YE OF LITTLE FAITH.

God's Name in Vain
The Wrongs and Rights of
Religion in Politics
Stephen L. Carter
Basic Books, $26, 256 pp.

A deeply committed Christian believes that homosexuality is a sin. He is also a landlord. May he deny an apartment to a gay couple? In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an Alaska Supreme Court decision which ruled that he cannot. When the law of the state forbidding discrimination comes into conflict with what some people consider the laws of God forbidding wanton fornication, the state's side, Stephen Carter argues in his new book, invariably wins.

Because it does, many religious believers by no means all Christian, let alone conservative, have come to feel that their views are treated with contempt in modern America. Carter is right to point out that they have reason to do so. While America's jurisprudence around church and state is something of a mess, many judges have come to accept that the First Amendment requires the creation of an isolation chamber between politics and faith.

Such a view, in Carter's opinion, is bad policy, if for no other reason than its lack of understanding of what faith requires. "Religion," he writes, "has no sphere. It possesses no natural bounds. It is not amenable to being pent up. It sneaks through cracks, creeps through half-open doors--it flows over walls." The religious sensibility is a prophetic sensibility; to use theologian David Tracy's term, it "resists." By seeking too much involvement in politics, people of faith lose the ability to be witnesses for their beliefs. Carter admires Fanny Lou Hamer, the civil-rights activist. Hoping to buy off possible protest at the 1964 Democratic convention, Lyndon Johnson sent Hubert Humphrey to ask what Hamer wanted. "The beginning of a New Kingdom, right here on earth" was her reply.

Carter, a professor of law at Yale and author of several well-received books, including The Culture of Disbelief (1993), does not actually develop a theory upon which judges could rely to produce a jurisprudence more respectful of faith. His book instead ought to be read as a prologue to any such theory, an attempt to clear some space by reminding readers that any society needs to listen to religious voices. Alas, the way he constructs his argument makes one wonder whether any guidelines can ever be found to accommodate religious convictions within a liberal and pluralistic society. For in presenting extreme, and unrealistic, accounts of what faith requires and the state demands, Carter leaves little or no room for the two to live together in peace.

"Religion that is not pure in its fidelity to its vision of truth, religion that is unfaithful begins to lose its distinctively religious character and becomes much like everything else," Carter writes. But what exactly does fidelity to truth mean? Once upon a time, a Lutheran conception of truth was wildly incompatible with a Catholic one; now, Lutherans and Catholics are reconciling their differences. Has either side been unfaithful or lost its distinctively religious character? The Catholic church once insisted on Latin, but now it welcomes the vernacular; is it any less Catholic? Even conservative Protestants who insist on the literal truth of the Bible have begun to accept more sophisticated hermeneutics.

Visions of the truth constantly change, and among the reasons they do are purely practical ones, including the very commercial (a desire to attract more members) and the very political (a desire to gain the ears of rulers, whether tyrants in the past or public opinion in an age of democracy). Faith resists, to be sure, and one of the things it resists is obsolescence. Carter argues that religion knows no boundaries, yet he tries to draw a border around religion as if it were a realm of existence untainted by sin. That very effort suggests a particularly Protestant view of faith and politics, one best represented, as Carter shows, by Roger Williams's contrast between the garden of faith and the wilderness of the larger world. If it is true, as Carter argues, that the state can never be neutral between faith and nonfaith, it is also the case that no neutrality is possible between one faith and another. Nonetheless, respect for faith in general ought to include respect for a Catholic tradition that relies on the state to promote the common good as well as Jewish tradition that emphasizes a level of separation sharper than Carter's own.

Not only is religion pure, in Carter's view, the state is corrupt. The desire of the American state to see children educated in public schools, in his view, "is no more than the instinctive totalitarian impulse of every successful state." Judges who decide against religious landlords or who permit the Air Force to disallow the wearing of yarmulkes in uniform are agents of the state, which explains why they take the positions they do. The state, Carter writes at one point, has the guns. At least in America, it may never have to use them, but that is because of "our evidently hopeless passion for statism," our belief in the inherent rightness of government.

I have a hard time recognizing in Carter's treatment of these issues the long history of hostility to the state in America. Nor can his view of even a liberal state's totalitarian temptations explain why the state's monopoly over public schools is in fact being broken. And just as it is true that religious believers can sometimes be bad, it is also the case that sometimes civil servants can serve the public good. There is every reason to believe that if we ever are to have a diversity of voices including both the secular and the religious, it will be because government will protect the capacity of the diverse to live together.

"I love this nation," Carter writes at the beginning of this book. "But my mind is not so clouded with the vapors of patriotism that I place my country before my God. If the country were to force me to a choice, and increasingly this nation tends to do that to many religious people, I would unhesitatingly, if not for some sadness for my country, choose my God."

If America were governed by a dictatorship of atheists intent on rooting out any signs of faith, Carter's dramatic declaration might be justified. But we live in a society wrestling with a highly complicated issue of how religion and politics intersect and for which there may not be any perfect solution. To suggest, as he does, that he will withdraw his allegiance if America does not come around to a point of view he can accept is to adopt a Manichaean view of the world perhaps appropriate to issues like slavery and genocide, but out of place, if not destructive, in a pluralistic society. Democracy, liberty, and even faith itself cannot be sustained in such uncompromising terms. To live up to its ideals, America must make room for faith. To live in this world, people of faith must make room for democracy.

"It is peculiar and sad, as the nation strides into a new century," Carter continues, "that we continue to find so many Americans who agree with this message: that religion, on balance, does more harm than good, and certainly has no place in our politics." Yes, there are judges who discriminate against the faithful, and one should never discount the hostility toward religion that can be found among certain liberal thinkers. But at a time when one presidential candidate speaks of Jesus as his favorite philosopher, let alone when a vice-presidential candidate's Orthodox Judaism helps his ticket in the polls, Carter's belief that ordinary Americans are hostile to religion is a misdiagnosis of the problem. If there is nonetheless reason why a certain sadness is appropriate, it is because a writer as thoughtful and eloquent as Stephen Carter has so little faith in the good will of his fellow citizens, most of whom agree with his prognosis, even if they do not necessarily share his sense of dread.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent book is One Nation, After All.