"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.

A nation of Indians ruled by Swedes?

Unintended consequences? "Religion in America was clearly and decisively disestablished, but it flourished all the more—not so much in spite of disestablishment as because of it." More from Os Guinness in The Case for Civility. Read it! Excerpts follow:

What is clear is that the notion of secularization as the inevitable decline and disappearance of religion in the modern world is the secularist’s fond hope, if not superstition. Religion in America and in most parts of the world is not disappearing and shows no sign of disappearing; and even in those parts of the world where it has declined for the moment, there are indications that the story is not over....

...more accurately a form of believing without belonging, as religious beliefs persist while allegiance to institutional forms of religion declines.

Second, what remains is often a form of “vicarious religion,” as those who have no religious affiliation still continue to look to established churches to speak on their behalf and sustain the cultural memory of their country at key moments in national life—such as Britain’s outpouring of national grief after the death of Princess Diana. Martin Rees, Britain’s present Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society, famously acknowledged that he goes to church as an “unbelieving Anglican…out of loyalty to the tribe.”

Peter Berger. On the one hand, he remarked, the tone deafness of the elites at home means that United States is “a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes.” In other words, the American people are as religious as the people of India, the most religious country in the world, whereas the American elites are as secular as the people of Sweden, the most secular country in the world—a fact that lies at the core of the culture wars today.

America is paradoxically viewed in many parts of the world as a nation of “Puritans and pornographers.”

At one extreme, 1789 was decisive in pushing France in a radically secular direction—or, as Jefferson said, toward atheism. A deeply corrupt church and a deeply corrupt state had united in their coercive repression of all dissent, and, like a volcanic explosion, the French Revolution blew them both away together: the Jacobin slogan of “strangling the last king with the guts of the last priest” had the effect of producing Jefferson’s full-blown atheists rather than moderate deists like himself.

Church and state were not officially separated in France until February 21, 1795. But the overall explosion that the corrupt, coercive French establishment ignited against itself created a grand fusion of revolution and irreligion and led to a radical secularization of French public life, so that in France to be progressive still mostly means being secular and to be religious still means being viewed as reactionary. This is a key part of the French mentality that lingers to this day and bedevils the resolution of French conflicts over religion in public life, not to speak of the direction of the European Union.

Astonishingly, too, Roman Catholic writers, from the popes down, who decry the militancy of French secularism today rarely acknowledge that this fierce secularism was bred and developed in direct reaction to their own earlier corruptions and has led to similar outbreaks of murderous anticlericalism elsewhere. These include the vicious Mexican repression of Catholics in the 1920s and the brutal Socialist slaughter of seven thousand priests, nuns, and bishops in Spain in 1936.

There was no wholesale repression, and there was no English equivalent of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, let alone the slaughter in the Vendée. As a result, English history has never been characterized by the militant anticlericalism or the wilder extremes of French secularization. Yet the secularization has been steady if slow, and the Church of England today hardly seems more than a beautiful Gothic ornament in English public life, or a nationalized utility for the “hatching, matching, and dispatching” of citizens, rites of passage in the seasons of life. Remembering Davie’s important qualifications about “believing without belonging” and “vicarious religion,” we should not dismiss this reduced role altogether.

But Davie is equally clear that the church has indeed “lost its role as the keystone in the arch of European culture.” Though still established, the Church of England is little more influential in England than the long-disestablished Catholic Church in France.

The year 1791 and the passing of the First Amendment put the United States at the other extreme from the start. Religion in America was clearly and decisively disestablished, but it flourished all the more—not so much in spite of disestablishment as because of it. Without the insidious embrace of church and state, religion in America was liberated to be a matter of free, voluntary, independent choice, dictated by conscience alone. It was therefore cut free from the deadly entanglements through which European religion had come to be the parent of its own secularization and the digger of its own grave.

Madison considered his proposed article, which limited the power of the states over religion, “the most valuable amendment on the whole list.”

The early years of the republic also witnessed the long, arduous task of removing the last vestiges of religious tests and established churches in various states. And then, after the Civil War, when the Fourteenth Amendment applied the First Amendment rights and restrictions to the states, too, it did not make clear how the two halves of the religious-liberty clauses should now be understood at the state level, which has been a bone of legal contention ever since.

First, indelible stains on the American record stand for all time as a check on triumphalism and a reminder of the need for humility. Second, unresolved constitutional tensions and inconsistencies remain to this day and are a reminder that law alone can never provide the magic formula to solve the problems. And third, since religious liberty as a natural human right is prior to and independent of all government decisions, including those of the Supreme Court, no generation’s interpretation of the First Amendment will ever be the last word on what religious liberty means. The highest court in the land has the last word on the law, but not on interpreting religious liberty.

Kick me out of the public square?

Today's civility discussion centers on who properly should occupy the public square, extremism and three crucial questions for the 21st Century. More excerps from Os Guinness:

Narrowing the field to the American public square, we can see that the extremes have long been defined as two opposing answers to how religion and public life should be related to one another. On one side are the advocates of a sacred public square, the “reimposers” who would give a privileged place to one religion at the expense of others; and on the other side are the advocates of a naked public square, the “removers” who would antiseptically cleanse the public square of all religion.

