national vocabulary, "You got to walk the walk, not just talk the talk."
But since the opposite of everything is frequently, if not always, true,
we might, on the matter of explicitly Christian rhetoric and the
American public square, consider reversing the injunction and asking the
question: How do we talk the talk? How, that is, do we talk so that
moral judgments born from Christian religious conviction can be heard
and thoughtfully considered by all Americans—or at least by those
Americans willing to concede that moral judgment plays a crucial role in
the public policy process?
The question of how Christians "talk the talk" in American public life
will not go away, because it cannot go away; this is a fact of
demographics, as well as a reflection of the nation's historic cultural
core. For the foreseeable future the United States will remain at one
and the same time a democracy, a deeply religious society, and a
vibrantly, gloriously, maddeningly, and, in some respects, depressingly
diverse culture. And thus, just as in decades if not centuries past, the
1990s will see a striking diversity of "vocabularies" in the American
public square: many of them religious, others determinedly secular.
How, then, to begin with, can Christians of various theological
persuasions talk with each other as they deliberate their public
responsibilities within the household of faith? And how can those same
diverse Christian communities contribute to a public moral discourse
that would more closely resemble a reasonable argument than a cacophony?
Is there, in other words, a grammar that can bring some discipline to
the inevitably polyglot public debate over how we ought to live
together?
I
These questions have been perennials in the garden of American public
controversy. But they have been rendered more urgent over the past
twenty years by two phenomena, distinct in their provenance but not
unrelated in their public consequences.
The first is the return to the public square of conservative,
evangelical, and fundamentalist Protestants from the cultural
hinterlands to which they were consigned (and to which they often
consigned themselves) in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial of 1925. For
almost fifty years after that great trek to the margins of the public
discourse, "the evangelicals" were content to remain in their enclaves,
worshiping and educating their children as they saw fit, asking only to
be left alone by the larger society. By the late 1970s, however, the
Carter Administration's Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service,
by their assault on Christian day schools, had demonstrated the
impossibility of sustaining that strategy; and the result was the
defensive/offensive movement we have come to know as the "religious new
right." That this movement dramatically sharpened the debate over the
place of Christian conviction in public discourse is too obvious to need
further elaboration.
And second, the return of the evangelicals and fundamentalists from
cultural exile was paralleled in the 1980s by a new assertiveness on the
part of American Roman Catholics (and especially several prominent
bishops). On issues such as abortion, pornography, school choice, and
the claims of the gay/lesbian/bisexual movement, Catholic bishops,
activists, and intellectuals who insisted on acting like Catholics in
public soon found themselves engaged not simply in political or
electoral battles, but in heated confrontations with several of the key
idea-shaping and values-transmitting institutions in our society: among
them the prestige press, the academy, and the popular entertainment
industry. Perhaps the high (or low) point of this trajectory was reached
on the 26th of November, 1989, when a New York Times editorial
solemnly warned Catholic bishops that their resistance to abortion-on-demand threatened the "truce of tolerance" by which Catholics were
permitted to play a part in American public life: a warning that was,
even by Times' standards, an exercise in brazen chutzpah.
Thus through the evangelical insurgency and the revitalization of the
Catholics in the public square—through the activism and interaction of
two groups who had long eyed each other with mutual suspicion (if not
downright hostility) but who now found themselves in common cause on a
host of fevered public issues—American democracy was faced, yet again,
with the problem of how it could be a e pluribus unum in fact
as well as in theory. And for their part, American Christians had to
think through the question of how their most deeply held convictions
could be brought to bear on public life in ways that were faithful both
to those convictions and to the canons of democratic civility. Given
that the United States remains, in Chesterton's famous phrase, a nation
with the soul of a church, the two questions were not unrelated.
