Two Americas

In the Spring 2004 issue of The Public Interest , Joseph Bottum insightfully examines the tensions in “biblical America” between the Enlightenment democratic public order and the fervent religiosity of the people. The tension is original and deep: “Public order in a democracy ?Ethe structure of liberalism that needs a people of virtue to maintain itself ?Eseems to require the bulk of citizens to believe in God . . . . Liberalism needs religion, but religion doesn’t need liberalism. The rhetoric of biblical prophecy would burn the world to the ground if a still, small voice demanded it . . . . And to reap the benefits it needs, a democracy must allow religion to remain the potential trump, the threatened uncontrollable, the possible authority outside a modern state that longs to have no authority outside itself.” In short, “From its founding, the nation has always been something like a school of Enlightenment rationalists aswim in an ocean of Christian faith. And how shall the fish hate the water wherein they live? Or the water hate the fish?” The American dilemma, as Bottum sees it, is how to navigate the tension, without draining the ocean or eliminating the fish: “the question in America was always how to reap the benefit of biblical religion while minimizing the dangers of extra-political authority and a set of citizens called by their deepest beliefs away from any desire to help defend the political order.” Given this situation, “If we lose either our extra-public religion or our Enlightenment use of public religion ?Eif either side in this tension ever entirely vanquishes the other ?Ethe United States will cease to be much of anything at all.”

Bottum’s analysis sharply defines the reality of America, but this analysis also suffers some important limitations. True, losing one or the other side of the tension would mean that America would cease to be what it has always been. But that doesn’t mean it would be nothing. It could simply be a biblical republic. To deny this possibility is to suggest that the Enlightenment order is irreversible; that the secular is simply a fixed realm, rather than, as Milbank has argued, a historically contingent social and political construction. Bottum’s analysis thus seems to be assuming something like the permanence of liberal order.

Bottum goes on to evaluate the recent contributions of Thomas Pangle and Leon Kass to the “quarrel between reason and revelation.” While commending both authors, Bottum offers some incisive criticisms of each. In the last analysis, he argues, Pangle gives the victory to reason; he begins by trying to show how public philosophy needs “the Bible’s thickness to reinvigorate itself” but ends trying to show that the Bible can be illuminated by political philosophy. Kass, too, sees the Bible endorsing “a wisdom that philosophy would recognize.” For Kass, “what the Bible finally does is ease the cruellest edges of the tragic world that Greek literature left us . . . . Kass seems to take biblical wisdom as revealing the human condition to be a sort of mildly mitigated tragedy, and the human heart a kind of cactus bloom.” Intellectuals can do no better than “come up with . . . a useful Bible, the public philosophy side of biblical America. To undo the damage of the secularists, we need to bring the other side of the tension back into balance as well. We need the untamed Bible that forces public philosophy to bend and accommodate.” America, he argues, needs its rational deliberation and its rational compromises, but it cannot be America “unless, underneath it all, a small voice whispers that the nations are as a drop in the bucket and are as counted as the small dust on the balance.”

Amen to almost all of that. Yet, I remain Hauerwasian enough to ask whether Christians need to be concerned with restoring balance and helping America to be America. But Bottum is Hauerwasian enough to know that the church contributes to that balance only accidentally, and that the church will not make its proper contribution if it sees its task as one of making a contribution to the balance of biblical America. The church’s task is no more or less than being the church and proclaiming the untamed Word of the untamed God.