1996)Google Scholar. An exemplary work by a prominent advocate of faith-based charities is Sherman, Amy L., Restorers of Hope: Reaching the Poor in Your Community with Church-Based Ministries That Work (New York, 1997).Google Scholar

15. An interesting and ideologically diverse examination of Clinton's use of religious language arises out of the essays in Fackre, Gabriel, ed., Judgment Day at the White House: A Critical Declaration Exploring Moral Issues and the Political Use and Abuse of Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999)Google Scholar. See also Wogaman, J. Philip, From the Eye of the Storm: A Pastor to the President Speaks Out (Louisville, 1998).Google Scholar

16. For a skeptical view of the meaning of RFRA, see McClay, Wilfred M., “The Worst Decision Since Dred Scott?” Commentary, Vol. 104, no. 4 (10 1997): 52–54.Google Scholar

17. See Hemenway, Robert E., “The Evolution of a Controversy in Kansas Shows Why Scientists Must Defend the Search for Truth,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 10 1999, B7–8, for a response from the Chancellor of the University of Kansas.Google Scholar

18. See Charles Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace, and, from a different perspective, Braden, Jennifer S. and Good, Thomas L., The Great School Debate: Choice, Vouchers, and Charters (Mahwah, N.J., 2000).Google Scholar

19. In Agostini v. Felton (1997), the Court allowed public school teachers to tutor private school students in their private schools, even if the schools were primarily religious in nature. In Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995), the Court ruled that a public university that pays printing costs for a number of student publications through the use of student activity fees cannot deny that benefit to a student-run religious publication.

20. Moore, Roy S., “Putting God Back in the Public Square,” Imprimis 28, no. 8 (08 1999)Google Scholar; and Greenhouse, Linda, “Cases Give Court Chances to Define Church and State,” New York Times, 19 09 1999, A1.Google Scholar

21. See the works of Stephen L. Carter, in note 8 above, and Nord, Warren, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar; Hutson, James H. et al. , Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C., 1998)Google Scholar; Sandoz, Ellis, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding (Baton Rouge, 1991)Google Scholar; Gregg, Gary L. II, ed. Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition (ISI Books, 1999)Google Scholar; Witte, John, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (Boulder, 1999)Google Scholar; and Noonan, John, The Lustre of Our Nation: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998).Google Scholar

22. Marshall, Paul, Their Blood Cries Out: The Untold Story of Persecution Against Christians in the Modern World (Dallas, 1997)Google Scholar; Shea, Nina, In the Lion's Den: Persecuted Christians and What the Western Church Can Do About It (Nashville, 1997).Google Scholar

23. Church attendance, too, may understate the extent to which religious belief persists. See Rosin, Hanna, “Believers in God, if Not Church,” Washington Post, 18 01 2000, A1.Google Scholar

24. Marx, Karl, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York, 1978), 594–596Google Scholar: “And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language. … the beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue.”

25. Himmelfarb's, Gertrude book One Nation, Two Cultures (New York, 1999)Google Scholar argues not only that contemporary American culture is deeply divided, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, though plausibly, that it is the advocates of traditional values, morality, gender roles, and the like who comprise the “counterculture” in our time.

26. A good brief description of this coalescing outlook is provided in Robert P. George, “What Can We Reasonably Hope For?” in First Things, no. 99 (January 2000): 22–24. More detailed, more adventurous, and more controversial is Kreeft, Peter, Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War (New York, 1996).Google Scholar

27. His religious commitments, and a general sympathy for religion, frequently surface in the work of Washington Post journalist E. J. Dionne Jr.; see, for example, “A Shift Looms,” Washington Post, 3 October 1999, B1; and (with John J. DiLulio) What's God Got to Do with the American Experiment? Essays on Religion and Politics (Washington, D.C., 2000). Stephen Carter's work on this subject has already been mentioned (see note 8). Robert Coles has written biographical studies of Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Day, Dorothy, and Percy, Walker and has recently published The Secular Mind (Princeton, 1999)Google Scholar, calling into question the adequacy of the secular outlook of modernity. William E. Connolly's Why I am Not a Secularist vigorously advances a new model of public life that more adequately addresses the deeper needs of human beings.