[It's a choice between] common dialogue approach to civility, which I shall argue is attractive in the short run but finally ineffective, and the covenant approach, which alone holds the key to a worthwhile truce and a tough-minded civility.

Hollowed out by the specious lies, half-truths, and nonsequiturs of ceaseless advertising and by other factors such as the ubiquity of ghostwriting, American verbal commitments do not mean what they once did. In a world of “words, words, words,” someone’s saying that their word is their bond is not so much a commitment as a rhetorical flourish or a piece of pious nostalgia.

Instead, the complex global world of the twenty-first century confronts a series of grand questions, the answers to which will decisively shape the next fifty to one hundred years. Three are especially urgent. First, will Islam modernize peacefully, forswearing its tendency toward militancy, pacifying its violent extremists, reversing its low view of women, acknowledging the right of religious liberty for all, including those Muslims who convert to other faiths, and accommodating to the fact of social diversity? Or will its continuing violence, its insistence on coercing faith, and its adamant refusal to allow faith to be privatized be the catalysts that force the modern world to reconfigure its structures and policies, either for better or for worse? Second, which faith will replace Marxism as the dominant ideology in China as the Middle Kingdom reemerges on the world stage as a superpower and responds to the opportunities and challenges of forces such as capitalism, democracy, and massive social change? And third, will Western civilization sever or recover its Jewish and Christian roots—either severing them according to the pattern of state-favored European secularism or recovering them according to the better angels of the American experiment?

The French writer and statesman André Malraux may have come closer than anyone else to the central issue of our time: “The twenty-first century will be religious, or it will not be.”

For any thoughtful student of world affairs who understands the role of religion in American and Western history, or in international affairs today, this view is preposterous. It flies squarely in the face of facts, and it rests on premises that are unexamined as well as secularist. What is out of step, Berger notes, is not the religiosity of the world but the secularity of the observers. (“The difficult-to-understand phenomenon is not Iranian Mullahs but American university professors.”

One does not have to agree with Thomas Aquinas that unbelief is contrary to human nature, with Edmund Burke that man is by constitution a religious animal, or with Berger that religion is a perennial feature of humanity to see that, at the very least, the prejudice is the product of what Max Weber called the tone deafness of certain elites: they do not hear or appreciate the music by which most people have, do, and always will orchestrate their lives. Sam Harris’s vision of the “end of faith” is as much wishful thinking as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.”

Whatever the source of the prejudice, the tone deafness has to be taken seriously because it affects public life and the freedom of many citizens whom those who are prejudiced simply do not take into account because their faiths are reckoned to be on the way out like an ebbing tide. The historian William Lee Miller captures the comic side of the “unmusicality” in the remark of an attorney: “What is the matter with these people? Why do they persist? Millions of those people out there believe what nobody believes anymore.”

Toward civility: he's jabbing at ME

Ha! I needle my mentor, Carl Johnson, for highlighting whole pages of a book. Now I'm doing it in The Case for Civility. There is deep wisdom in there, and the deeper I go in the book, the better it gets. The author, Os Guinness, jabs both sides. Here is more of what he ably observes:

The developments and conflicts over religion and public life of the past generation are coming to a head in a way that could produce a watershed moment for the United States.

From the rise of the Religious Right in the mid-1970s to the role of the Religious Right in the election of George W. Bush in 2004, the tide has flowed powerfully in the direction of conservative religious influence. The tide is now turning. The tie-in between the Religious Right and the Republican Party, and in particular between the Religious Right and the person and policies of George W. Bush, has provoked a mounting backlash that has made the liaison a severe liability for both.

The antireligious backlash can be seen at the popular level—for example, Rosie O’Donnell’s recent claims on an ABC talk show that conservative Christians are even more dangerous than Muslim terrorists, and the comparison, on NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, of Christians to Ku Klux Klansmen.13 But the backlash is far more lethal in educated and liberal circles, where it can be seen in the explosion of attacks on the Religious Right, either in the name of opposing views of religion and public life or in the name of a vehement, reenergized, and openly intolerant secularism—for example, such books as Sam Harris’s End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

How we live with our deepest differences is a question that lies at the heart of American freedom, and soon it may be a matter of survival for the planet. Americans have both high ideals and a wealth of experience to share with the wider world.

For countless reasons, the prospects for civility in the global public square in the short term are bleak. Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace” and the Enlightenment dream of a single, universal civilization are utopian and unrealizable.

America has been wrestling with the dilemmas longer, with better foundational resources, and with a generally better outcome than in any other nation. On the other hand, in spite of recent problems such as the culture wars, America has still not developed the levels of extremism that bedevil solutions elsewhere.

None of us speaks from nowhere; that would be impossible. None of us speaks from everywhere; that would be incoherent. All of us speak from somewhere—which is our freedom and responsibility as well as our fate.

Christians have at times talked of the Prince of Peace but flagrantly betrayed him with their dark record of state-sponsored coercion and violence from Constantine to the eighteenth century.