II
So far as we know, the apostle Paul was not overly vexed about the
public policy of Athens in the first century of the common era; but
Paul's struggle to "translate" the Christian Gospel into terms that the
Athenians could understand and engage suggests that the issue
confronting Christians has a venerable history. Paul's invocation of the
"unknown god" to the men gathered on the Areopagus was, of course, an
evangelical tactic aimed at the religious conversion of his audience;
the book of Acts does not suggest that Paul was very much concerned to
reform deficit financing, health care, education, or defense
appropriations in Greater Athens. But that evangelical instinct which
led the apostle to seek a language—a grammar, if you will—through which
the Athenians could grasp (and be grasped by) the claims of the Gospel
is something on which we might well reflect, as we ponder such decidedly
secondary and tertiary questions as deficit financing, health care
reform, education, and defense appropriations in the American Republic.
Paul was a man at home with at least two moral-intellectual "grammars":
the Judaic, in which he had been rabbinically trained, and the
Hellenistic, which dominated elite culture in the eastern Mediterranean
at the time. We may be sure that Paul regarded the Judaic grammar as
superior to the Hellenistic, but he did not hesitate to employ the
latter when he deemed it necessary for the sake of the Gospel.
This grammatical ecumenicity, as we might call it, was memorably
captured in Paul's familiar boast, "I have become all things to all men,
that I might by all means save some." (1 Corinthians 9:22b) Again, the
questions behind this present discussion are questions of considerably
less consequence than the salvation of souls. But if, in such a grand
cause, the apostle of the gentiles could appeal to his audiences through
language and images with which they were most familiar—if, to get down
to cases, Paul could expropriate an Athenian idol as an instrument for
breaking open the Gospel of Christ, the Son of the Living God—then
perhaps it is incumbent upon us, working in the far less dramatic
precincts of public policy, to devise means of translating our religious
convictions into language and images that can illuminate for all our
fellow-citizens the truths of how we ought to live together, as we have
come to understand them through faith and reason.
There is danger in this, of course, and it should be squarely faced:
Christians eager to be heard in the public square today may, through an
excess of grammatical ecumenicity, so attenuate their message that the
sharp edge of truth gets blunted, and thus debased. Flaccidity in the
cause of a misconceived public ecumenism has been one dimension of the
decline of the academic study of religion in America, as it has been a
dimension of the decline of mainline/oldline Protestantism. Some would
suggest that a similar disposition to excessive public correctness, as
that set of attitudes is defined by the tastemakers of our society, has
also misshaped certain interpretations of the Roman Catholic "consistent
ethic of life."
Moreover, it can often seem as if our cultural moment demands
uncompromising confrontation rather than polite dialogue. When unborn
children have less legal standing than an endangered species of bird in
a national forest; when any conceivable configuration of consenting
adults sharing body parts is considered in enlightened circles to
constitute a "marriage"; when senior United States senators bloviate
about "sexual harassment" in kindergarten while national illegitimacy
rates approach 30 percent of all births: one is reminded of Orwell's
observation, two generations ago, that "we have now sunk to a depth at
which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent
men." There are some hard, home truths to be told on the various Mars
Hills of the American Republic, and one need not doubt that the telling
of such truths, even in a publicly accessible grammar, is going to bring
down upon one's head the odium of those committed to the establishment
of the Republic of the Imperial Autonomous Self. Under such
circumstances, the old country saw which tells us that we may as well
get hung for a sheep as for a goat retains its pertinence.
But the good news is that the bad news is not all the news there is. For
in certain signs of these times we may also be seeing a new public
recognition of the enduring realities of religious conviction and a new
willingness to concede a place for religiously based moral argument in
the American public square. The warm reception given Professor Stephen
L. Carter's recent critique of the secularism of our elite culture, our
law, and our politics suggests that seeds first planted by Richard John
Neuhaus in The Naked Public Square are beginning to flower,
however variously or confusedly. The broad bipartisan, ecumenical, and
interreligious support that made possible the passage last year of the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act is also an important straw in the wind
(although it remains to be seen just how the creative minds on the
federal bench will bend RFRA to various agendas of their own devising).
Then there is the fact that we have a President who, unlike his
predecessor, is unabashedly public about his Christian faith, and who
seems to understand that the engagement of differing religious
convictions within the bond of democratic civility is good for America.