28. Also implicit in McCarraher, Eugene, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, 2000).Google Scholar

29. One can learn a great deal from observing the tenor of two major academic conferences planned for the year 2000. First, one held 11 – 14 May at the University of Minnesota's Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, entitled “After Secularism/Religion: Interpretation, History, and Politics.” This decidedly postmodernist undertaking, underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation, seeks “to problematize the history by which religion and secularism are presented as polar oppositions,” and, by “engaging with the assumptions about progress, pragmatism, and rationality that underpin the genealogy of secularism,” to “generate new languages of interpretation that reveal both the partialities of secularism and the worldliness of religious belief.” The second, a somewhat more mainstream undertaking supported by the Lilly Endowment, is entitled “Congress 2000: The Future of the Study of Religion,” and was held 11 – 15 September at Boston University and Harvard University. Yet there too, the conference announcement proclaims “the collapse of foundationalism,” and the “frailty of the old secularization thesis,” questions “the Enlightenment relegation of religion to the ‘private’ realm,” doubts the possibility of “objective historical and ethnographic study”—and, for that matter, of any “normative and interpretative claims” at all.

30. See Lindbeck, George A., ed., The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Post-Liberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, 1996)Google Scholar, and The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, 1984); Frei, Hans W, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, 1980)Google Scholar; Hauerwas, Stanley, ed., Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Eugene, Ore., 1997)Google Scholar; Milbank, John et al. , eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (New York, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. A view well expressed in Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Democracy on Trial (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

32. Hunter, James Davison, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars (New York, 1994), esp. 45–82Google Scholar; and the earlier Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991).

33. Some of the dangers of overemphasizing the middle ground can be seen in Wolfe, Alan, One Nation After All: What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other (New York, 1998).Google Scholar

34. Glendon, Mary Ann, “Religious Freedom and Common Sense,” New York Times, 30 06 1997Google Scholar; and Glendon, and Yanes, Raul F., “Structural Free Exercise,” Michigan Law Review 90 (10 1991): 477–492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. See Sandel, Michael, “The Political Theory of the Procedural Republic,” in Neuhaus, Richard John, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr Today (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1989), 19–32.Google Scholar

36. Fish, Stanley, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar; Cuddihy, John Murray, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

37. Marsden, George M., The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Unbelief (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

38. It is perhaps for this very reason that some of the most interesting work on the concept of secularism is coming out of the Indian subcontinent. See, for example, Bhargava, Rajeev, Secularism and Its Critics (New York, 1998).Google Scholar

39. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Bradley, Phillips (New York, 2000), esp. 1:303–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McClay, Wilfred M., “The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Liberal Tradition in the American Republic,” in Quinlivan, Gary, ed., Public Morality, Civic Virtue, and the Problem of Modern Liberalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000).Google Scholar

40. This language comes from the Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

41. I did so completely unaware that the same title had already been used in a thoughtful essay by Leon Wieseltier, contained in Edna and Margalit, Avishai, Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar, on which I stumbled in the process of revising this essay for publication. I commend the essay to the reader's attention, although Wieseltier's distinction between “hard” and “soft” secularism is very different from my own distinction between “negative” and “positive” secularism.

42. Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York, 1969), 121.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., 127

44. Ibid.

45. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book One, Chapter Seven.

46. Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 142–43.

47. Ibid., 143.

48. Ibid., 133.

49. Ibid., 171.

50. Ibid., 171–72.

51. This is one of the central assertions put forward in Casanova, Public Religions.

52. See McClay, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition.”

53. Newman, John Henry Cardinal, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, 1990).Google Scholar

54. Even this qualifier is itself qualified, however, by Christ's assurance (Matthew 6:33) that those who “seek first” God's kingdom will also have their worldly needs recognized and cared for.

55. Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 135–41.

56. Myers, Ken, Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace (Charlottesville, 1994), 62–63.Google Scholar

57. See the thoughtful essays in Cromartie, Michael, ed., Caesar's Coin Revisited: Christians and the Limits of Government (Washington, D.C., 1996)Google Scholar. See especially this remark of Fr. James V. Schall: “The most revolutionary aspect of the Caesar's coin passage [in the Bible] is not the “render unto God” part but the “render to Caesar” part. Here we have the revelational tradition maintaining that there are indeed things of Caesar. And where do we aquire an understanding of those things? Not primarily from revelation…. The New Testament argues that if we want to find out what things belong to Caesar, we should go to those authors or experience wherein this matter can be directly and properly discussed. Revelation is not designed primarily to teach us what we can usually find out by ourselves, and this moderation on the part of revelation is part of its own claim to be true.”

58. Kramer, Peter D., Listening to Prozac (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; and Anderson, Walter Truett, The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person (New York, 1997).Google Scholar

59. See Berlin, Isaiah and Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York, 1991), 40–46.Google Scholar