Word above sword - prophets, Nazis & depoliticizing faith

Aligning faith with politics can lead to disaster. For example: aligning faith with Republicans led to compromise with the outcome of the most recent funding of an organization caught selling babies' body parts. Regardless of which side one is on, or parsing words, it can only result in failure. Here's what Os Guinness says in The Case for Civility.

As the heirs of the Jewish tradition, Christians have a distinctive view of power, expressed in the maxim “Word above sword.” Whereas Israel’s neighboring nations viewed their warrior-king as their chief political officer, the Jews held that God was their warrior-king; and in an early and distinctive expression of the separation of “church and state,” they held that God had several political officers apart from the king, such as the priest and the prophet. (According to the Hebrew record, God did not originally even intend Israel to have a king.)

Thus the prophet—who was the messenger of God, with no power base but the word of God—was more important to the people of God than the king, whose power base was the sword. Indeed, while the Hebrew prophets took on many causes, their main thrust was directed against the royal nationalism that distorted Jewish life, just as presidential nationalism distorts American life today.

Unquestionably, Jesus of Nazareth understood himself as standing in the same prophetic tradition, relying decisively on the Word and repudiating the party of the Zealots and all who rely primarily on the sword. (“Those who take to the sword shall die by the sword.”) It was therefore a disastrous detour when the Christian church allowed the Emperor Constantine to reach for the mantle of her moral authority to cover the state. (“What I will,” his son Constantius announced, “should be the law of the church,” a sentiment later echoed by Louis XIV: “L’Eglise, c’est moi.”) Or when the Renaissance popes reached for the sword of the princely states to enhance the power of the church. Or when the Protestant church in Germany submitted weakly to the Nazi Party in the 1930s and allowed itself to be used as a support. (Hitler: “We can make this clerical gang go the way we want, quite easily.”

But whatever the different motives, the Christian church in Europe has yet to escape from the long, dark shadow of this seventeen-hundred-year dangerous liaison of church and state.

In America, the brilliant separation of church and state freed the churches from the deadly clutches of this embrace.

If the churches were to have influence, it had to be first and foremost through a reliance on the Word rather than the sword or the ballot box, and it was better to come through laypeople rather than pastors or priests, and to be indirect and “bottom up” rather than direct and “top down.”

Thus when Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831, he found it striking that religion was “the first of the political institutions”—even though pastors “keep aloof from politics” and though “faith takes no direct part in the government of society.”15 In other words, the influence of the church was all the stronger for being indirect and that of the pastors all the stronger for their being at one remove from political engagement. Politics in all its gritty realism is the proper calling of lay people, not the prime business of the pulpit. Christians should be engaged in politics, but never equated without remainder with any party or ideology.

Put differently, there are two equal but opposite errors into which Christians have fallen in the modern world. One error is to “privatize” faith, interpreting and applying it to the personal and spiritual realm only. That way faith loses its integrity and becomes “privately engaging and publicly irrelevant.” The other error, represented by the Religious Left in the 1960s and the Religious Right since the late 1970s, is to “politicize” faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become the “useful idiots” or “biddable foot soldiers” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form: Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests. In short, out of anxiety about a vanishing culture or in a foolish exchange for an illusory promise of power, Christians are cheated into bartering away their identity, motives, language, passions, and votes.

Kevin Phillips delivers his scathing attack on “radicalized religion” in a chapter titled “Too Many Preachers.” But the problem is not too many preachers; proportionately, there are no more than before. The problem is too many preachers in the wrong place with the wrong text and the wrong tone. Preachers should be in the pulpit preaching the Word, including its relevance to politics and to the whole of life, but leaving their laypeople to be in the public square and to apply their faith to politics.

Faith’s loss of independence through politicization is more damaging than it might appear, for the cultural captivity of the Christian Right represents a double loss of independence. Rather obviously, Christians lose their independence when they engage in politics in a way that allows their faith to become subservient to politics and its priorities and procedures. But less obvious and equally important, Christians have already lost their independence when they attempt to find political solutions for problems that are essentially cultural and prepolitical—in other words, when they ask politics to do what politics cannot do.

When there has been a profound sea change in culture, as the United States has experienced since the 1960s, it is both foolish and futile to think that it can be reversed and restored by politics alone. That approach will always fail, and can only fail. Politics is downstream from the deep and important changes in American culture, and what lies upstream is mostly beyond the reach of political action. Thus overreaching political activism is bound not only to fail, but to leave the cultural changes more deeply entrenched than ever and those fighting them weaker than ever.

