Religion on a Pedestal

As part of the macabre humor that Rabbis develop to express their fears of professional irrelevance, one story stands out from my days as a student studying for ordination. The young Rabbi is called to his first pulpit and is asked by the Synagogue President for the intended subject of his first sermon. "Sabbath observance" answers the young man. "That may not be a good idea," cautions the President. "Almost no one in our congregation stays home from work on Saturday." "Well, how about observance of dietary laws?" asks the Rabbi. "No that won't work either," comes the reply. "People here find such notions archaic." "Well, then, what should I speak about?" asks the chastened clergyman. Comes the immediate response, "Why Judaism, of course!"

I'm sure other faith traditions tell, mutatis mutandis, the same story and now Stephen Carter, law professor at Yale University and a deeply religious person -- as he genuinely describes himself -- weighs in with similar concerns. Religion has been marginalized and trivialized. The dominant culture excludes religiously based argumentation from the public square, not on content, but merely because it is religiously based. American Jurisprudence has also conspired to make religion a matter of private personal choice -- a "hobby" to use Carter's word -- with no sustainable claim for respect or special accommodation. [ Most significant in this regard is the 1990 Supreme Court decision in Employment Division vs. Smith. Prior to Smith church/state issues were governed by the Lemon test that prevented government from impacting on religion except in cases of compelling interest and when no less intrusive solution could be found. With the decision in Smith the operative criteria has become the test of whether particular legislation was designed to specifically impact on religious groups. Even handed legislation that inadvertently harms religion is no longer unconstitutional. Such a criteria will inevitably negatively impact the standing and functioning capacity of religion in this society.]

The problem as he describes it, is real. It is one that religious thinkers frequently grapple with. But Carter's suggested solution will find few advocates in the contemporary religious community. Stories about the trivialization of normative religion into feel-goodism were prevalent in the 60's and 70's when I was student, but find little resonance in traditional religious circles today. Though many have left for more "liberal" options, or opted out altogether, those that have remained, and those significant numbers who have returned, want and practice a far more traditionally authentic religion than the one advocated by our Synagogue President or by Stephen Carter. Trivialization may exist outside religious circles, but that is viewed by those inside the circle as a threat to be overcome, and not as a problem to be solved by compromise.

[Yet compromise is precisely what Carter wants. "The religions for all their arrogance and sinfulness can often provide approaches to the consideration of ultimate questions that a world yet steeped in materialistic ideologies desperately requires." On the other hand, "...religions are at their most useful when they serve as democratic intermediaries (independent moral voices interposed between the citizen and the state) and preach resistance." "The corollary, however is ominous. The closer the religions move to the center of secular power (as against influence), the less likely they are to discover meanings that are in competition with those imposed by the state." He cites, "Governor Cuomo in a very thoughtful address", who "argued that the separation can and must be made in order for devoutly religious individuals to function as elected officials in a secular polity." Ultimately religion should challenge and question but not make real changes. It is this deal that Carter offers. Religionists, however, are seeking other solutions.]

It is clear from the book's last chapter that Carter has some sense of this. He acknowledges that continued delegitimization of religion in the public square, far from insuring religion's demise, is creating a backlash that has led, among other things, to the success of the Christian Coalition in controlling state Republican Party organizations in at least a dozen states. This development frightens Carter and it is one that he hopes can be prevented from continuing.

It is in the roots of this fear that one finds the book's most egregious flaw. Carter is caught between his political beliefs and his misunderstanding of how people who live by traditional religious principles function. What Carter wants is for religion to be a moral oppositional force to government. However, he does not want it to take, what his politics sees as "wrong" public policy positions on issues such as abortion and gay rights. Carter cannot bring himself to condemn all such activity. He recognizes the debt owed to religion by the Civil Rights movement. But he would like religion to keep out of those areas that go against today's prevailing cultural norms. Carter will allow religion to argue and even to convince people that a fetus is a human being, but not to draw public policy conclusions from that belief. [ "... [T]heir right to choose abortion...must be based on an approach that allows abortion even if the fetus is human" (emphasis his).] Religion, as our opening anecdote's Synagogue President would agree, is to produce feelings and pious sentiments but not real consequences.

