One need not accept (and indeed I don’t) the authors’ arguments about the value and function of churchstate debates in discussions of religious freedom to affirm that the Kingship of Christ is crucial for the health of Christian churches. Still, I remain deeply suspicious of their claims about the social form that best serves and expresses Christian belief. Their arguments about the church’s role in society suffer from the same flight from social embodiment that they claim characterizes their opponents in the churchstate debate. And the intellectual road Hauerwas and Baxter travel inductively from their conclusion of Christ’s Kingship—leading through arguments about freedom and political practice, the insuperable conflicts introduced by churchstate debates, and the relation of civil religion to authentic Christian belief—is marked by signs of confusing detours and confounding dilemmas.
In my response to Hauerwas and Baxter’s position, I will show how their narrow focus on secondary, less helpful issues in the history of churchstate debates obscures more compelling and primary points of concern that have a better chance of illumining these debates. Then I will show how Hauerwas and Baxter’s views of religious indifferentism rest on faulty analogies between free speech and freedom of religion, reveal an inadequate theory of politics, and are plagued by insurmountable dilemmas. In the end, their worries about indifferentism pale in comparison to the specter of irrelevance posed by Hauerwas and Baxter’s beliefs to the lives of everyday Christians perplexed by the right relation between religion and politics.
Finally, I will argue that their understanding of the Christian tradition implies a homogeneous idea of faith that excludes from consideration other relevant examples of the relation between church and society that might challenge or support their views. Among other helpful models, the example of the prophetic black church presents a vital vision of the relationship between faith and politics that preserves Christian identity while expanding the possibilities of democracy, an unjustifiable task for Christians from Hauerwas’s point of view, but a central claim of black prophetic Christianity.4
Hauerwas and Baxter’s misgivings about the First Amendment in their present essay derive partially from a narrow interpretation of churchstate relations by columnist George Will.5 As Hauerwas and Baxter explain, for Will the “heart of the constitutional understanding of ‘religion,’” is the “distinction between ‘conduct’ and ‘mere belief.’”6 According to the authors, Will elaborates this distinction by saying that the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the religious controversies that plagued Europe by establishing in religion’s stead the commercial republic of capitalism. Influenced by John Locke, who maintained that the truth of religion cannot be established by reason, Thomas Jefferson shaped the American doctrine of the free exercise of religions, which made religions private and subordinate to the political order. As long as religion is mere belief and private, the logic goes, it is free and unrestricted. But when it becomes a matter of conduct or behavior, religion is subject to the rule of law. For Will, this represents the Founders’ genius; for Hauerwas and Baxter, it is sheer anathema, an intolerable rub.
But Will has a severely limited and self-serving view of the First Amendment. Even if we acknowledge the distinctions many Founders made between belief and behavior, we are not automatically bound to Will’s interpretation of their views. Indeed Hauerwas and Baxter’s worries are legitimate only if Will’s argument about the Founders’ beliefs turns out to be the crucial distinction in the constitutional view of religion. But the most important distinction is not between conduct and mere belief, but between freedom of conscience and the coercion to believe. This distinction is made clear when we carefully consider in historical context the easily misinterpreted terms of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the prime architects of the constitutional concept of freedom of religion.
James Madison, who contributed key phrases to the important Virginia Declaration of Rights, an exemplary document defending freedom of religion, proposed the language of the First Amendment that was eventually revised and enacted by the First Congress.7 In proposing the First Amendment, Madison was as greatly influenced by the suffering of religious dissenters at the hands of the Church of England as by enlightenment ideals of reason’s superiority and the doctrine of natural rights.8 These ideals led Madison to declare that religion “can be directed only by reason and conviction.”9 And the brutal battles fought over religious freedom led him to conclude that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience.”10
Such religious battles also convinced Madison that religious belief must not be established or imposed by the state. This was especially true for a revealed religion like Christianity, whose claims to the exclusive possession of truth also opened the possibility of religiously justified claims to political power.11 To circumvent this possibility in the embryonic nation, Christianity had to be shorn of its potential political authority, a strategy achieved by challenging Christianity’s biblical authority and asserting its status as a reason-governed discourse, a transformation that profoundly shaped Madison’s views of religion, and Jefferson’s as well.12
Indeed, Jefferson, in the strong embrace of Lockean liberalism, natural rights philosophy, and enlightenment rationality, also rejected Christianity’s status as revelation.13 With Madison and other similarly enlightened men, Jefferson declared religion to be a matter of opinion.14 This view led him to proclaim that, should the neighbors of Americans say that there are twenty gods, or no God, such a statement would neither “break their legs or pick their pockets,” precisely because it is not backed by the force of law.15 For Jefferson and the Founders, such an opinion is distinguished from officially established and recognized beliefs. Since the government is derived from the natural rights of human beings and not divine revelation, such opinions would neither mandate punishment nor require exceptional protection for their utterance. To act otherwise, as if the religious opinion that there was no God or that there were twenty gods could cause injury to be inflicted upon its bearer, is to acknowledge that such an utterance fractured a legally sanctioned belief about God. But this would be contrary to the constitutional view of religion.