It is far from self-evident that President Clinton's policies (and
appointments) are entirely congruent with his religious and moral
rhetoric; nor can one dismiss as mere partisanship the suggestion that
the President's rhetoric has been designed in part to divide the white
evangelical vote and thus secure his reelection in 1996. But politicians
will always be politicians, and those of us who take the bully pulpit
seriously can still applaud the fact that the President of the United
States publicly acknowledges that "we are a people of faith" and that
"religion helps to give our people the character without which a
democracy cannot survive."* However wide the chasm between the
President's talk and his Administration's walk, it surely means
something that President Clinton experiences no embarrassment about
using religious language in public.
At the very least, the President's public appeal to biblical religion
ought to remind us just how far from our roots we have strayed when the
"naked public square" could even be considered a plausible embodiment of
the American democratic experiment. In a nation whose coinage and
currency contain the motto, "In God We Trust"; whose Supreme Court
sessions open with the plea (admittedly, ever more poignant in recent
years) that "God save this honorable court"; whose House of
Representatives and Senate begin their daily work with prayer; whose
Presidents have, without exception, invoked the blessing of God in their
inaugural addresses—it is the proponents of established secularism who
should be on the historical, cultural, constitutional, and moral
defensive. If President Clinton's use of explicitly religious language
does nothing other than make clear who ought to be prosecuting and who
defending in this matter of religion and public life, then the President
will have done the country a service indeed.
III
Still, the sheer fact that religiously based public moral argument seems
"okay" again in certain influential quarters does not suggest the end of
our problem, any more than the widespread celebration of the film
The Age of Innocence, with its celebration of the superiority
of marital fidelity over extramarital sexual passion, suggests the end
of the sexual revolution. What we may have today, through a confluence
of forces (and not least because the crisis of the urban underclass has
finally focused the elite culture on problems of moral formation), is an
opening through which to begin the slow and laborious process of
reclothing the naked public square. Save in some tenured bunkers where
cultural vandals make merry while the cities burn and children shoot
children over basketball shoes, it is now widely acknowledged that its
nudity has been bad for the country. The question is how, and in what
livery, the square will be reclothed.
Abraham Lincoln, and specifically his Second Inaugural Address, provides
an important historical model. In this speech, remember, Lincoln
interpreted the national agony of a violent and sanguinary civil war in
explicitly biblical terms, citing Matthew's Gospel ("Woe unto the world
because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to
that man by whom the offense cometh") and the Psalmist ("The judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether") to buttress his general
hermeneutic claim that the workings-out of the American democratic
experiment were caught up in a divinely ordered plan for human history.
Now, can anyone reasonably argue that, in his deliberate choice of
biblical language and in his appeal to the notion of a providential
purpose in history, Lincoln was excluding anyone from the public debate
over the meaning and purpose of the War Between the States? Can it be
reasonably contended that Lincoln's attempt to prepare the United States
for reconciliation by offering a biblically based moral interpretation
of the recent national experience constituted an unconstitutional
"imposition" of belief and values on others?
We recognize Lincoln's Second Inaugural as perhaps the greatest speech
in American history precisely because, with singular eloquence and at a
moment of unparalleled national trauma, it spoke to the entire country
in an idiom that the entire country could understand. No one was
excluded by Lincoln's use of biblical language and imagery; all,
irrespective of confessional conviction (or the lack thereof), were
included in the great moral drama whose meaning the President was trying
to fix in the national consciousness.
It is arguably true that, even in the midst of civil war, the United
States (North and South) was a more culturally coherent nation than our
America today; and it is certainly true that no statesman of Lincoln's
eloquence and moral imagination is on the horizon of our public life.
Yet there is still an important lesson here. And the lesson is that
biblical language and imagery in public discourse ought to be used, not
to divide, but rather to unite: not to finish off an opponent with a
rhetorical coup de grace, but to call him (and all of us) to a deeper
reflection on the promise and perils of the American democratic
experiment.