The danger in this for religion is obvious. Theology would find itself in constant retreat before every immoral challenge that arose, were it to adopt such a public posture. Carter supports his suggestion for religious self-emasculation by arguing that religion is corrupted by power and functions best when it removes itself from the power game. Yet the early Civil Rights movement with all its good, was also, by his terms, a grab for power.

Carter is also guilty here and throughout the book of describing religion in political power terms that are foreign to religion's understanding of itself. ["Religions are in effect independent centers of power" says Carter.] Absent from his description are the ontological and existential dimensions central to religious self-perception, but then that may be the point of the book.

Carter attempts to sweeten his proposal by offering something in return. He promises public respect for religious expression, greater accommodation of religious practice, exemption of religious students from "objectionable" school programs, and maybe even vouchers and government support for secular activities in religious schools. Along the way he manages to offer the survival of the State of Israel as a tradeoff for religious support (or at least non-opposition) to affirmative action programs, and then ties legitimizing the affirmative action paradigm to all accommodation of religion.

He should be aware that most of the community to which he makes this offer will find it demeaning if not thoroughly insulting. To trade the sacred for short term partial accommodation is an action that all religious faiths roundly, rigorously and regularly condemn.

In offering his understanding of why such a deal is necessary Carter is, at least, consistent. [In a section entitled "How Roe changed the rules",] he sees the origins of today's religious marginalization in religion's public anti-abortion advocacy and the secularist response to it. [Says Carter, "what has happened in the way of marginalizing religion can be captured in one word: abortion".] This incursion into the public policy arena led the Moral Majority and others into advocating many other uncomfortable public policy positions in domestic and foreign affairs and to consequent further marginality for religion. Unfortunately in this, as in much of his historical analysis, Carter is simply incorrect. Madeline Murray O'Hair and friends succeeded in removing Bible and prayer from the schools fully a decade before Roe v. Wade and legal decisions of that type can be found throughout the entire 10 years that follow her "triumph". Even the case that [enshrined the above mentioned] Lemon test that governed Church-State relations until the 1990 Smith decision, forbade the government's paying for secular textbooks or offering similar secular assistance, to religious schools. It came in 1971, two years before Roe. Indeed Roe was very much a climax in, and not the beginning of, the marginalization of religion. It was only after a decade of perceived major losses of this type that the religious right began to mobilize. In other circles Carter's "history" would easily be called "blaming the victim".

Carter is correct in condemning religious thinkers who use their beliefs as the handmaiden of their politics. ["Matters become troublesome however, when one's theology always ends up squaring precisely with one's politics."] Those who start with their political conclusions and then find support in authoritative sources do religion a disservice. I have often marveled that Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson can claim to speak from the same religious tradition in their political pronouncements.

Unfortunately, Carter's analysis of this phenomenon is superficial at best. There is no religious basis on which to declare the Soviet Union as well-intentioned and therefore as worthy of detente or on which to declare Space Based Defense Systems as morally imperative. Both positions involve political judgments not sustainable by religious texts. Both begin with non-religiously-authoritative judgments on the nature of the Soviet or strategic missile threat. On the other hand, abortion and gay rights are much different types of concerns. The Catholic or Jewish (which is significantly different) stance on abortion is not a matter of politics or political judgment. These positions embody eternal values and begin from a religious judgment of when life begins or when it can make a sustainable claim for protection under God. Accepting homosexuality as an alternate lifestyle is not within the purview of authentic traditional religions and Carter is fooling himself by suggesting it. While religious thinkers should be more careful about making political judgments a part of their spiritual and moral declarations, religion cannot be silent on issues that are matters of the spirit and morality and retain authenticity.

This last is the true source of religious marginalization in this society. The moral revolution of the 60's and its aftermath created a culture that worships radical autonomy and shuns any authority other than one's own conscience. Normative religion, is by definition, at odds with this world view. Short of turning religion into secularism, it will ever be so. No Faustian deal will avoid this clash of values. Carter, himself, points out that areas touching on procreation and marriage are at the zenith of the religious contretemps. Given the focus of the 60's moral revolution this is exactly what one would expect to happen.

Carter must also be challenged on his egregious stereotyping of religious people. Religionists don't use the same reasoning methods as secularists is his claim.