And more important for the fledgling nation, Christianity was no longer to be protected from challenge or dissent under cover of legal sanction. Thus, the interests of nonbelievers, unorthodox believers, and dissenting Christians converged around the disestablishment of religion and the establishment of religious freedom. In view of this history, the central distinction in the constitutional view of religion is indeed between freedom of conscience and the coercion to believe. Hauerwas and Baxter’s acceptance of Will’s distinction between mere belief and conduct as the primary constitutional religious issue causes them to overlook the bitter cultural and interpretive wars fought over the freedom of religion by citizens oppressed by the intolerant behavior of the established church. By viewing the issue of the freedom of religion in relation to the historical events I have just sketched, Hauerwas and Baxter might be led to accentuate the struggles of oppressed Christians and other citizens against the power of the church when it is officially entrenched by law in a classic Constantinian contract with the state.16 Ironically, the Constantinian compromise of the church is a favorite theme of Hauerwas’s ethical reflections, and invites vigorous exposition in the present context.17 But Hauerwas and Baxter’s pursuit of a less important constitutional distinction has diverted their attention from a suitable occasion to press one of Hauerwas’s more powerful charges.
Even a cursory reading of the events precipitating the development of the First Amendment suggests that it was a brilliantly preemptive and bloodless resolution of religious conflict. By disestablishing religion and establishing religious freedom, the Founders translated an a priori denial of privilege to any one religion in particular as the principle for extending privilege to them all. The crucial distinction in the constitutional view of religion is the one between enforced religious views and th
e freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice or community. Viewing the freedom of religion debate in this manner allows us to understand what really was at stake for citizens who endured hardship because of their opposition to the politically protected claims of official and legal Christianity.
But Hauerwas and Baxter’s silence on this aspect of the churchstate debate is rooted perhaps in a presumption of the homogeneity of the Christian experience, a point I will take up in greater detail later. For now, it is enough to say that the freedom of religion debate pointed to the vibrant religious diversity, especially within Christianity itself, that was mocked by the rigid constraints and narrow practices of the Church of England and by established religion in the colonies. Established religion defined the church in the singular, but the existence of New Light Presbyterians, Strict Congregationalists, Separate Baptists, and even Methodists demanded that it be reconceived in the plural.18
Conflicts created by the quest for the tolerance of religious pluralism is an inescapably key theme that must be addressed in any credible account of the events surrounding and leading to the First Amendment. Their avoidance is certain to lead to truncated and self-serving versions of events that shaped, in principle, the democratic destiny of our nation. Indeed, the religious question played a crucial role “in the beginning of free government. No question was then more important, none played so prominent a role in the thought of the pertinent theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Bayle, and, to a lesser but still significant extent, even Montesquieu—and even if it could be said that they solved it, or answered it, in principle, it was left to the American Founders to be the first to solve it, or to try to solve it, in practice.19
Of course, as Hauerwas and Baxter’s discussion of Employment Divison, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon v. Smith and Black proves, freedom of religion has met limitations in the form of state proscription of religious beliefs that intersect the nebulous area between important aspects of law and faith. We have also seen the opposite effect in the case of the Jonestown mass suicides, where the failure of state intervention in the name of freedom of religion perhaps inadvertently aided the economic and religious exploitation and deaths of over nine hundred persons.20 But uses of freedom of religion have largely safeguarded the religious liberties of faith communities to pursue the practice of their beliefs in a society where religious prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance were not given legal underpinning.
The glaring exception, of course, is chattel slaves, who were for most of their enslavement legally barred from free worship without white supervision. But even black Christians came to cherish the First Amendment because it protected their hard-won freedom to worship without governance, while also giving legal expression to their concern that other groups not suffer similar penalties of social and religious intolerance. The formulation of the First Amendment by the Founders presented a tenable solution to the religious suffering created by the legalization of Christianity. It may be cogently argued that with the First Amendment, a large and vital Christian purpose was served, that the ideals of Christian love and tolerance were ironically promoted through the government’s refusal to cede Christianity official status. By keeping believers from maiming one another over religious dispute, the government instituted in law what Christian belief aimed for in principle but failed to practice. It would not be the last time the government intervened in the face of the failure of Christians to act on their beliefs, a topic about which I shall have more to say later.