This principle does not preclude hard truth-telling (as the Second
Inaugural amply attests). But Lincoln spoke as one who had understood
the frailty of all things human, and especially of all things political;
he did not suggest, even amidst a civil war, that all righteousness lay
on one side, and all evil on another; he knew, and acknowledged, that
the nation was under judgment; and he spoke not as a Republican, and not
even as a Northerner, but as an American seeking to reach out to other
Americans across chasms of division at least as broad and deep as any we
face today.
Such an approach—in which Christian conviction speaks through and to the
plurality of our national life, such that that plurality is enabled to
become a genuine pluralism—ought to commend itself to us, first and
foremost, on Christian theological, indeed doctrinal, grounds.
The treasure of the Gospel has been entrusted to the earthen vessels of
our humanity for the salvation of the world, not for the securing of
partisan advantage. We debase the Gospel and we debase the Body of
Christ (which witnesses in history to God's saving work in Christ) when
we use the Gospel as a partisan trump card. Our first loyalty—our
overriding loyalty—is to God in Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Because of that loyalty, Christians are "resident aliens" in any polis
in which they find themselves, as the second-century "Letter to
Diognetus" puts it. But it is precisely because our ultimate allegiance
is to a Kingdom not of this world that we can make a useful contribution
to the working out of an American democratic experiment that has
understood itself, from the outset, to be an experiment in limited
government, judged by transcendent moral norms, and open to the
participation of all men and women who affirm belief in certain "self-evident" truths about human persons and human community.
The experiment could fail; it requires a virtuous people in order to
succeed. All of this was implied in the Second Inaugural, and that helps
explain the enduring power of Lincoln's address. None of us is Lincoln.
But everything we say and do in public should make clear that our
purposes are to reunite America through a new birth of freedom, not
simply to throw their rascals out and get our rascals in.
And at a far more vulgar level, there are also practical considerations
to be weighed here. Playing the Gospel as a trump card is not only
offensive to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and secularists; it is also
offensive to other Christians—even (perhaps especially) to those
Christians who may be otherwise inclined to make common cause on public
policy issues. In brief, playing the Gospel as a trump card makes us
less effective witnesses to the truths we hold about the way in which we
ought to live together. (Moreover, and to go back to our primary
concern, the suggestion that Christian orthodoxy yields a single answer
to virtually every contested issue of public policy is an offense, not
simply against political common sense, but against . . . Christian
orthodoxy.)
IV
Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and its unchallenged position in the
pantheon of American public rhetoric, ought to have secured a place for
biblical language and imagery in our public life, the frettings of
radical secularists notwithstanding. But, having seen in Lincoln a model
for the proper deployment of explicitly biblical language in American
public discourse, perhaps a word about natural law is in order.
This is not the place to explore the differences among the various
natural law theories, or the points of tangency (and distinction)
between Roman Catholic natural law theory and Calvinist concepts of
common grace. Rather, the question before us is how Christians
contribute to the evolution of a genuine pluralism out of the plurality
of vocabularies in American public moral discourse today; the question
is how today's cannonading is transformed, in John Courtney Murray's
pungent phrase, into a situation of "creeds at war, intelligibly." And
the issue is a serious one, for society will descend into a different
kind of war, Hobbes' dread war of "all against all," unless we can talk
to each other in such a way that we make sense to each other—or at least
enough sense to conduct the public argument that is the lifeblood of a
democracy.
"Natural law" here means the claim that, even under the conditions of
the Fall, there is a moral logic built into the world and into us: a
logic that reasonable men and women can grasp by disciplined reflection
on the dynamics of human action. The grasping of that logic may be (and
Christians would say, most certainly is) aided by the effects of grace
at work in human hearts; and it may be the case that the Gospel draws
out of the natural law certain behavioral implications that are not so
readily discernible with the naked eye (so to speak). But that such a
moral logic exists, that it is available to all men through rational
reflection, and that it can be intelligibly argued in public, is, I
think, a matter of moral common sense.