James Davison Hunter nails the point sharply: “Cultural conservatives bet on politics as the means to respond to the changes in the world, but that politics can only be a losing strategy. What political solution is there to the absence of decency? To the spread of vulgarity? To the lack of civility and the want of compassion? The answer, of course, is none—there are no political solutions to these concerns, and the headlong pursuit of them by conservatives will lead, inevitably, to failure.” Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, Left as well as Right, have made the same mistake of politicizing faith; and signs are that a weakening of the Religious Right will lead to a rejuvenation of the Religious Left, which would be no better.

And it must be remembered that the present alliance between Christian conservatives and the GOP was in part a defensive reaction to the decision of the Democratic Party in 1972 to shift from its traditional alliances and espouse the cause of secularism. But whichever side it comes from, politicized preaching is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church—and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons.

The Christian Right should be under no illusions. Its recent politicization of faith is an expression of folly, not wisdom, and a sign of its weakness, not strength. As Father Richard John Neuhaus tirelessly reminds Christians engaging with public life, “The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.”

The religious right deserves criticism as well

Both the secular left and the religious right have their shortcomings, and Os Guinness in The Case for Civility is an equal-opportunity critic and encourager of both. He seeks to find the best of both worlds as well, urging us to acknowledge each other and admit that another point of view may have merit in a number of areas. I am reminded of Speaker Tip O'Neal and President Ronald Reagan, who wrangled passionately over issues and then, arm-in-arm, went off to share food and beverage.

Today's part of Guinness' even-handed critique gives pause and ponder to the religious right.

Psychologically, victim-playing is dangerous because it represents what Nietzsche called “the politics of the tarantula,” a base appeal to resentment. But worst of all, it is spiritually hypocritical, for nothing so contradicts their claim to represent “Christian values” as their refusal to follow the teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth by playing the victim card and finding an excuse not to love their enemies. Shame, shame, shame on such people; and woe, woe, woe to such tactics.

To go deeper and to put the point bluntly: as these few examples show, many in the Religious Right are more obviously fundamentalists than they are Christians. By that I do not mean that they are not Christians, but that the overlay of their fundamentalism has so overpowered their Christian faith that the substance and style of their political action have little to do with Jesus. They have lost their Christian core and become a political movement that at times has little discernible Christian remainder.

As such, fundamentalism is not traditional; it is an essentially modern reaction to the modern world.

While it has a religious identity, it is as much a social movement. What it does is reassert a lost world, a once-intact but no longer taken-for-granted cultural reality; and in doing so, it both romanticizes the past, with its messiness airbrushed away, and radicalizes the present with its overlay of psychological defiance and cultural militancy. In the process, Christian fundamentalism grows more and more alien to the way of life to which Jesus of Nazareth called his followers.

This point about Christian fundamentalism being a modern reaction to the modern world carries a double warning about the perils of extremism—and the fact that “my enemy’s enemies” are not always my friends. 

On the one hand, such a reaction to the modern world has betrayed the church in the past. The German Christians who fell for the siren sounds of Nazism were the very ones who had set out to fight for “the order of God as the standard for the shaping of common life” (in the words of a Protestant theologian), over against the forces of corrupt individualism and liberalism, represented by the Weimar age and its permissiveness, abortions, decadence, and dismissal of traditional marriage. With such an impulse, it was all too easy for Hitler to corral their support in coming to power. “The national government will regard its first and foremost duty,” he declared, “to restore the unity and spirit of our People. It will preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will take Christianity, as the basis of our collective morality, and the family as the nucleus of our People and State, under its firm protection.”

If the lost world of the American Religious Right lies in the nineteenth century, the lost world of Islamists is the seventh century, when Muhammad and his followers swept everything before them. Salafism, the word used of Muslim fundamentalists, literally means a “harking back.” But Islamism is far more than just a throwback to primitive or medieval Islam. Its view of its advocates as a revolutionary vanguard, and their belief in the power of violence to remake humanity, are highly modern ideas and closer to the views of nineteenth-century anarchists and nihilists than to those of their Muslim forebears. As such, Islamism is truly a modern reaction to the modern world.

In the same way, the Religious Right’s references to its enemies and its use of tactics such as direct mail, talk radio, and victim playing owe more to fundamentalist reactions to modernity and to overheated fictional visions of the end times than to the good news of Jesus of Nazareth. As an observer quipped of the “Left Behind” craze, which has intoxicated and diverted so many fundamentalists and become conflated in the public mind with the Christian view, “For God so loved the world that he gave us World War Three.”

In short, many of the tactics of the Religious Right serve only to illustrate the cynics’ quip “The Christian Right is neither,” and to underscore the sad wisdom of Erasmus, who witnessed the insanities of Christians in his day: “If we would bring the Turks to Christianity, we must first be Christians.”