Overall the First Amendment has been very good for Christianity. It forced Christian churches to appeal to potential adherents on the basis of persuasive preaching, sound theology, superior ways of life, and sacrificial action.21 Once they were cut from the strings of official obligation, independent Christian churches were free to prophetically address the state and to criticize practices that were offensive to moral principles to which churches strongly adhered. The benefits of the separation of church and state are nicely summarized by John Bennett, who says that it fulfills the “need of religious institutions to be free from control by the state,” that it satisfies the “need to protect citizens from interference with their religious liberty” by either state power or religious groups, and that it “is favorable to the health and vitality of churches.”22
The alarm set off in Hauerwas and Baxter by Will’s insistence that the free exercise of religion rests on religion’s privatization and subordination is largely unnecessary. Perhaps we can reach a clearer understanding if we examine the two terms of Will’s contention separately. To proclaim that religion will not carry the weight of law by being disestablished is not the same as saying religion will be made private.23 It is very important not to collapse the two as Will has done, a move Hauerwas and Baxter fail to challenge. Indeed, many of the Founders promoted the advantage of the public expression of religion even as they asserted the necessity for religion’s disestablishment.
Because the Founders were not orthodox Christians, the views they held about the role of religion in the republic had more to do with its preservative function in national life and its support of political institutions than its strictly redemptive role as envisioned by partisan believers.24 Benjamin Franklin, for instance, saw the virtue of what he called “public religion,” the forerunner of what we know today as civil religion.25 Martin Marty says that by public religion Franklin “meant not the end of sects but of sectarianism, not the end of their freedoms but the increase of their duty to produce a common morality. Wherever he saw churches agreeing, he encouraged their support of the commonweal, and he opposed their spats over their peculiarities. His faith . . . was in . . . the need to do good.”26 Franklin’s views resonated with other Founders, who sought to fashion a public polity based on the premise that a common moral community underlay the republic. As Marty says: “Fortunately for later America, the Founding Fathers, following the example of Franklin, put their public religion to good use. While church leaders usually forayed only briefly into the public arena and then scurried back to mind their own shops, men of the Enlightenment worked to form a social fabric that assured freedom to the several churches, yet stressed common concerns of society.”27
George Washington, too, subscribed to a belief in the public utility of religion, asserting the link between religion and public morality as the foundation of national flourishing. In his farewell address, Washington stated:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. . . . Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.28
And even Thomas Jefferson, despite his unorthodox Christian beliefs and his individualization of religious faith, demonstrated appreciation for religion’s public function in the republic, especially since the proliferation of religious bodies would serve as a built-in check and balance to American religious life. According to Jefferson, the function of “several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.”29 He also valued religion for lending moral support to political liberty when he queried, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”30
Of course, it is exactly the public expression of religion along these lines that disturbs Hauerwas and Baxter, who hold that national or civil religion is “counterfeit” Christianity uprooted from an account of the good. Even if one maintains this view, however, it doesn’t negate the fact that there is nothing in the First Amendment that prohibits the public expression of religion, including Christianity, i
n the republic. Thus, as Hauerwas and Baxter present his case, Charles Taylor’s arguments about religion and political life are on target: there was neither intent nor need in the separation of church and state to exclude God or religion from the republic.
Similarly, the subordination of religion to the political order is not as bad as Hauerwas and Baxter deem it to be, because it doesn’t mean what they fear it to imply. I have already hinted at my response earlier by suggesting that one virtue of the separation of church and state is Christianity’s enhanced potential to address the state on politically independent terms. But Will’s claim is also legitimate, that religion was to be made subordinate to the political order. The tension that arises from these apparently contradictory claims can be relieved by examining the two ways in which we can read religious subordination: either functionally or morally.
First, since American society was deliberately constructed upon secular principles to avoid the fatal conflicts occasioned by established religion in the England of the Founders’ recent memory, the subordination of religion to the state went hand in hand with the creation of the nation and the establishment of the freedom of religion. Saying that religion is subordinate to the political order is the positive statement of its more generally repeated negative formulation: that religion will not be established, or politically justified, in American society. What is meant is that religion will not function officially to adjudicate national disputes, will not occupy legal status to enforce civil codes, and will not be the means by which social goods are distributed. These functions are left to the political realm. Hence, in a legal sense, religion is functionally subordinate to politics.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 29