We saw that logic at work in the American public debate over possible
U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf in the months between Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait and the beginning of Operation Desert Storm. From one
end of the country to the other, and in venues ranging from radio talk
shows to taxicabs to barber shops to bars to the halls of Congress, men
and women instinctively argued in the natural law categories of the just
war tradition in order to debate America's responsibilities in the Gulf:
Was ours a just cause? Who could properly authorize the use of force?
Did we have a reasonable chance of success? Was military action a last
resort? How could innocent civilian lives be protected? The country did
not instinctively reach for these questions because the just war
tradition had been effectively catechized in our schools over the past
generation (alas); rather, we reached for those questions because those
are the "natural" questions that any morally reflective person will ask
when contemplating the use of lethal force for the common good.
Moreover, the rather high level of public moral argument over the Gulf
crisis (perhaps the highest since a similar natural law argument had
been publicly engaged during the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act)
suggests that this instinctive moral logic has the perhaps unique
capacity to bring grammatical order to the deliberations of a diverse
society.
To commend the development of the skills necessary for conducting public
debate according to the grammar of the natural law is not to deny
explicitly Christian (or Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist) moral discourse a
place in the American public square. All Americans have the right to
bring their most deeply held convictions into play in our common life;
that is—or rather, ought to be—the commonly accepted meaning of the
First Amendment's guarantee of "free exercise." But those convictions
will be most readily engaged which are translated into idioms that can
be grasped by those whom we are trying to persuade. And one grammar
capable of effecting that translation is the natural law tradition. Two
examples may help illustrate the point.
The abortion license created by the Supreme Court in 1973 remains the
single most bitterly contested issue in American public life. It is
self-evident that Christian orthodoxy regards elective abortion as a
grave moral evil: as a profound offense against the entire structure of
Christian morals. And there is no doubt that the steady proclamation of
that truth, in love, has been a crucial factor in the perdurance of the
right-to-life movement over the past generation. The overwhelming
majority of those active on behalf of the right to life of the unborn
are committed to that cause, and have remained committed in the teeth of
fierce opposition from the elite culture, because they understand that
the Lord requires this of us.
But how are we to make our case to those who do not share that prior
religious commitment, or to those Christians whose churches do not
provide clear moral counsel on this issue? And how do we do this in a
political-cultural-legal climate in which individual autonomy has been
virtually absolutized?
The answer is, we best make our case by insisting that our defense of
the right to life of the unborn is a defense of civil rights and of a
generous, hospitable American democracy. We best make our case by
insisting that abortion-on-demand gravely damages the American
democratic experiment by drastically constricting the community of the
commonly protected. We best make our case by arguing that the private
use of lethal violence against an innocent is an assault on the moral
foundations of any just society. In short, we best make our case for
maximum feasible legal protection of the unborn by deploying natural law
arguments that translate our Christian moral convictions into a public
idiom more powerful than the idiom of autonomy.
A similar strategy commends itself in the face of the gay and lesbian
insurgency. Again, the position of orthodox Christian morality is
unambiguously clear: homosexual acts violate the structure of the
divinely created form of love by which men and women are to exercise
their sexuality in unitive and procreative responsibility. Thus
"homosexual marriage" is an oxymoron, and other proposals to grant
homosexuality "equal protection" with heterosexuality are an offense
against biblical morality: what many would call, unblushingly, an
abomination before the Lord.
But given the vast disarray wrought by the sexual revolution, by the
plurality of moral vocabularies in America, and by the current
confusions attending Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, we make a more
powerful case against the public policy claims of the gay and lesbian
insurgency by arguing on natural law grounds: by arguing that it is in
the very nature of governments to make discriminations; that the
relevant question is whether any proposed discrimination is invidiously
unjust; and that the legal preference given to heterosexual marriage is
good for society because it strengthens the basic unit of society, the
family, and because it is good for children. Given the fantastic damage
done to the urban underclass by the breakdown of family life, this is,
alas, an easier argument to make today than it was, say, twenty years
ago. But as that asphalt Via Dolorosa comes to impress itself more
indelibly on the national conscience, we may well find that natural law-based appeals to public responsibility for the welfare of children and
families give us a vocabulary superior in political potency to the
rhetoric of autonomy. And we just may find a new possibility for
building a conservative-liberal coalition on precisely these grounds,
facing precisely these issues.