In writing critically of fundamentalism and the Religious Right, I do not write as a skeptic toward faith or as a supporter of the strict separationist view that would confine faith to the private sphere. I write as a Christian who takes my own faith seriously with all the integrity of classical, historic orthodoxy, just as I respect the right and duty of others to take their faith seriously, too, whether religious or naturalistic. But when all is said and done, I have two further objections to the Religious Right.

First, the Religious Right has politicized faith, a cardinal error that is wrong in both principle and practice—again, not as a constitutional matter but as a matter of Christian integrity that has political consequences. Historically, evangelicals have a distinguished record in politics, exemplified by their broad contributions to liberal reforms and by leading individuals such as William Wilberforce, “the little liberator” who, among many historic reforms, led the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire and stands as the greatest social reformer in all history.

Fundamentalism, by contrast, was originally inward-looking in faith and inactive in politics. It was disinterested in politics just as it was generally world-denying in its cultural stance—exemplified famously by Jerry Falwell’s 1965 sermon in which he contrasted “ministers and marchers” and called his hearers to “preach the Word” but not to “reform the externals.” Fundamentalism’s recent engagement with politics, especially after the late 1970s, is therefore uncharacteristic.

[The Religious Right] should never be equated without remainder with any political party or ideology, or fall for the fallacy of “particularism”—the idea that there is a single, particular party or policy that is uniquely and fully Christian. There are parties and policies that are not Christian, but there is no one party or set of policies that uniquely is. The City of God coincides but is never conflated with the City of Man, and the people of God can never be identified exclusively with any state or party.

This means that, for Christians, there is a vital difference between proper political engagement and the danger of politicization—the subservience of the Christian faith to the political agendas and political styles of its day, so that faith loses its integrity and independence and becomes the reflection of politics.

Civil contention: not weakness but strength

Some mistake civility with ducking controversy. Weakness. Nothing could be further from the truth. One can passionately contend (OK, fight) for the right, but with, as I proposed in the Army Corps of Engineers: cordial confrontation. Up front: a key statement from Os Guinness, followed by more excerpts from The Case for Civility. Stay tuned. Having finished the book, I will, in time, sum up his most worthy, salient points.

Properly understood and rightly ordered, diversity and particularity are not a matter of weakness, but strength. Playing safe through what is often a pale and diluted unity becomes self-defeating. Such milquetoast diffidence discourages individual passion, constricts real diversity, and blocks what is often the real secret of an individual’s or an organization’s success—the power of their faith in all its stubborn particularity.

Numerous possible errors confront Americans at this stage of the controversies over religious liberty. One is to be overconfident and therefore complacent about America’s capacity to handle diversity. Jefferson was right when he wrote to Jacob De La Motta that “religious freedom is the most effective anodyne against religious dissension” and that when it comes to religion the normal maxims of civil government are reversed: with religion, “divided we stand, united we fall.”

But this capacity needs to be guarded with care. George Orwell argued famously that Jefferson’s “Truth is great and shall prevail” is now more a prayer than an axiom, and the question has been raised today as to whether nations can reach the outer limits of diversity. So two things are critical: first, that all faiths really are experiencing religious liberty; and second, that the bonds of unity are strengthened as the boundaries of diversity are stretched. 

Another potential error is to duck the problems of particularity in the public square by trying to deal with religion only through ecumenical and interfaith coalitions and organizations—as if that would be safer and less controversial than dealing with the prickly problems of particular faiths. In faith-based funding, for example, the temptation is to reduce faith to social work and look to interreligious coalitions rather than to organizations that have a clear and particular faith. 

(When a reporter referred to her sisters as social workers, Mother Teresa replied: “We are not social workers. We do this for Jesus.”) Or again, ABC television switched from its pioneering religion correspondent, who was superbly professional in her objectivity but a person of faith, and made much of their announced reliance for their religious news on an organization that was “ecumenical.”

The nervousness about controversy is understandable, but the reluctance to think and act according to first principles is lamentable. Religious liberty is for particular faiths and particular individuals, not for generic religion. Better a controversial but genuine success in drug rehabilitation than a thousand inoffensive failures. Better a smart professionally objective reporter, be he or she Christian, Jewish, atheist, Muslim, or Mormon, than a hundred safe and dull news sources.

Properly understood and rightly ordered, diversity and particularity are not a matter of weakness, but strength. Playing safe through what is often a pale and diluted unity becomes self-defeating. Such milquetoast diffidence discourages individual passion, constricts real diversity, and blocks what is often the real secret of an individual’s or an organization’s success—the power of their faith in all its stubborn particularity.

Yet another potential error is for Americans to confuse civility with niceness, as if civility were a higher form of manners fit for a Victorian dinner or a Japanese tea ceremony. With some people, this error flows from a genuine misunderstanding; with others, it is a cover: they are leery of the hard work of respect-forged civility and frankly relish any excuse for a good old-fashioned shoot-out or no-holds-barred slugfest.

