Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms.

Two very different books about the culture war have recently appeared. Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief is intellectually graceful and interesting. But if you want a war correspondent's account of who is fighting and what the fight is about, read Stephen Bates's Battleground.

Bates is a journalist and lawyer, and his story is set in rural Hawkins County, Tennessee. His protagonist is Vicki Frost, who became concerned about the books her children were being given to read in elementary school.

The books that concerned her contained stories and essays selected by a New York publisher (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). Some were science-fiction stories, and portrayed space travel and telepathy. In other stories, non-western religions and beliefs appeared on an equal footing with Christian beliefs.

The books troubled Frost. They plainly came from a different world than the one in which her children were growing up, and spoke a different language. They seemed to her to be teaching a religious doctrine that was quite simply evil. To Frost and millions of others there is no abstract category of religion," in which her beliefs are one competing variety.

Frost wanted her children taught in her own language, and she did not want them to be taught that her language and beliefs were arbitrary or translations from some higher order of being. Truth in her world was plainly revealed in ordinary language.

And so she began a long struggle with her local school system, and eventually went to court. Her suit became known as "Scopes II," because she and her few local allies spoke in the language they were trying to defend, the language of the Bible. They claimed that the doctrines of tolerance and relativity embedded in the Holt books were opposed to Christian belief and so could only be understood as evil. But it was not another Scopes trial. Early in her struggle, Frost had abandoned the effort to require Christian teaching in the local schools and fought only to have her children excused from having to learn parts of the standardized curriculum.

The trials and appeals in the Frost case are described in great detail. Bates had access not only to court records but also to the trial judge's draft opinions, and in interviews lawyers and clients talked freely about trial tactics. The hired guns - plaintiffs' Christian Women of America and defendants' People for the American Way - are meticulously described. One sees how inevitably the Frost suit was submerged in the larger battle of what Bates calls "the Superpowers."

Perhaps there is too much detail. But I would hate to sacrifice any of the data that Bates gives us so scrupulously. It is difficult to talk in generalities about the suit without prejudicing Frost's claim, because law talk pretty much assumes that there is something abstract called "religion," whose free exercise is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. She was obliged to rely on this abstraction in her own suit, although it is apparently contrary to her belief. And so it is not surprising, perhaps, that she lost.

But Bates gives us a lively sense of how much is at stake in struggles like this one. It is hard to summarize his fine book or the fight it describes without trivializing the issues. One sees the steady spread of centralized power into the most intimate spaces of language and belief Frost had asked the courts to decide whether her family and her little community will be able to preserve enough of their essential character to survive, and the answer was not encouraging.

Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor, is worried about the successes the right is having in local government. He sees them as a threat, and he has written The Culture of Disbelief to warn the political left of the danger. While Carter throws in his lot with the left, he is not sure they want his support. For he professes a religion - he is a church-going Episcopalian - and he says that the people of the left he meets and the left-wing books he reads express only scorn for religious belief.

The Culture of Disbelief is addressed to these would-be compatriots, the left wing of the Democratic Party. Carter teaches constitutional law, and much of this book seems to reflect the case-by-case discussions in his classroom. When he says "we," with a sweeping gesture toward the horizon, he really seems to have in mind his own students and a few law professors.

He says that "we" have trivialized religion in public fife, in politics, and in the law. Since opinion surveys show that nearly all Americans believe in God (although apparently "we" do not), he fears that the religious right may take control of government by appealing to religious sentiment. To avoid this, the left must learn to speak the language of religion.

Carter is a young man, and his work has the charm of youth. He offers us a theory of the Constitution, a survey of 600 years of European cultural history, and a new moral philosophy.

"Our" principal failing, Carter says, is that we have trivialized religion by making it purely a matter of private belief. Conversation about politics in the national media is conducted in secular terms, he says, and any reference to moral or religious motives is suspect. The consequence is that believers like himself must sacrifice an important part of themselves if they want to participate in national politics - unless they join the religious right.

