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

As Part of the macabre humor that rabbis use to express their fears of professional irrelevance, one story stands out from my days as a student. A young rabbi is called to his first pulpit and is asked by the synagogue's president for the intended subject of his first sermon. "Sabbath observance," he answers.

"That may not be a good idea," cautions the president. "Almost no one in our congregation stays home from work on Saturday."

"Well, how about observance of dietary laws?" asks the rabbi.

"No, that won't work either," the president replies. "People here find such notions archaic."

"Well, then, what should I speak about?" asks the chastened clergyman.

Comes the immediate response: "Why, Judaism, of course!"

I'm sure members of other faiths tell, mutatis mutandis, the same story; and Stephen Carter, law professor at Yale University and a deeply religious person, shares the same concern. Religion has been marginalized and trivialized, he says. The dominant culture excludes religiously based arguments from public airing, not because of their content, but merely because they are religiously based. American jurisprudence has also conspired to make religion a matter of private personal choice - a "hobby," to use Mr. Carter's word - with no sustainable claim for respect or special accommodation. Most significant in Mr. Carter's view is the 1990 Supreme Court decision Employment Division v. Smith, in which the state of Oregon was allowed to retain legislation outlawing the smoking of peyote, even in American-Indian religious ceremonies. Prior to Smith, church-state issues were governed by the so-called Lemon test (for the 1971 decision Lemon v. Kurtzman), which prevented government from regulating religion except in cases of compelling interest and when no less intrusive solution could be found. With the decision in Smith, the operative criterion became whether particular legislation was designed to affect specific religious groups. Even-handed legislation that inadvertently harms a religion is thus no longer unconstitutional. As Mr. Carter sees it, this new relationship between church and state must inevitably damage the standing and functioning of all religions in this country.

The problems as he describes them are real, and ones with which many religious thinkers have grappled. But the solution of religious compromise that Mr. Carter suggests will find few advocates among serious Jews and Christians.

Stories about the trivialization of normative religion - its disintegration into varieties of feel-goodism - were prevalent when I was a student in the Sixties and Seventies, but they do not reflect the reality of American religion today. Though many religious Americans have left their churches and synagogues for more "liberal" options, or opted out altogether, those who have remained, and those significant numbers who have returned, want and practice a far more traditionally authentic religion than the one advocated by our synagogue president or by Stephen Carter. Trivialization may be the norm outside religious circles, but that is viewed by those inside the circles as a threat to be overcome, not as a problem to be solved by compromise.

Mr. Carter writes that "the religions for all their arrogance and sinfulness can often provide approaches to the consideration of ultimate questions that a world yet steeped in materialistic ideologies desperately requires." On the other hand, "religions are at their most useful when they serve as democratic intermediaries (independent moral voices interposed between the citizen and the state) and preach resistance. . . . The corollary, however, is ominous. The closer the religions move to the center of secular power (as against influence), the less likely they are to discover meanings that are in competition with those imposed by the state." Ultimately religion should challenge and question but not work for real change. It is this deal that Carter offers.

Religionists, however, are seeking other solutions. It is clear from his book's last chapter that Mr. Carter has some sense of this. He acknowledges that the delegitimization of religion in public life, far from ensuring religion's demise, is creating a backlash that has led, among other things, to the Christian Coalition's winning control of Republican Party organizations in at least a dozen states. This development frightens Mr. Carter.

He is caught between his liberal political beliefs and his misunderstanding of how people who live by traditional religious principles function. He cannot bring himself to condemn all religious activism. He recognizes the debt owed to religion by the civil-rights movement, and he wants religion to be a force in moral opposition to government. But he would like religion to keep out of those areas - such as abortion and gay rights - in which it threatens to violate today's prevailing, liberal cultural norms. So he will allow religion to argue and even to convince people that a fetus is a human being, but not to draw what he views as "wrong" public-policy conclusions from that belief. As he puts it, the "right to choose abortion . . . must be based on an approach that allows abortion even if the fetus is human." Religion, as that synagogue president would agree, is to produce pious sentiments, but only insofar as those sentiments are without practical consequences.