The latter burden comes right down to the present, for certain Christians form the bulk of one of the two great extremes in the American culture wars and are stirring up against themselves some of the most vehement antireligious animosity in the modern world.

First, there are people for whom conflict should be a contradiction of all they stand for (in the medieval case, conflict between fellow believers; in modern America, between fellow citizens). Second, summary private responses to disagreements (in the medieval case, characteristically violent; in modern America, through the myriad ways of culture warring) are to be replaced by orderly processes of settling disputes.

First Amendment in 1791. Of these three settlements, the American is the most original, the most conducive to freedom and justice for all in pluralistic conditions, and the one that James Madison justifiably called “the true remedy.”

The reasons are different in each case, but each in its way has so far proved incapable of accommodating certain modern developments.

Expressed differently, two options are now being put forward in terms of how we are to relate to others in the global public square, and both have a tendency to swing toward the extremes. On one side are the progressive universalists, those who believe that their way is the one way, the way for everyone, even at the cost of coercion—a position that leads inevitably toward conflict. And on the other side are the multicultural relativists, those who believe that all cultures are different and that there are no universal values, and that therefore no one has the right to judge another culture or its values, let alone intervene in the affairs of another culture and impose his or her values on another culture. More tolerant-sounding at first, this option is also an extreme because it leads to complacency. If we are never able to judge or intervene in the affairs of others, we will inevitably turn a blind eye to evil, injustice, and oppression.

Let's get civil: The senseless blame game requires a mirror

Who's to blame for culture wars? Religion? Secularism? Plenty of blame to go around (stay with this series: happily a remedy lurks)!  Os Guinness has much to ponder (see excerpt below).

As one radical Muslim’s placard declared with a stunning lack of self-consciousness: “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion.”

But before anyone drifts off into the well-rehearsed litany of blaming it all on religion, we should remember that modern “terror” began in France in 1789 in the name of secular Reason, killing several million in its wars and committing a near-genocide in the Vendée on its first outing. Nearer our own time, close to a hundred million people were slaughtered in the twentieth century by secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, in the name of secularist ideologies—far more than the deaths from all the religious persecutions and repressions in Western history combined.

In the world’s most murderous century, about one hundred million human beings were killed in war, another hundred million under political repression, and yet another hundred million in ethnic and sectarian violence.

This is no moment for crowing by either side, or for cheap attacks and mindless finger-pointing by anyone. There is enough blame to go around to sober us all, and the urgent need is for solutions, not scapegoats. As Ambrose Bierce pronounced with bitter accuracy in The Devil’s Dictionary, “The defining feature of humanity is inhumanity.”

Sixty years ago, the English writer Hilaire Belloc predicted today’s dramatic resurgence of Islam, and also pointedly warned that Muslims would seek revenge for their last great humiliation in Europe—at the siege of Vienna in 1683; to be precise, on September 11, 1683.

First, and most important, Americans must face the fact that the challenge of living with our deepest—that is, our religiously grounded—differences is one of the world’s great issues today.

Yet to this point there has been more decrying the darkness than offering any light.

Second, all members of the world’s educated classes must face the fact that the perspective that has dominated Western thinking about religion for more than a century—namely, the secularization theory—is seriously flawed and damaging in its influence.

Claiming Europe’s experience as their pattern for the world, secularization theorists have argued that modernization necessarily entails the decline and disappearance of religion—so that the more modern a nation becomes, the less religious it also becomes. But if Europe was therefore the vanguard, the United States was recognized as the one possible exception. Because of its unique historical circumstances, it bucked the trend and was both the most modern country in the world and the most religious of modern countries.

The last thirty years have witnessed a much-needed revision of secularization theory. Today, following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and an explosion of varied evidence from around the world, it is widely recognized that secularization theory is empirically wrong, and that all too often it has been philosophically biased as well. The theory simply does not do justice to the realities of human experience in real life in today’s world.

On the one hand, there is the question of justice and freedom for those whom secularization theory has victimized.

On the other, there is the recognition of the irony that as the theory of secularization has weakened, the philosophy of secularism has grown stronger, or at least louder—the result being a secularist fundamentalism that matches the rise of religious fundamentalism and creates one of the two poles of today’s extremism in religion and public life.

The net effect of this intolerant secularism must be assessed with the same clear-eyed realism that we use to assess the menacing rise of fundamentalism and religious extremism. From the murderous coercions of communism, to the forced silences of French secularism, to the brazen intolerance of the new atheists, Europe and many of the educated classes in other parts of the world have developed a way of thinking that has excluded religion from public life more decisively than at any other time in human history. That this unprecedented attitude and its policies may be just as damaging to freedom as religious extremism must be considered.

Third, the global era is raising a brand-new issue for our time—the emergence of a global public square.

Fourth, as I said, Americans must face the embarrassing fact that just when the world is ready to notice the significance of the American way of being modern, many aspects of the American way are under severe stress and are hardly capable of being a model for anyone. [more to come - his conclusions are encouraging]