The point is well taken, so far as it is addressed to the political left. But Carter enlarges his argument. He implicitly denies the existence of a middle ground. Those who trivialize religion include the Rehnquist Court, the U.S. Congress, and the last four presidents. Carter says that the "God-talk" of people in public life reflects only a watered-down "civic religion," or at most a purely private set of beliefs that no one seriously expects to be acted upon. The avowedly Christian presidents that we repeatedly elect are equally at fault as the rest of us, and their God-talk trivializes religion as much as does the left's aggressive atheism.

We see immediately that Carter is not going to offer much help to Frost, who in the end only fought to keep her religion intact for her children. The personal religion that most U.S. citizens espouse is not, apparently, what deserves constitutional protection. Carter's argument requires that both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses protect not liberty of conscience, but churches. Religious freedom in his scheme is not an individual, but a corporate, right. Furthermore, it belongs only to churches that teach that there is a personal God ("a sentience beyond the human") capable of suspending or altering the laws of "natural science," who sets out laws for the church community to follow.

The implication, never quite clearly spelled out, is that secular government is supreme in the material world, where Carter seems to think the laws of "natural science" are as clear as statutes. (Carter argues that creation science must not be given equal time in public schools, not because it is a religious doctrine, but because it is wrong.) Materialist science and secular law have the same domain. Churches have jurisdiction over a different realm of matters that are governed by a belief in the supernatural. There is a persistent confusion in the book between moral and political philosophy.

Churches arc to be safeguarded by the Constitution, Carter argues, because they are the principal institutions protecting minorities from the majority's despotism. He repeatedly mentions the role of northern churches in the abolition movement and of Southern Baptist churches in the civil rights movement. It is interesting to see the comfortable religion of our public leaders excoriated as mere "civic religion," unworthy of the name. Carter's book has much the same tone that dissenting English radicals used to adopt when sneering at the Church of England ("the Conservative Party at prayer"), and it is charming to see him then hold up, in contrast, the truly religious, dissenting values of the Anglican communion in America, the Episcopalian Church.

The argument turns frankly political at this point. The left is urged to adopt Carter's constitutional theories and to tolerate churches in public fife because churches guarantee diversity and the protection of important moral values. In short, the left is offered a presumably congenial, utilitarian justification for religion.

Of course, Carter's theory would work a revolution in how we understand the Constitution. Until now, the Supreme Court has always viewed the First Amendment as protecting individual liberties. A shift to group or corporate rights would mean that individual liberty would be lost to the churches, which would be given quasi-governmental powers. Carter seems doubtful even of the government's right to require life-saving medical treatment for an unconscious patient with excellent chances of recovery when church representatives with jurisdiction over the patient object.

The secular government, on the other hand, having delegated moral questions to the churches, would be free to establish a reign based on "natural science," whatever the "scientists" may decide that to be. But he falls to recall that the history of regimes based on "science" is even less reassuring than the history of those based on churches with governmental powers.

In Battleground, Frost's miniature rebellion on behalf of local and family tradition quickly was absorbed into a larger struggle between a national "religion" of biblical inerrancy, in Carter's terms, and the political left. Carter thinks the "religion" should have won; but neither side really represented Frost.

The story Bates tells so well is of religion in a quite different sense, religion that exists neither in the public world of the national media nor in the silent world of the purely private. Religion, as most people in this country seem to know it, is not a matter of church services and the supernatural, even when these play a part. American religion lives in the space that we share, in the realm of face-to-face community, in which love and evil have objective existence.

Tolerance and liberty of conscience are not neutral terms, and they have no scientific basis. They are integral parts of a particular moral system, an American religion, at least a part of which is inscribed in our Constitution. These words mean that the government is not to intrude beyond certain limits on moral choices that shape family and community.

I hope that Carter and his left-leaning colleagues will learn to speak the language of this civic religion. "Natural science" has nothing but trivial statements to make about this world, and perhaps Carter has lived too securely within a society founded on tolerance to see what sustains it.