Similar models of argumentation can be developed for other "social
issues," including censorship, school curricula, school choice, sex
education, and public health. In all these cases, it should be
emphasized again, the goal is not to weaken the moral claims or
judgments involved, but rather to translate them, through the grammar of
natural law, into claims and judgments that can be heard, engaged, and,
ultimately, accepted by those who do not share our basic Christian
commitment (and, perhaps, even by some of the confused brethren who do).
Finally, a word about democratic etiquette. If patriotism is often the
last refuge of scoundrels, then what currently passes for civility can
be the last refuge of moral weakness, confusion, or cowardice. Moreover,
as Mr. Dooley pointed out a while ago,"pollytics ain't beanbag." That
enduring reality, and the gravity of the questions engaged in the
American Kulturkampf, remind us that genuine civility is not
the same as docility or "niceness."
But there is a truth embedded in the habit of democratic etiquette, and
we should frankly acknowledge it. The truth is that persuasion is better
than coercion. And that is true because public moral argument is
superior—morally and politically—to violence.
All law is, of course, in some measure coercive. But one of the moral
superiorities of democracy is that our inevitably coercive laws are
defined by a process of persuasion, rather than by princely ukase or
politburo decree. And why is this mode of lawmaking morally superior?
Because it embodies four truths: that men and women are created with
intelligence and free will, and thus as subjects, not merely objects, of
power; that genuine authority is the right to command, not merely the
power to coerce; that those who are called to obey and to bear burdens
have first the right to be heard and to deliberate on whether a proposed
burden to be borne is necessary for the common good; and that there is
an inherent sense of justice in the people, by which they are empowered
to pass judgment on how we ought to live together.
Thus in observing, even as we refine, the rules of democratic etiquette,
Christians are helping to give contemporary expression to certain moral
understandings that have lain at the heart of the central political
tradition of the West since that tradition first formed in Jerusalem,
Athens, and Rome (to take symbolic reference points). And, not so
inconsequentially, we are thereby taking a stand against the
totalitarian temptation that lurks at the heart of every modern state,
including every modern democratic state. To be sure, that is not the
most important "public" thing we do as Christians. But it is an
important thing to do, nonetheless.
V
Two sets of obstacles make the transition from plurality to genuine
pluralism in contemporary America even more difficult than it
necessarily is.
The first obstacle is the legal and cultural sediment of the Supreme
Court's jurisprudence about the First Amendment religion clause over the
past fifty years. There is no space here to review this sorry history in
detail. Suffice it to say that the Court's strange decision to divide
what is clearly one religion clause into two religion clauses, and its
subsequent tortuous efforts to "balance" the claims of free exercise and
no establishment through Rube Goldberg contraptions like the three-part
"Lemon test," have not only led the justices into a jurisprudential
labyrinth of exceptional darkness and complexity; they have also created
a legal and cultural climate in which the public exercise of religious
conviction is too often understood as a quirk to be tolerated, rather
than a fundamental human right that any just state is obliged to
acknowledge. Which is to say, the justices' increasingly bizarre
balancing act has elevated no establishment and subordinated free
exercise to the point where a new establishment, the establishment of
secularism, threatens the constitutional order. And until the First
Amendment's religion clause is sutured together once again, in law and
in the popular understanding of the law—until, that is, no establishment
is understood as the means to the goal of free exercise—our law will
remain profoundly confused and our political culture too often
inhospitable to people of faith.