The danger in this for religion is obvious. Were it to take Stephen Carter's advice, theology would find itself in constant retreat before every immoral challenge that arose. Mr. Carter supports his call for religious self-emasculation by arguing that religion is corrupted by power and functions best when it removes itself from politics. Yet the early civil-rights movement, of which he approves, was nothing if not a grab for political power.

Mr. Carter is also guilty here and throughout the book of describing religion in terms of political power which are foreign to religion's understanding of itself. "Religions," he writes, "are in effect independent centers of power." Absent from this description are the ontological and existential dimensions central to religious self-perception. If religion is not about the search for truth - an ultimate truth which supersedes the claims of everyday politics - what is the point of religion?

Mr. Carter attempts to sweeten his proposal by offering something in return. He promises public respect for religious expression, greater accommodation of religious practice, exemption of religious students from "objectionable" school programs, and maybe even vouchers and government support for secular activities in religious schools. Along the way he manages to offer the survival of the State of Israel as a tradeoff for religious support of (or at least non-opposition to) affirmative-action programs.

He should be aware that most of the community to which he makes this offer will find it demeaning if not thoroughly insulting. Trading the sacred for short-term partial accommodation is an option that all religious faiths rigorously and regularly condemn.

In making his case for such a deal, Mr. Carter is at least consistent. He says: "What at has happened in the way of marginalizing religion can be captured in one word: abortion." He sees the origins of today's religious marginalization in religious organizations' public opposition to abortion, and the secularist response to that opposition. This incursion by believers - the Moral Majority and others - into the public-policy arena, he argues, led them to advocate many other uncomfortable public-policy positions in domestic and foreign affairs, and consequently led to the further marginalization of religion.

But in this, as in much of his historical analysis, Mr. Carter is simply incorrect. Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her atheist associates succeeded in removing the Bible and prayer from the schools fully a decade before Roe v. Wade, and legal decisions of that type can be found throughout the entire ten years that followed her "triumph." Even the case that enshrined the Lemon test - which forbade the government to pay for secular textbooks or offer similar secular assistance to religious schools - came in 1971, two years before Roe. Indeed Roe was very much a climax in, and not the beginning of, the marginalization of religion. It was only after a decade of major losses of this type that the Religious Right began to mobilize. In another context, Stephen Carter's "history" would rightly be called "blaming the victim."

Mr. Carter is correct in condemning religious thinkers who make their beliefs the handmaiden of their politics. "Matters become troublesome," he writes, "when one's theology always ends up squaring precisely with one's politics." Those who start with their political conclusions and then seek support in authoritative sources do religion a disservice. I have often marveled that, in their political pronouncements, Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson can claim to speak from the same religious tradition.

But Mr. Carter's analysis of this phenomenon is at best superficial. He is right to point out that there was never a religious basis - as some claimed - on which to declare the Soviet Union worthy of detente, or for that matter on which to declare SDI a moral imperative. Both positions involve political judgments not sustainable by religious texts. On the other hand, abortion and gay rights are very different types of concerns. The Catholic or Jewish (which is significantly different) stance on abortion is not a matter of politics or political judgment. These positions embody eternal values and begin from a religious judgment as to when life begins or when it can make a claim for protection under God. In the same way, the acceptance of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle is not within the purview of authentic traditional religions, and Mr. Carter is fooling himself by suggesting it is. While religious thinkers should be more careful about making political judgments a part of their spiritual and moral declarations, religion cannot be silent on issues that are matters of the spirit and morality and at the same time expect to retain its authenticity.

This last, I would say, is the true source of religious marginalization. The moral revolution of the Sixties and its aftermath created a culture that worships radical autonomy and shuns any authority other than one's own conscience. Normative religion is, by definition, at odds with this world view. It will ever be so. No Faustian deal will avoid this clash of values. Mr. Carter himself points out that issues of procreation and marriage are at the heart of the religious contretemps. Given the focus of the Sixties moral revolution, this is exactly what one would expect to happen.