Genuine civility is more than decorous public manners, or squeamishness about differences, or a form of freshman sensitivity training. It is substantive before it is formal. It is not a rhetoric of niceness, or a psychology of adjustment, or a form of conflict prevention. It is a republican virtue that is a matter of principle and a habit of the heart. It is a style of public discourse shaped by respect for the humanity and dignity of individuals, as well as for truth and the common good—and also, in this case, by the American constitutional tradition. American republicanism, as George Weigel reminds us, is “a system that is built for tension.” 

Far from stifling debate, civility helps to strengthen debate because of its respect for truth, yet all the while keeping debate constructive and within bounds because of its respect for the rights of other people and for the common good. Those who are worried about tough, robust civil debate forget what an achievement disagreement is, and how creative the contribution of tough, robust civil debate can be. An apt picture of this second approach to civility—setting up an agreed-upon framework within which differences can be settled robustly—is the ideal of sportsmanship that was the goal of the Queensberry rules in boxing. 

When the Ninth Marquess of Queensberry lent his name to the Queensberry rules for boxing, boxing was more a drawn-out form of murder than a sport, with bare-knuckle fights that could last a hundred rounds, and boxers who sometimes fought to the death. The Romans, after all, tolerated gladiatorial games, but they banned boxing in A.D. 39 as too brutal. So what the Queensberry rules did was to put boxing inside a ring, within rules, and under a referee. But while boxers touch gloves at the start of the fight, and are disqualified for such things as punches below the belt during the fight, they still fight, and there are still winners and losers at the end. 

In sum, boxing was civilized to a degree, and boxers were persuaded that the object was not simply to win, but to win by the rules. So too with political civility: it is forged within a covenanted framework, or charter, of the three Rs of religious liberty—rights, responsibilities, and respect. But civility is not for wimps; it is competitive. It is first and foremost a matter of political debate rather than an attempt at shortcutting through judicial decision. Important political differences have to be “fought out” in the public square, but the term fight is now only a metaphor, and winners have their responsibilities as well as losers their rights. In other words, political debates are won and lost, and policies and laws come and go, but all within the bounds of what is mutually agreed to be in the interests of the common good. The unthinkable alternative is the no-holds-barred war of all against all. A tough, robust, principled civility is absolutely vital to America, and to throw it away casually is as irresponsible as it is for Americans to wage war internationally without a sober respect for the consequences of action that is not properly legitimized. In both cases the result is a massive loss of credibility for which America will pay dearly in the long run. 

In a celebrated argument between Sir Thomas More and his son-in-law Roper in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1960), the younger man is as impatient with Sir Thomas’s willingness to give the Devil the benefit of law as many people are today about the place of civility. “What would he do?” More asks Roper. “Would he cut through the laws to get to the Devil?” When Roper answers that he would cut down every law in England to get after the Devil, More simply asks him what he would do when the forest of laws was flattened and there was no windbreak left. How could he stand upright then? Today’s proponents of a careless erosion of civility should ponder More’s point.

No sacred public square? No gluten-free

Here's an example of civil debate - acknowledging and respecting both sides. In this case, Charles Krauthammer needles the gluten-free craze but if it works for you, fine. And in the interest of civil discussion, he pleas for freedom - freedom from gluten-free gloating! Here's his conclusion:

Turns out, according to a massive Australian study of 3,200 products, gluten-free is useless. “The foods can be significantly more expensive and are very trendy to eat,” says Jason Wu, the principal investigator. “But we discovered a negligible difference when looking at their overall nutrition.” 

Told you so.

Why then am I not agitating to have this junk taken off the shelves? Because of my other obsession: placebos. For which I have an undying respect, acquired during my early years as a general-hospital psychiatrist. If you believe in the curative powers of something — often encouraged by the authority of your physician — a sugar pill or a glass of plain water can produce remarkable symptom relief. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it.

So I’d never mess with it. If a placebo can alleviate your pain, that’s better than opioids. If going gluten-free gives a spring to your step, why not? But please, let the civility go both ways. Let the virtuous Fitbit foodie, all omega-3’d and gluten-free, drop the self-congratulatory smugness. And I promise not to say it’s all in his head.

Live and let eat.  His complete column is HERE

And now...more from Os Guinness:

Say No to the “Sacred Public Square” On one side in the culture wars are the partisans of a sacred public square, those who for religious, historical, or cultural reasons would continue to give a preferred place in public life to one religion—which in most current cases would be the Christian faith but one day could conceivably be the Muslim faith. Do they support an officially established national faith? No. Some, such as Christian “Reconstructionists,” would like to, but they are the fringe, and the religious-liberty clauses of the First Amendment forbid it unambiguously. So on issue after issue, most argue for a preferred or privileged place for faith, if only as a vestige from the past, as in the demand for prayer in public schools today.