Thus, for example, one cannot applaud Professor Stephen Carter's
suggestion that the answer to the trivialization of religious belief and
practice in contemporary American law and politics is something like
maximum feasible toleration for religion in public life. No: the free
and public exercise of religious conviction is not to be "tolerated"—it
is to be accepted, welcomed, indeed celebrated as the first of freedoms
and the foundation of any meaningful scheme of human rights. And until
we reverse, both in law and in our popular legal-political culture, the
inversion of the religion clause that the Court has effected since
the Everson decision in 1947, the already difficult problem of
bringing a measure of democratic order and civility into our public
moral discourse will be endlessly exacerbated.
The second obstacle in the path to genuine pluralism is a certain lack
of theological and political discipline on the part of the religious
right.
Now this may seem a classic case of "blaming the victim"; after all, we
have recently witnessed a campaign for lieutenant governor of Virginia
in which the Democratic Party and much of the media portrayed the
Republican candidate, an avowed Christian, as a high-tech Savonarola
panting to impose a theocracy on the great Commonwealth, the Mother of
Presidents, through such lurid policies as . . . well, school choice,
informed consent prior to an elective abortion, parental notification of
a minor's intention to seek an abortion, equalization of the state's
personal income tax exemption with that allowed by the federal
government, tort reform, and a lid on state borrowing. All of which took
place eight brief months after a Washington Post reporter, in a
magnificently revealing Freudian slip, unselfconsciously described
evangelicals as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Which
in turn took place a mere seven months after the prestige press batted
nary an eye when Jesse Jackson, at the 1992 Democratic National
Convention, told the Christmas story in such a way as to criticize those
who would have objected to Mary aborting Jesus. In these circumstances,
in which fevered warnings are endlessly issued about the machinations of
the religious right and not a word is written or said about the agenda
of the religious left (and its influence on no less a personage than
Hillary Rodham Clinton), it may seem passing strange to suggest that the
necessary challenge to the imposition of an establishment of secularism
in America must be complemented by a parallel demand for increased self-discipline on the part of the religious right. Yet that is what is
needed. And here is why.
It is needed, first and foremost, for theological reasons. A partisan
Gospel is an ideological Gospel; and as many of us insisted against the
claims of liberation theology in the 1970s and 1980s, an ideologically
driven Gospel is a debasement of the Gospel. "Christian voter
scorecards" which suggest that the Gospel provides a "Christian answer"
to President Clinton's economic stimulus package, to the
Administration's tax proposals, to questions of voting rules in the
House of Representatives, and to increasing the federal debt ceiling
demean the Gospel by identifying it with an ideological agenda.
Another set of concerns arises from democratic theory. One can have no
quarrel with describing our current circumstances as an American
"culture war." But the suggestion, offered by Patrick J. Buchanan at the
1992 Republican Convention, that a culture war is to be equated, willy-nilly, with a "religious war" must be stoutly resisted. The two are not
the same. A culture war can be adjudicated, and a reasonable
accommodation reached, through the processes (including electoral and
juridical processes) of democratic persuasion; a religious war cannot.
Moreover, the very phrase "religious war" suggests that the answer to
the issue at the heart of the culture war—namely, the establishment of
officially sanctioned secularism as the American democratic creed—is an
alternative sanctified creed. But under the conditions of plurality that
seem to be written into the script of history (by God, some of us would
say), such a substitution is not and cannot be the answer. The
alternative to the naked public square is the reconstitution of civil
society in America. And what is "civil society"? Civil society is the
achievement of a genuine pluralism in which creeds are "intelligibly in
conflict." Genuine pluralism is, as Richard Neuhaus has written on many
occasions, not the avoidance of our deepest differences, but the
engagement of those differences within the bond of democratic civility.
No serious observer of the American political scene can doubt that any
number of forces have declared war on the religious right. For its part,
however, the religious right should decline that definition of the
conflict, and get on with the task of rebuilding civil society in
America—a strategy that is both theologically appropriate and, one
suspects, very good politics.
