Even though the populist religious right is marked by paradoxical features, it should also be given credit for drawing attention to important questions about the role of religion in American public life. After the decline of the mainline Protestant establishment, the society was left with no real provision as to how religious viewpoints would be represented in the public sphere, such as in politics or education. At the same time, an immense revolution in mores had been accelerated by the upheavals of the late 1960s. Many prevailing moral standards promoted in popular culture, in commercial culture, by the government, and in public education were at odds with the traditional religious teachings not only of conservative Protestants but also of many of the other traditionalist religious groups across the country. An important question was how such conservative religious viewpoints, which were largely minority viewpoints, might be represented and protected in the public domain. Advocates of the religious right were rightly concerned to guard their own freedoms of religious expression and action. Yet they seldom had a theory of how to do the same unto others as they would have done unto themselves—that is, they rarely spoke of how to provide equal protection for religious and secular viewpoints with which they did not agree.13
CONCLUSION
Toward a More Inclusive Pluralism
Popular fundamentalist and conservative evangelical leaders who speak of returning to a Christian America are not alone in their failure to address questions of how to deal with both religious and secular diversity in public life. The mainstream secular culture of the past half-century, despite its concerns for justice regarding other sorts of diversity (such as racial, ethnic, or sexual diversity), has not yet effectively addressed the difficult question of religious diversity. One way to understand that neglect is as an inheritance of the way that the mainstream liberal-moderate secular and religious culture dealt with such matters in the 1950s. An account of the characteristic midcentury outlooks and their legacy can help us today in thinking about alternative approaches for the future.
Despite the prestige of mainline Protestantism in the 1950s, and despite all the public expressions of a broad piety, some of the most prominent and pervasive ideals of the mainstream culture were in deep conflict with the traditionalist sorts of religious faith held by many Americans. To return to a theme mentioned before in other contexts: one of the major implications of the midcentury consensus critiques of conformity and affirmations of scientific outlooks and individual autonomy was that they seemed to promise a new moral order that would help to free individuals from traditional communities and moral strictures. Much of the religious revival was fostered in a myriad of traditionally religious communities—Catholic, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, holiness, Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, African American, Midwest Lutheran, Southern Baptist, and many more. Yet the message that one would most often hear from the cultural mainstream—as in the national media, public education, and academia—was that one would be better off as an individual liberated from such community constraints. Individual self-development and self-fulfillment should be one’s overriding goals.
That often subtle message—that it was better to trust yourself than to follow subcommunities or their traditions—was symptomatic of the way that midcentury mainstream consensus-minded culture most often dealt with diversity and pluralism. A chorus of voices, including the more progressive mainline Protestant leadership, affirmed a flexible, inclusive pluralism as one of the great virtues of mainstream American life. At midcentury, American society still had a long way to go before it was truly inclusive, but the ideal was at least in place that openness and tolerance were essential to a healthy, thriving society. To be truly “pluralistic” meant to be open-minded rather than sectarian and dogmatic. That was especially the message of the more secular liberal thinkers. When, for instance, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Walter Lippmann’s advocacy of a return to natural law, it was on the grounds that the pundit was forgetting “the reality of pluralism.” Intellectually, to be pluralistic meant that one should be empirical and pragmatic, following the evidence wherever it led, rather than being guided by preconceptions. When David Riesman, for instance, wrote of The Lonely Crowd in his 1961 preface that it “was one of a number of books which in recent years have eschewed dogmatism and fanaticism and preferred openness, pluralism, and empiricism,” he was simply summarizing the consensus liberal ideals of the day. These were ideals held not only by scholars; they were also becoming widely prevalent in business, politics, the media, and everyday life.1
An important feature of this outlook was that it took for granted a progressive and cumulative model of truth. It assumed that, ideally, the human race progressed by accumulating new insights and discoveries that proved valuable for collective human flourishing. Because impositions of irrational ideologies or dogmas could inhibit or even destroy this growth, a society needed to cultivate the qualities of being empirical, open-minded, and inclusive. Disinterested scientific methodology provided one valuable model, and accumulated scientific knowledge was the surest way to weed out folk beliefs and other nonsense. Although this version of inclusive pluralism allowed room for considerable varieties of experiences and outlooks, such as religious or imaginative ones, that went beyond what science might teach, it also took for granted that educated people should test their beliefs against shared, accumulated, scientifically based knowledge. Such empirically tested beliefs and practices would provide the best hope for building consensus and promoting collective intellectual and social progress. Though people would inevitably disagree on particulars, they would have a shared foundation for agreement as to basics. That had been “the noble dream” of progressive-minded people since the eighteenth century. Even if the philosophical foundations for such hopes were admittedly more flexible, or perhaps more shaky, than in the days of enlightenment confidence, the assumptions regarding shared, scientifically tested outlooks still held out hope for social progress.2