Mr. Carter must also be challenged on his egregious stereotyping of religious people. He claims that religionists do not use the same reasoning methods as secularists do. "Religion is really an alien way of knowing the world - alien, at least, in a political and legal culture in which reason supposedly rules," he says. In one sweep Mr. Carter thus denies the rationalist tradition of Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, and their vast number of modern expositors. While the rationalist religious tradition begins with a belief in God that secularism lacks, from that point the debate is joined on identical grounds and using the same rules of logical argumentation. Once one understands that belief in the efficacy of the scientific method to reveal moral truth is as much a leap of faith as belief in God, secularist and religionist epistemologies are revealed as functionally equivalent. By claiming that religionists don't think the same way secularists do, Mr. Carter can put religionists wherever he wants them.

Further, modern multiculturalists accept without question that blacks, women, and gays think different - i.e., have different epistemologies - from white males. They argue for full inclusion on this basis, not for exclusion. Since Mr. Carter accepts the multiculturalist argument, the fact that he is only partially willing to include religion in the public square seems to indicate a marked subconscious bias against religion on his part.

Similar stereotypes occur in Mr. Carter's ritual bashing of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Oliver North (who Carter is not sure acted out of religious conviction, but he deserves opprobrium anyway), and the 1992 Republican Convention. He also claims that no meaningful dialogue may be had with religionists, and that religionists can't evaluate their beliefs critically. He equates the media and academic culture with the American mainstream, and he is unable to distinguish between cults and religions. All of this is evidence of less than profound thinking.

His formulaic description of the historical evils perpetrated by religion is troubling for the same reason. He never acknowledges the internal contradictions that religious morality has with its own destructive behavior. Such contradictions have led to great acts of moral heroism on the part of religionists in the name of religion, even when powerful practitioners of the same religious tradition have been engaged in massive acts of persecution. No such moral contradictions ever confronted Stalin or Hitler when their secular ideologies led them to the atrocities they perpetrated.

Attributing secular society's suspicion of religion to this blood-stained history, as Mr. Carter does, reveals further superficial analysis. If a history of atrocities necessarily leads to marginalization, socialism should be the most reviled institution on the face of the earth, particularly by those with the "moral sensitivity" to be suspicious of religion on such grounds. As this is obviously not the case, discomfort with religion must emanate from somewhere else.

Equally disturbing, but reflective of opinions regularly proclaimed by academics, is Mr. Carter's claim that pagan cultures were more tolerant than monotheistic ones. According to his account, in a multi-god society no one cared if the group in the next valley worshipped different gods. It is the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic claim of universality that creates problems. However, Mr. Carter fails to mention the pagan world's record of barbarism - a record much more impressive than that of any Western religion. This should not be surprising. For, if there is no universal recourse to a shared set of moral principles, the people in the next valley have no claim on my concern: after all, my god takes no notice of them, and may well be in competition with their god. I will therefore, the pagan reasons, be doing sacred work by eradicating them as thoroughly as possible.

Most painful is Mr. Carter's subtle insinuation of racism in his account of the Supreme Court's troubling decision in Employment Division v. Smith. Mr. Carter claims that the Lemon test was overturned only because the case involved a racial minority, American Indians, and their unconventional beliefs about peyote. Mr. Carter can only maintain his position by avoiding the dozens of cases subsequent to Smith that, in citing Smith, have negatively affected many "mainstream" religions. The Court has had ample opportunity to back down from this reading of Smith and has been unwilling to do so. Carter mentions none of this legal history. In fact, a reader would think that the Lemon test continues to hold sway and that Smith-like decisions appear only when marginal groups are at risk. Even a casual scholar of the Court should know that this is not the case.

Mr. Carter's book gained notoriety when it was read and cited favorably by President Clinton. The President had convened a prayer breakfast for one hundred religious leaders from around the country, to reaffirm his belief that religion must be brought back into the public square. Ironically the breakfast embodied many of the unfortunate tendencies to be found in this book. No fundamentalist or identifiably right-wing denomination or thinker was invited, and Mr. Clinton used the occasion to repeat Mr. Carter's claims that anti-abortion advocacy caused the marginalization of religion. Stephen Carter's Faustian deal is not more attractive coming from the White House than it was coming from Yale Law School.

The Talmud tells of a rabbinic applicant sent to a town to explore becoming its rabbi. He was seated on a high platform and asked to preach, whereupon he refused the position. When asked by his teacher why he had refused, he answered that the populace wanted him on a pedestal, but did not want him actually to have an impact on their lives. Mr. Carter offers the same deal. It should and will be rejected.