To be fair, the Religious Right has been much maligned. Since it emerged as a force on the political scene in the mid-1970s, fundamentalism has become the “eighth deadly sin,” and we have seen one long open season on fundamentalism and those who have been variously insulted as “American ayatollahs,” “theocrats,” “Christianists,” “theocons,” and now “Christian fascists.” There is good reason for the updated version of Peter Vierek’s comment that antifundamentalism has replaced anti-Catholicism as the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.

Kevin Phillips, for example, has recently appeared on countless radio and television shows warning darkly of an “American theocracy.” But his is only the latest in a series of fevered liberal alarms that include fictional works, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and nonfiction works whose warnings of what conservative Christians will require when they have their way in America are frankly ludicrous and unworthy of fair-minded liberals and serious reporters.

Liberals, in other words, choose to be progressive before they choose their policies, and are often no more independent in their thinking than traditionalists. But those who still prize fair-mindedness might consider the following: First, there is little in the traditionalist platform that would not have been the concerns of most Americans as recently as the 1950s. Second, if such concerns qualify as “theocracy” and “Christian fascism,” many of America’s most revered leaders in most earlier periods in American history would have been theocrats and fascists, too. Third, ruling out today’s movements as “theocratic” because of the influence of religion would also rule out such shining successful reforms as the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, both of which—like almost all Western reform movements—were inspired by faith and led by people of faith.

Fourth, progressives who make such wild, inaccurate, and ill-tempered attacks end by becoming like those they attack, and their works take their place as astonishing exhibits of what otherwise decent people may think under the alarmist conditions of the culture wars.

The root trouble is that Phillips, and all the antitheocrats, define theocracy so loosely—for Phillips, it is “some degree of rule by religion”—that it would include (and therefore exclude) any influence of faith on public life. Some already use theocracy as the term of choice by which to object to every trace of faith in public life, as if the slightest public mention of God were enough to rekindle the fires of the Inquisition, and the merest whisper of a prayer were dangerous enough to warrant calling out the separationist police and their legal henchmen.

For which of us who prize the high place of reason and integrity would not desire to lead a life influenced and “ruled” by whatever we believe is true, right, good, and beautiful—and to persuade others of the merits of doing so, too?

The difference between free exercise and theocracy is simple, clear, and telling, yet in the fevered climate of the culture wars the two are taken as one. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, today’s puritan is the person who is haunted by the thought that someone somewhere may possibly have breathed up a prayer in the public square.

Similarly, when Phillips proves the dangers of “the emerging Republican theocracy”—as he does by showing the numerical and political strength of the Southern Baptist Convention—he flies in the face of any fair-minded view of history. I am not a Baptist, but to accuse the heirs of Roger Williams, John Leland, and Isaac Backus of theocracy would be greeted as a trifle exaggerated, if not absurd, were it not for reviewers and readers ready to cheer for any attack on people they dislike.

As one who holds the Hebrew prophets in the highest esteem, I am outraged by the false prophets of fundamentalism, who violate the biblical canons of prophecy and pronounce in the name of the Lord what is theologically obscene and historically untrue. As one who is challenged to the core by the sublime call of Jesus of Nazareth that his followers should “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you,” I am appalled by the way the Religious Right attacks its fellow believers and demonizes its enemies. Shame on the scurrilous attacks in much Christian direct mail, and on fundamentalist pastors and their followers who hold placards in public such as “God hates fags,” “Thank God for maimed soldiers,” and “God hates you.”

Against all such hypocrisies, Wendell Berry rightly protests: “The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, and love beyond forgiveness.”

"A pox on both your houses"; Demonizing raises $

Caustic cultural skirmishes and bulling accomplish nothing, except to recruit and raise funds for the other side. Time to agree to disagree agreeably. More from The Case for Civility's Os Guinness:

In the words of Justice Wiley Rutledge in 1947, “We have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between state and religion is best for the state and best for religion.” Justice Hugo Black argued similarly, “The wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach”—ignoring the plain historical fact that Jefferson’s wall of separation was as characteristically porous; or better still, it was as serpentine and wavy as the walls of his beloved “ackademical village,” the University of Virginia

And many nations have grown wary of “human-rights imperialism,” suspicious that “human rights” are a spurious excuse for “transnational interference” in the affairs of sovereign states. In such a skeptical climate, cut-flower rights-without-roots will eventually wither as ideals that are hollow, meddlesome, and open to abuse—while real human rights will suffer in practice after they have been weakened in theory, and at the hands of democrats rather than tyrants.

