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Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
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The question implies that the First Amendment's “separation of church and state,” as interpreted by the Supreme Court, is an insufficient solution to the old conflict between American democracy and Catholicism. Catholicism has become unsafe in contemporary American democracy in ways that the original constitutional arrangement, of which the First Amendment was only a part, does not help. The contemporary danger is rooted partly in the old conflict between classical liberalism and revealed religion as such. But the more proximate danger is the secular “civil liberties” regime that has been instituted by the Supreme Court since 1940. That regime permits Catholics to follow their religion in public affairs only insofar as it is in agreement with the secularism which the “civil liberties” regime both instituted and understands liberal democracy to require.
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References
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83 %Ibid., Ch. 1, #18.
84 %Ibid., chap. 1, #12.
85 %Ibid., chap. 3, #70.
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89 In Evangelium Vitae, Introduction, #4, the pope distinguishes “[t]he basic principles of their Constitutions [i.e., of many countries] which protect the right to life,” from modern legislation which makes legal some practices that are against life.
90 %Ibid., chap. 1, #19.
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93 Democracy in America, pp. 255–56.