Thomas Kuhn, a Berkeley historian of science, would in 1962 publish his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which would help to undermine the remaining foundations for these progressive cumulative views of truth. In the context of the radical pluralism of the later 1960s, Kuhn’s book would emerge as one of the most influential American texts of the twentieth century. Kuhn argued that even natural science itself was not a cumulative enterprise built on a foundation of objective starting points. Instead, it was shaped by “paradigms,” or fundamental assumptions about reality. These paradigms could undergo revolutionary changes, such as in the Copernican revolution, when scientists replaced the assumption that earth was a fixed place with the model that everything was in motion. Such paradigm shifts made the seemingly objective science of one era incommensurable with the seemingly objective science of the next era. Eventually, the term “paradigm shift” would become commonplace in American thought, and the idea of objective social authority based on scientific models would be widely questioned. But in the 1950s, almost everyone was working within the old paradigm, in which it was assumed that natural scientific methodologies did provide more or less objective foundations so far as they went and hence could provide essential common components in building cultural consensus.3
So the idea of progress was still alive at midcentury. Most commentators took for granted that, generally speaking, the best ideas were recent inventions. Faith in progress had become somewhat chastened since World War I, but the assumption that newer, superior ideas were steadily replacing older, inferior ones—C. S. Lewis at the time called it “chronological snobbery”—still was characteristic of the era. Such assumptions, even if sometimes tempered, were particularly strong regarding views that purported to have the authority of science on their side. That included fields such as psychology and sociology that offered the latest insights on human nature and behavior. It was not uncommon to speak as though people should bring their views up to date with the latest scientifically based findings in such areas, much as they mi
ght need to keep up with the latest technology. Even though the sciences often led to disagreements, and even though one had to be pluralistic in the sense of allowing for differences among various modern schools of thought, empirically tested views could provide the basis for an evolving consensus of opinion among right-thinking people.4
The most striking example of such assumptions of progress and normativity was the assumption that parochial traditional religious views would eventually die out as civilization and education advanced. Scholars typically took for granted “the secularization thesis,” which said that as modernity advanced, traditional religions would decline. Ethnoreligious communities and Bible-belt religion were assumed to be on the way out. The frenzied activities of groups such as Pentecostals and fundamentalists, even if they attracted large audiences, could be viewed as the last flaming of a dying culture. Many factors—such as industrialization, urbanization, mobility, and new technologies—were contributing, ushering in an essentially secular age. Amid these other forces, modern scientific outlooks could help people become autonomous individuals. People were taught that they should adopt a new, scientifically informed ethic of constructive self-realization and self-determination as they freed themselves from the restraints of their parochial origins.
Such assumptions, together with accompanying ideals of inclusive pluralism shaping a progressive consensus, left mainstream American culture with little concern for incorporating real religious diversity into its public life. If traditional religious voices were backward and dying out, there was no need to develop a rationale for incorporating them into mainstream discussions in the sophisticated media or academia. Efforts to cultivate and preserve a place for religion in public life concentrated instead largely on religious views that were themselves up-to-date and progressive, such as those of liberal Protestantism.
By the 1980s, mainline Protestant voices, although still present, had lost much of the prestige they had enjoyed at midcentury. In addition, the symbolic privileges of broadly Protestant Christianity had been reduced, as they were in, most famously, the Supreme Court rulings of the 1960s banning mandated Christian exercises in public schools. Mainline Protestantism also voluntarily stepped away from some of its privileged status. Many church-affiliated colleges and universities, for instance, greatly reduced the presence of their own denominational heritages and cultivated a diversity of voices similar to that found in the rest of academia.
So, with the voices thus muted of the group that traditionally had most effectively represented religious interests in public life, the prevailing outlook became that the public domain—whether in education, politics, or public discourse—ought to aim at operating without reference to specific religious viewpoints. The most common means to promote such neutrality was by way of more consistent privatization of religious belief. That approach had considerable appeal. All religious views could be treated equally. They could be respected as personal choices, so long as they did not get in the way of the public business of society. This view was often expressed in a metaphor taken from Jefferson, that of a “wall of separation” between church and state. The Supreme Court had invoked this image as early as 1947, and it was used again in the 1960s as a basis for ending prayer in public schools. It also became popular shorthand in the moderate-liberal mainstream for thinking about relationships between religion and the public sphere.