What the exodus was for the Jews and conversion was spiritually for the Puritans, revolution was politically for the founders. Similarly, what covenant was for both the Jews and the Puritans, constitution was for the founders. And what return was for the Jew and revival was for the Puritans, Mason’s “frequent recurrence” and Jefferson’s “revolution every twenty years” were for the founders.

So the future is never a rerun of the past. But the best way forward is partly to go back, so that the remembered past is the key to a renewed future, and a usable past is a liberal force rather than being purely conservative, let alone reactionary or antiquarian.

The symptoms of the collapse of public life are widespread and include a long list of broader developments: the disappearance of urban public space, the shrinking of a book-and-newspaper-reading public, the growth of gated communities and constant surveillance, the rise of political primaries and the weakening of political parties, the decline of elections into public-relations contests, the degradation of political deliberation and debate into culture warring, the dominance of television as a source of news and of entertainment and of profit as the priority in television, the growing resort to referendums at the expense of legislatures, the precipitous collapse of trust and voter participation, the rise of political dynasties and celebrity candidates, the expansion of lobbies and lobbyists, the increase of cronyism and corruption, the appearance of billionaire politicians and of the mounting power of money as the loudest voice in America, and the exponential growth of secrecy and classified documents.

Overall, the fall of public man confronts American democracy with a blunt question: What would American citizens think if they were actually encouraged to think for themselves as democracy assumes?

The journalist Fareed Zakaria has described the broad outcome of these trends as an excess of democracy, and in a non-republican direction that the founders would have feared: “There can be such a thing as too much democracy—too much of an emphatically good thing.”

James Hunter, a leading analyst of the culture wars, describes the net effect as “a public discourse defined by the art and trade of negation.” Name-calling, insult, ridicule, guilt by association, caricature, innuendo, accusation, denunciation, negative ads, and deceptive and manipulative videos have replaced deliberation and debate. Neither side talks to the other side, only about them; and there is no pretense of democratic engagement, let alone a serious effort at persuasion.

Needless to say, the culture-war industry is lucrative as well as politically profitable, and a swelling band of profiteering culture warriors are rushing to strike gold with their wild attacks on the other side, all for the consumption of their own supporters and the promotion of their books and programs. But the toll of such trench warfare on the republic is heavy. First, the incessant culture warring trivializes and distorts important issues and reduces America to a Punch-and-Judy democracy in which cartoon stereotypes rail at each other with no serious engagement, let alone deliberation and debate. Second, the culture wars demean the participants themselves. 

Many who start with thoughtful positions slip into a partisanship in which team playing trumps truth, decency degenerates into malice, and constant attacks become a hostility that hardens into extremism. I can only trust that the better people at least have the grace to be ashamed in private of their conduct in public. Third, the culture wars become a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecy. In the bitter clash of polar views, the truths at stake are lost and each side becomes the other’s double, the closest reflection of the other, the main argument for the other, and the chief fund-raiser for the other. The finger-wagging, mudslinging accusations reinforce the perceptions of the other side as the dangerous and aggressive enemy. Every conservative becomes “the Far Right,” and every liberal “the Far Left.” What some do once is taken to stand for all that the enemy “is really about.” Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side’s worst is truly all that it is. American political advertising is sinking slowly toward a level worthy of Soviet propaganda.

Conservatives are currently unashamed of demonizing their enemies both at home and abroad, whereas liberals tend to criticize the demonization internationally yet indulge in it shamelessly at home. The same people who are too sophisticated to speak of an “axis of evil” or of “Islamo-fascists” are only too happy to fire at their fellow Americans such epithets as “theocrats,” “American ayatollahs,” and “Christian fascists.”

Or yet again, the conflict can be viewed in part as the unwitting product of the “mediated” age and its need for sound bites, sensationalism, verbal blood sports, and red-meat appeals to emotionalism.

For too long Americans have allowed the warlords of the culture wars to expand their power until they dominate many of the spheres of public life like bullies on a playground. It is time for concerned Americans to say, “A pox on both your houses!” and to reclaim the public square for citizens of all faiths.

Thomas Jefferson - hero of Christians and skeptics

Thomas Jefferson became the hero of both the Christian and the skeptic. He deleted miracles out of scripture, but he attended the largest church - worship services in Congress. Bored with the music, he livened up the hymns by bringing the Marine Band with him.

“It is no exaggeration to say that, on Sundays, in Washington during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the state became the church.”

In The Case for Civility, here's what author Os Guinness finds:

Earlier, Jefferson had been more openly deist and antireligious, but two things had changed by the time he wrote the letter. On the one hand, he had read Joseph Priestley’s A History of the Corruptions of Christianity in the early 1790s. After this he softened his earlier views and saw himself as an adherent of an uncorrupted faith—loosely approximating Unitarianism. On the other hand, as his altered position on faith coincided with his presidency, he shifted to a view of religion and public life that some see as utilitarian and others as hypocritical. 

