Since the rise of the religious New Right two generations ago, the religion-and-politics battle in America has been fought on many fronts. The most obvious one involves electoral politics, although even here the story is not so straightforward as often depicted. As Richard John Neuhaus showed two decades ago, the new activism of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants in the 1970’s did not begin as a political offensive intended to woo America from secular liberalism, let alone from the Democratic party. Instead it was a defensive reaction to attempts by the Carter administration to bring federal regulatory pressure to bear on religious schools, thereby threatening to inundate the enclaves that evangelicals and fundamentalists had created to escape the cultural meltdown of the 1960’s.1 Only in time did what started as self-defense””“leave us alone”””become a significant political movement promoting traditional morality in public life.
Viewed through a wider historical lens, the revolt of the evangelicals can also be seen as one episode in an ongoing struggle over the meaning of the religion clause of the First Amendment. For the first century and a half of the Republic, that clause had been a backwater of constitutional jurisprudence. This began to change with a series of Supreme Court decisions springing from the Everson case in 1947. What struck many as an effort to drive confessional religion from the public square and to establish secularism as a quasi-official national creed provoked a challenge by religious intellectuals and activists representing a wide variety of theological and denominational positions; their arguments were buttressed by legal scholars, some of them devoutly secular in cast of mind.
Nor is that all. If the religion-and-politics wars have been about politics””including the politics of constitutional interpretation””they have also been about ideas. To claim a place for religious conviction in the public square is implicitly to challenge the “secularization hypothesis” propounded for decades by modern sociologists and historians””the idea, that is, that modernization inevitably leads to a dramatic decline in religious conviction and a weakening of the culture-forming effects of religion. Perhaps less obviously, it is also to challenge the secularist or Jacobin version of the Whig theory of history, according to which the evolution of Western democracy should be seen as a development away from religion, and against Christianity in particular.
All of these disparate strands have been involved in the latest phase of the religion-and-politics wars: the rise of what Christopher Hitchens has hailed as the “new atheism.” The commercial success of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, following on the heels of similar books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), may not have added very much to the sum total of our knowledge about either religion or the impact of religious conviction on our politics. But these best-sellers have kept both the polemical and the political pots boiling, and sharpened the question of what role””if any””religious conviction, or even religiously-informed moral argument, should play in American public life.
Mr. Weigel claims that the Carter administration threatened to “inundate the enclaves that evangelicals and fundamentalists had created to escape the cultural meltdown of the 1960’s.” That’s not exactly how I and others remember it – many, if not the majority of the “enclaves” had little to do with escaping cultural meltdowns. They were set up and financed to preserve racial segregation. I am not justifying the proposed attempts to regulate private schools, but Mr. Weigel ought to recognize that the actual facts presented a slightly more complicated situation than his ideology will acknowledge.
Indeed, Dan, but the the judiciary’s hostility towards any expression of religion in the public schools was at least as powerful a motivator as race, if not more so, in the erection of Christian schools.
The other problem with Weigel and Neuhaus’s thesis is that the evangelicals were very politically active in rearguard actions to have the state promote “godly” morality and to punish vice in the 1970s, even aside from Carter Administration efforts to secularize Christian schools. Evangelicals were in the forefront of political opposition (in religious terms) to such things as liquor by the drink, pornographic magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, and decriminalization of homosexuality (remember Anita Bryant?)