Communal Expressions of Meaning

We’re pretty close to the end of the graduation season, but the litigation about graduation season never seems to end.  Here’s an interesting call for some sort of truce in the prayer wars.  The author, a self-professed non-believer, offers a distinction between a communal expression of meaning and a government establishment of religion.  Since I believe that the latter requires coercion of some sort and the former does not, he’ll have no argument from me on that point.

The core of his contention:

The substitution of moments of silence for prayer suggests that there’s no communal expression of meaning possible in American life, which is tantamount to the promotion of a kind of radical individualism. We are supposed to be a political community. Community requires some kind of creed—though not of course necessarily a religious creed. Silence is no substitute for communal expression, but some devotees of separation seem to feel that any communal expression of meaning is too close to religion to be permitted to the government.

In Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Lee , this dearth of communal meaning in the public square was admitted. Justice Kennedy wrote that the government could not undertake the task of prayer even to express “the shared conviction that there is an ethic and a morality which transcend human invention.”

But surely this goes too far. Even a New Atheist figure like Sam Harris , in his recent book, The Moral Landscape , insists that there is an objective morality that goes beyond human invention. But whatever the separation of church and state might mean, whatever government neutrality involves, it cannot forbid government from asserting that moral values are real. Just because this has been a traditionally religious position is no reason for secular people to give up on objective values.

I’m not quite sure whether he’s calling for a communal expression of meaning to which everyone can be expected to subscribe—something like a creedal formulation of our civil religion, perhaps a recitation of the Declaration of Independence—or just asking us to be mindful of the difference between religious expressions in which many, if not all, of us could join and a genuine religious establishment.

Is he willing to tolerate genuinely religious invocations that won’t be shared by some or is he calling for pseudo-religious affirmations (the Regent’s Prayer ?) that can offend by virtue of their watery inclusiveness?

You tell me.