But whatever his motive, and whatever the gap between his private and public views, his public view came closer to that of the other framers and to a view of faith that was vital to freedom. “The Christian religion,” he wrote in 1801, “when brought to the original purity and simplicity of its original institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty.”

Thus Jefferson advocated a stricter view of separation than many of the other founders, but his “wall of separation” bears no resemblance to that of his contemporary supporters whose views lack the subtlety of the sage of Charlottesville. For some of the framers, such a view was unquestionably utilitarian, and even a bit cynical. 

But it was not necessarily hypocritical. And it was this functional appreciation of faith that lay behind several incidents for which Jefferson and the other framers have been charged with hypocrisy—for instance, the story Ethan Allen told of a friend meeting President Jefferson on his way to church one Sunday “with his large red prayer book under his arm” and exchanging greetings. 

“Which way are you walking, Mr. Jefferson?” the friend asked. “To church, Sir,” the president replied. “You going to church, Mr. J.? You do not believe a word in it.” “Sir,” said Mr. Jefferson, “no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man, and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning, Sir.” 

Jefferson’s example is instructive. In two important areas, there was a striking gap between his private and public views—over slavery and over religion in public life. In the case of slavery, it is hard not to conclude that the writer of the Declaration of the Independence was hypocritical. He owned more than three hundred slaves in his lifetime, he had more when he died than when he wrote the Declaration, and he imported slaves into France, although he knew that slavery was illegal there and not customary as it was in Virginia. 

But beyond his vested interest in his own slaves, there was always his anguish over the unavoidable dilemma he saw: the slaves’ freedom would endanger America’s freedom. In his own words, he was caught between “justice in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Yet as the conversation with Ethan Allen shows, whether Jefferson was two-faced or simply utilitarian, there is no question that he also believed that freedom requires virtue, and virtue faith, and that he as “chief Magistrate” must support certain public expressions of faith. The fact is that the largest regular meetings for worship in America during Jefferson’s presidency were under the roof of the U.S. Capitol, and with Jefferson present and supplying the music through the Marine Band. 

In other words, Jefferson declared his position on the “wall of separation,” but he also demonstrated what he intended, and his deeds are as important as his words. In a day before politicians and pundits talked constantly of “sending signals,” Jefferson’s signals were clear. 

On New Year’s Day, Friday, January 1, 1802, he wrote to the Danbury Baptists about the “wall of separation,” and in line with that, he refused to have “fastings and thanksgivings as my predecessors did.”11 But only two days later, the very same weekend, on Sunday, January 3, he as the chief executive went to a worship service in the “Hall” of the House of Representatives, and did so regularly for the next seven years. 

One contemporary said that the president “constantly attended public worship in the Hall,” usually arriving on horseback and once braving heavy rain to get there in time.12 Beyond any doubt, church services in the Capitol in Jefferson’s day were as common and uncontroversial as they were popular. A veritable potpourri of preachers and churches passed through when Jefferson was present, many of them unabashedly evangelical and even evangelistic; and money for religious purposes was raised openly and often in the Capitol, with the president himself donating.

Jefferson allowed religious services in executive-branch buildings. Episcopalians regularly used the War Office and Baptists the Treasury.

“It is no exaggeration to say that, on Sundays, in Washington during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the state became the church.”

Neither he nor the government would ever be a party to any imposed and uniform belief or exercise. Let there be no doubt about that. But Jefferson was fully supportive, as being in the public interest, of “voluntary, non-discriminatory religious activity, including church services, by putting at its disposal public property, public facilities, and public personnel, including the president himself.”

Freedom, flaws, politicized prayer, JFK, divorce & the Golden Triangle in a smoke-free country

Our concept of freedom is far different from what our founders envisioned. Freedom requires virtue (including responsibility and self-discipline), and one finds little virtue without some kind of faith. I recall a man lighting up a cigarette on a Seattle bus. When I objected (after all, it was strictly prohibited), he loudly protested that "this is a free country." The bus driver made it clear to him that he was free to smoke, but there were two conditions: either he put the cigarette out or he smoked to his heart's content - on the outside of the bus.

Here is more of Os Guinness' excellent insights in The Case for Civility:

Unquestionably, the American founders separated church and state, and equally unquestionably, the result was entirely positive. Curiously, however, there is a deep suspicion of the notion in some conservative circles today, a suspicion that goes far beyond a rejection of the extreme form of separation known as “separationism” or “strict separation.” The latter, as we will see later, has serious flaws. It is not what the framers intended, and became influential only after World War II. 

But in reacting to separationism, many conservatives have gone overboard and are actually speaking against the separation of church and state. One example is the common argument heard from the Religious Right that the separation of church and state is a “myth,” that it was “not in the Constitution,” and that it was an invention of Jefferson’s through his reference to a “wall of separation” in his letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802. 