["... [R]eligion is really an alien way of knowing the world--alien, at least, in a political and legal culture in which reason supposedly rules", says Carter.] [In one sweep he thus denies] the rationalist tradition of Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes and their vast number of modern expositors in the halls of theology. While the rationalist religious tradition begins with a belief in God that secularism lacks, the dialogue and debate are joined from that point on identical grounds using the same rules of logical argumentation. Once one understands that belief in the efficacy of scientific method to reveal moral truth is as much a leap of faith as belief in God, secularist and religionist epistemology can become and often is functionally equivalent. By claiming that religionists don't think the same way as secularists one can put religionists wherever one is most comfortable having them.

Further, modern multiculturalists accept without question that blacks, women and gays think differently, i.e., have different epistemologies, than white males. They argue for full inclusion on this basis, not for exclusion. Since Carter accepts the multiculturalist argument, his only partial willingness to include religion in the public square seems to display a marked subconscious bias against religion.

Similar stereotypes occur in Carter's almost ritual bashing of Reagan, Bush and Oliver North (whom Carter is not sure acted out of religious conviction, but deserves opprobrium anyway) and the 1992 Republican Convention. He also claims that no meaningful dialogue may be had with religionists, and that religionists can't evaluate their beliefs critically. He equates the media and academic culture with the American mainstream and he is unable to distinguish between cults and religions. All of this reveals superficial stereotypical thinking.

His formulaic description of the historical evils perpetrated by religion is also troubling. He lacks any discussion of the internal contradictions that religious morality has with its own destructive behavior. Such contradictions have led to great acts of moral heroism on the part of religionists in the name of religion, even when powerful practitioners of the same religious tradition are engaged in massive acts of persecution. No such moral contradictions ever confront a Stalin or a Hitler when their secular ideologies lead them to the atrocities that they perpetrated with such cold-blooded competence.

Attributing secular society's suspicion of religion to this blood-stained history as Carter does, again reveals superficial analysis. If previous atrocities are the criteria for marginalization, socialism should be the most reviled institution on the face of the earth, particularly by those with the "moral sensitivity" to be suspicious of religion on these grounds. As this is obviously not true, discomfort with religion must emanate from elsewhere.

Equally disturbing, but reflective of similar sentiments regularly proclaimed by various academics, is his claim that pagan cultures were more tolerant than monotheistic ones. In a multi-god society no one cared if the group in the next valley worshipped different god's. It is the Judeo-Christian-Islamic claim of universality that creates problems. Certainly forceful imposition of one's universalistic beliefs is dangerous. However, Carter fails to mention the pagan world's far more barbaric record of behavior. Without some universal recourse to a shared set of moral principles the people in the next valley have no claim to concern on my part. This is undoubtedly true as my God takes no notice of them, and may well be in competition with their God. I will, therefore, be doing sacred work by eradicating them as thoroughly as possible.

Most painful is Carter's subtle insinuation of racism into the Supreme Court's troubling decision in Employment Division v. Smith. Carter claims that the overturning of the Lemon test occurred only because a racial minority, Native Americans, and their non-mainstream beliefs were involved. Carter can only maintain his jeremiad by avoiding the dozens of cases subsequent to Smith that, in citing Smith, have negatively impacted on many "mainstream" religions. The Court has had ample opportunity to back down from this reading of Smith and has been unwilling to do so. Carter mentions none of this legal history. In fact, a reader would think that the Lemon test continues to hold sway and that Smith-like decisions appear only when marginal groups are at risk. Even a casual scholar of the Court should know that this is not the case.

Carter's book gained notoriety in having been read and cited favorably by President Clinton. The President acted on his comments by convening a prayer breakfast for one hundred religious leaders from around the country to reaffirm his belief that religion must be brought back to the public square. Ironically the breakfast embodied many of the flaws that I find in the book. No fundamentalist or identifiably right wing denomination or thinker was invited, and Mr. Clinton used the occasion to repeat the "abortion advocacy caused the marginalization" claim. The Faustian deal is no better coming from the White House than it was coming from Yale Law School.

The Talmud tells of a Rabbinic applicant sent to a town to explore becoming its Rabbi. He was seated on a high platform and asked to preach, whereupon he refused the position. When asked by his teacher why he had refused, he answered that the populace wanted him on a pedestal, but did not want him to actually have an impact on their lives. Carter offers the same deal. It should and will be rejected. Perhaps we can ask him to write his next book in answer to the following question. Without God and fully-functioning normative religion, what authority exists that can answer the critical moral questions that we face as individuals and as a nation?