Finally, a greater measure of theological and political self-discipline
is to be urged on the religious right because it is just possible that
the right might win, and thus it had better start thinking now about how
it wants to win: as a force of reaction, or as a movement for the
revitalization of the American experiment. The choice here is going to
have a lot to do with how conservatives, evangelical Christian or
otherwise, govern in the future.
To say that the religious right might just win is not necessarily to
predict the outcome of, say, the 1996 presidential election, or the 1997
Virginia gubernatorial election, or the 1998 congressional elections.
Nor can one overlook the possibility that the current moral-cultural
ills in this country might lead to a kind of national implosion, perhaps
in the next decade. Given the demographic realities and the current sad
state of our politics and our law, that might yet happen.
To say that the religious right might win is, rather, to express an
intuition about the current correlation of forces in the debate over how
we ought to live together. One cannot get over the feeling that Irving
Kristol was on to something when he argued (in the Wall Street
Journal of February 1, 1993) that cultural conservatism is the wave
of the future in the United States. The secularization project, for all
that it dominates the network airwaves and the academy, has largely
failed: Americans are arguably more religious today than they were fifty
years ago. And this growth is not to be found in those precincts where
mainline/oldline churches have been acquiescing, both morally and
theologically, to this secularization. On the contrary, it is precisely
the churches making the most serious doctrinal and moral demands on
their congregants which are flourishing. All of this on the positive
side, coupled with the undeniably disastrous effects of the sexual
revolution, the welfare state, and the absolutization of individual
autonomy on the negative side, suggests that the revival of "traditional
moral values" as the common ethical horizon of our public life in the
late twentieth and the early twenty-first century is not an
impossibility.
In these circumstances, it is not only appropriate, but indeed
obligatory, for the evangelical and fundamentalist components of the
religious right to practice the public arts of grammatical ecumenicity:
to learn how to translate religiously grounded moral claims into a
public language and imagery capable of challenging the hegemony of what
Mary Ann Glendon has styled "rights-talk."
For the cultural-conservative coalition that can revitalize American
civil society and American politics will be a coalition that includes
Christians of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox commitment; Jews
who have broken ranks with the reflexive secularism and cultural
liberalism that have come to inform so much of American Jewry's approach
to the public square; a few secular people; and, just perhaps, a
considerable number of Muslims. Grammatical ecumenicity within this
coalition is essential to maintaining its tensile strength in the
cultural and political battles in which this coalition will be engaged.
And such ecumenicity will if anything be even more essential in
exercising the authority of governance such that the reconstitution of
America as a nation e pluribus unum involves a deepening,
rather than a theologically and democratically inappropriate narrowing,
of the unum.
In talking the talk, in truth and in charity, with force and with wit,
so that others can enter the great conversation over the "oughts" of our
common life, the religious right can make a signal contribution to the
reclothing of the naked public square in America. And in doing that, it
will be serving the Lord who stands in judgment on all the works of our
hands, but most especially on our politics. For orthodox Christians
politics is, or ought to be, penultimate. Talking the talk in the terms
suggested here helps keep politics in its place: and that, too, is no
mean contribution to the reconstruction of civil society in America at
the end of the twentieth century.
*The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "Remarks by the President at Signing Ceremony for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act," November 16, 1993. President Clinton's comments on this and other occasions are in sharp contrast to the discomforts that President Bush experienced in publicly acknowledging religious faith. Some will attribute this, and not without reason, to the cultural differences between Kennebunkport Episcopalians and Little Rock Baptists. But even Bush's most ardent admirers would have to concede that he was, to put it bluntly, terrified by the "religion issue,"
which he seemed to regard as an expression of that "right-wing agenda" stuff he reportedly deplored. Most memorably, during the 1988 primaries, Bush, asked to recall what he was thinking about when he was floating alone in the Pacific after his plane had been shot down by the Japanese, replied that he had thought about "Mom and Dad, about our country, about God . . . and about the separation of church and state."
George Weigel, author most recently of Final Revolution, is President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. An earlier version of this essay was presented last December at a conference sponsored by EPPC on "The Religious New Right: The 1992 Campaign and Beyond".