The great problem with the “wall of separation” metaphor was, as the courts came to recognize, that it proved to be impossible to draw any consistent line between the secular public sphere and the religion of the private sphere. A sizable minority of Americans was seriously religious, and their religious beliefs had inevitable influences on their activities in the public domain, whether in politics, business, or education. It is one thing to try to draw a line between “church and state,” two sorts of institutions. But no consistent line of separation can even be imagined between the far larger entities of “religion and society.” Religion is seldom a strictly spiritual matter; rather, it involves moral prescriptions as to how to act in everyday secular affairs. Although religious people may reasonably be expected to act with a degree of civility in the public domain, showing respect for others and their differing views, it is not reasonable or practical to expect them to act in the public realm without reference to their deeply held, religiously based moral convictions. So, even if privatization has proven valuable as a way of encouraging social harmony up to a point, it is a principle that cannot address the question of equity in the public sphere in dealing with inevitable differences based on religious conviction.5
Mainstream American culture has never had a fully adequate way of dealing equitably with religious diversity in the public domain. On the positive side, one of the great achievements of the new nation was that religious toleration was instituted from the beginning. What was missing (and understandably so, in that era of religious establishments, when Protestants were in the vast majority) was a principle for moving beyond mere toleration. Rather, Protestants understandably protected their own influence and interests, but they also worked to keep other faiths out of the public domain, as their long record of militant anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism illustrates. Even so, because America was a democracy, Catholics and Mormons could gain some political power, and thus some influence in the public domain, despite Protestant efforts to the contrary. When the mainline Protestant establishment did become more tolerant, in the mid-twentieth century, it was in the form of a tri-faith (Protestant-Catholic-Jew) inclusive pluralism. That sort of inclusivism, based in liberal religion, failed to include fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and other conservative evangelicals as well as Mormons, Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, and many others who did not fit the mainline religious profile.6
The major historical alternative to Protestant dominance and privilege was a more secular approach that made privatization the ideal. That seemed to be the implication of Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” a position shared by some Baptists, who had histories of opposing religious establishments. It became the favored view of secularists in the twentieth century. It offered, as has just been observed, no theory for dealing with inevitable expressions of religious diversity in the public domain. Secularists and academics generally, who had made recognition of other sorts of diversity one of the great causes of the 1960s and 1970s, were seldom interested in religion. Race, class, and gender were the new categories of the present, while religion, they typically thought, was a fading category from the past. They still took the secularization thesis for granted, much as their predecessors had in the 1950s.7
In the meantime, however, a funny thing was happening on the way to the secularization of American life: traditionalist religious subcommunities were not going away, but often were growing in strength. Some, such as older ethnic urban Roman Catholic communities, did suffer attrition as parishioners moved to the suburbs, and many cradle Catholics, having adopted ideals of American autonomy that did not fit well with church authority, simply stopped attending. But other new Catholic immigrant groups, especially Latino Catholics, took their places. More open immigration policies fostered other varieties of ethnoreligious communities, many of which were non-Christian and non-Western. In addition, New Age sensibilities generated new kinds of spirituality and revived old ones. Perhaps most remarkably, the more conservative revivalist Protestant groups were thriving rather than diminishing.
With American religious practice not actually diminishing, and with religious diversity growing, a new challenge was emerging. Simply including progressive consensus religious voices in the mainstream on the 1950s model was not feasible. Neither was it possible to establish a consistent privatization. So here was the challenge: How, in an era when diversity was being celebrated in other respects, might it be possible to construct a mainstream discourse that recognized roles for a variety of religious voices? And this is still the question today.
When the reli
gious right emerged as an organized political movement in the late 1970s, it, too, as has been recounted, lacked attention to the question of how to ensure equity for widely diverse voices in the public domain. Even though militantly conservative Christians had not been part of the liberal Protestant establishment of the 1950s, their instinct was to propose a return to something that would look a lot like it, but with conservatives such as themselves in charge of defining the cultural consensus. The religious right could encompass some internal religious diversity, since it included culturally conservative Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and others. Yet what it glaringly lacked, especially in the popular Protestant zeal to return America to its alleged Christian roots, were accounts of how such a proposed restoration would deal with greater diversity, either religious or secular. Militantly conservative Protestants, just getting over their belligerent anti-Catholicism, did not have a heritage of thinking about such issues beyond the Baptist principle of separation of church and state. They now spoke of “secular humanists” as though they were the enemy to be excluded in a Christianized America. Conservative Roman Catholics had a religious heritage in which, until recently, it had been held that, ideally, Catholicism should be the state religion. That meant that Catholics were only just beginning to address questions of how to deal equitably with religious and cultural diversity. Some serious conservative theorists, both Catholic and Protestant, did indeed provide some valuable engagement with those issues. But in the more popular manifestations of the religious right, their nuanced voices were often drowned out by strident and simplistic calls for a return to America’s original Christian consensus.8
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment Page 16
