The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion.

How American Law and Politics

Trivialize Religious Devotion

Stephen L. Carter 

Basic Books, $25,320 pp.

It should be news to no one that religious people of liberal political bent have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to maintain solidarity with secular liberals. It's hard to feel comfortable with, much less close to, someone who evidently holds in contempt the thing that one values most.

This estrangement has been especially acute and painful to Catholic liberals, many of whom supposed they had broken free of parochial exclusion and into the American mainstream, and who probably believed, in any case, that they had a right to expect better. Catholics are, after all, heirs to a tradition of social teaching and social action that embodies all the best of what liberalism ought to denote.

But secular liberals have grown progressively more brittle and ideologically rigid over the last two decades. And Catholics of whatever political stripe remain, in their view, Catholics, members (dupes?) of a religious institution that is hopelessly backward, unforgivably repressive, and (in the most extreme formulations) fundamentally un-American. As they have calcified ideologically, secular liberals also have attempted to impose a legal and cultural regime that, says Stephen L. Carter, effectively and illegitimately rules "God-talk" out of bounds in discussions of politics and public policy. As Carter puts it: "There are, we are taught by our opinion leaders, religious matters and important matters, and disaster arises when we confuse the two."

Carter's view is that there is more than a little bit of hypocrisy involved in this, since "there is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause." What's more, he contends, disaster--or at least grave distortions of the social and political orders--is as likely to result from segregating religion from politics as from inviting it in.

Carter's central contention is that democratic politics, the arena in which minorities try, through persuasion, to transform themselves into majorities, is precisely where religion belongs. What our culture must begin to appreciate is that it is the persuasiveness of an idea, not its provenance, that matters. And it is on their ideas, not on the fact of their religiousness, that participants in the public debate ought to be evaluated.

Carter, a professor of law at Yale University, approaches this subject from the perspectives of a religiously committed person he is an Episcopalian and he and his wife send their two children to a private, religious school--and of a political liberal who nevertheless believes that "American liberals have made a grievous error in their flight from religious dialogue."

He also comes to this subject with a reputation as an honest, independent thinker, one who is unwilling simply to genuflect before the liberal tabernacle but insists on looking inside. His previous book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby-- Carter is black--was a courageous attempt to think freshly about race and racial justice in the United States.

The Culture of Disbelief is not an unflawed book. There is an unsettling naivete in many of its propositions. But if it gets the serious reception it deserves, it ought to engender some badly needed dialogue and soul-searching in high places on the issue of how our political society treats religion and religious people. Carter writes: "In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them."

The evidence of that is everywhere-- in things as small and absurd as a television commentator's wondering aloud whether it was appropriate for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to be seen wearing a religious symbol, a cross, around her neck, to things as large and awesome as the FBI siege and the conflagration at the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians last spring.

Several things have contributed to the creation of this antireligious culture, but a couple are especially worth mentioning.

A principal factor, Carter suggests, has been judicial readings that have contorted the establishment clause of the First Amendment "from a guardian of religious liberty into a guarantor of public secularism." Thus, it has become possible for judges to overturn legislation that was fully within the authority of a legislature to enact solely because the legislators who approved it had religious motivations. How much of our voluminous legal codes would have to be struck down if that standard were applied to every provision?

Another noteworthy factor is the very odd but incessantly repeated notion that no individual or group ought to "impose their morality" on others--as if any meaningful law does not impose someone's notion of moral behavior(abortion on demand, anyone?) on the population as a whole.

This fear of having an alien morality imposed seems to be about as powerful among the American people as their powerful attachment to religion and belief in God. It is that fear that, for example, the New York Times stokes with its periodic breathless, front-page stories on the inroads being made by the Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition in local elections. A reader may fairly wonder: Are we talking Invasion of the Body Snatchers here or democratic politics?

Underlying all this is something very basic: the contest for power. Churches, Carter observes, are sources of authority and power independent of the state. To the extent that they flourish, the state's power is limited; to the extent the churches are diminished, the state's power and the ability of those who control it to pursue their agendas are enhanced.

In other words, far from being a threat to our democratic process, the existence and involvement of the churches in the public square is essential to its operation in a regime of limited government.