A Republican congresswoman recently denounced the separation of church and state as a “lie.” This argument is both wrong and foolish. The phrase is not in the Constitution, but the principle most certainly is. More important, both the framers and almost all Americans—certainly all Protestants—viewed the provision as principled and positive. Tocqueville went so far as to say that, as a Roman Catholic, he had met many priests and fellow Catholics who “assigned primary credit for the peaceful ascendancy of religion in their country to the separation of church and state.” Indeed, he added, he did not meet a single American in all his stay who thought otherwise. Christian conservatives who are hesitant about the notion today should remember that the “separation” was originally a distinction rather than a divorce. 

Separation was not simply negative, a reaction to the evils and excesses of Constantine’s hijacking of the mantle of the church. It was positive, a flower whose seed goes back to early American Baptists such as Roger Williams, who was the first to speak of “a wall of separation,” and far earlier still to the teaching of Jesus about the different duties owed to “God” and to “Caesar,” and then to a key succession of events and statements: the separation between emperor and pope when the emperor moved to Constantinople, the Fourth Treatise of Pope Gelasius in the fifth century (God “has separated the two offices for the time that followed, so that neither shall become proud”), and later the clash between Pope Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV in the eleventh century. 

In short, long before Jefferson and Madison spoke and wrote, the separation of church and state and its corollary of modern institutional pluralism had their beginnings in ideas that are basic to the Jewish and Christian faiths, though so far yet to be embraced by the other monotheistic faith, Islam.

Another example of a flawed understanding of the separation of church and state is George W. Bush’s much-trumpeted but bungled policy of providing government money for what he calls “faith-based initiatives.” 

Predictably, this initiative was surrounded by controversy from the start and did not live up to its supporters’ hopes. At its best, it was a well-intentioned compliment to the dynamism of faith-based entrepreneurialism in the nineteenth century. 

The tribute was sincere and the intention laudable—to encourage the voluntarism and dynamic energy that are now recognized as the lifeblood of a healthy civil society, and to foster the little platoons and mediating institutions that are its cells. 

But regardless of its political and legal problems, such as the accusations of cronyism and political manipulation, the project was self-defeating as a concept because the close relationship between government and faith-based groups almost inevitably leads, first, to a growing dependency of the faith-based organization on the government, and, eventually, to the effective secularization of the faith-based group. 

In the words of David Kuo, President George W. Bush’s special assistant for faith-based initiatives, “Between Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services alone, for example, more than $1.5 billion went to faith-based groups every year. But their activity had come at a spiritual cost. They were, as organizations, largely secular.”

Early-nineteenth-century entrepreneurialism erupted precisely because faith was released from all governmental dependence; and today’s entrepreneurialism will slowly wither as dependency on the government grows again. In other words, the core problem of the president’s faith-based policy is not legal and constitutional but theological and spiritual. In the words of the nineteenth-century Catholic writer Félicité de Lamennais, “It was not with a cheque drawn on Caesar’s bank that Jesus sent his apostles out into the world.”

True faith-based initiatives owe nothing to the government except its protection of their freedom to operate.

There are many parts of the world that have one or other of these two forces. That is not unusual. President Hu Jintao of China for example, correctly trumpets his notion of a “harmonious society.” But with a Leninist one-party state, harmony without liberty is another word for tyranny.

John Kennedy’s call for “a world safe for diversity” was delivered at American University in 1963 under the shadow of the Soviet nuclear threat. It is even more relevant in the face of today’s challenges of exploding religious pluralism. The president’s phrase is sometimes dismissed with a snort, however, because of its echo of Woodrow Wilson’s call for “a world safe for democracy.” As has frequently been remarked, the call for “a world safe for democracy” led to “a world safe for dictatorship,” and “the war to end all wars” led to “a peace to end all peace.”

This confusion has long bedeviled discussions of official prayer in public schools, and supporters of school prayer have found themselves on the horns of a dilemma of their own choosing. Insisting on official Christian prayer in such pluralistic settings, they either ignore the diversity and pray as if everyone shared their faith—thus scandalizing those who do not; or they respect the diversity and pray in an inoffensive way that tries to appeal to as many faiths as possible—thus secularizing their own faith while still offending those who reject public prayer of any kind. The infamous New York Regents’ Prayer, it should be remembered, was written by lawyers, not people of faith at all.

The separation of church and state meant a clear distinction between the two, but by no means did it mean a divorce.

Behind this broad tolerance lay the founders’ general agreement on what I call the “golden triangle of freedom” (freedom requires virtue; virtue requires faith of some sort; faith requires freedom; and so on) and therefore on the fundamental importance of religious liberty to public life.