The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (33 page)

AS USUAL STANLEY HAUERWAS (this time with Michael Baxter) has, in “The Kingship of Christ: Why Freedom of ‘Belief’ Is Not Enough,” given us a great deal to think about in wrestling with the persistent problems growing out of the churchstate debate. Arguing that there are irresolvable tensions between American society and Christian faith, the authors deliver a tough rebuke to those theologians who “posit some kind of harmony between the two by means of a so-called churchstate theory.”
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The authors further maintain that most Christian theologians conspire to “privatize and subordinate Christianity,” especially when they assume that “Christianity consists of a set of beliefs (mere belief) that can be abstracted from practices and actions (conduct).”
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The danger, as the authors see it, is that Christian belief gets removed from its legitimate social context in the church and becomes conceived as a matter of individual freedom. The remedy that Hauerwas and Baxter propose is for Christians to reclaim their ecclesiastical and social identity as “the people who acknowledge the Kingship of Christ.”
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One need not accept (and indeed I don’t) the authors’ arguments about the value and function of churchstate debates in discussions of religious freedom to affirm that the Kingship of Christ is crucial for the health of Christian churches. Still, I remain deeply suspicious of their claims about the social form that best serves and expresses Christian belief. Their arguments about the church’s role in society suffer from the same flight from social embodiment that they claim characterizes their opponents in the churchstate debate. And the intellectual road Hauerwas and Baxter travel inductively from their conclusion of Christ’s Kingship—leading through arguments about freedom and political practice, the insuperable conflicts introduced by churchstate debates, and the relation of civil religion to authentic Christian belief—is marked by signs of confusing detours and confounding dilemmas.

In my response to Hauerwas and Baxter’s position, I will show how their narrow focus on secondary, less helpful issues in the history of churchstate debates obscures more compelling and primary points of concern that have a better chance of illumining these debates. Then I will show how Hauerwas and Baxter’s views of religious indifferentism rest on faulty analogies between free speech and freedom of religion, reveal an inadequate theory of politics, and are plagued by insurmountable dilemmas. In the end, their worries about indifferentism pale in comparison to the specter of irrelevance posed by Hauerwas and Baxter’s beliefs to the lives of everyday Christians perplexed by the right relation between religion and politics.

Finally, I will argue that their understanding of the Christian tradition implies a homogeneous idea of faith that excludes from consideration other relevant examples of the relation between church and society that might challenge or support their views. Among other helpful models, the example of the prophetic black church presents a vital vision of the relationship between faith and politics that preserves Christian identity while expanding the possibilities of democracy, an unjustifiable task for Christians from Hauerwas’s point of view, but a central claim of black prophetic Christianity.
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Hauerwas and Baxter’s misgivings about the First Amendment in their present essay derive partially from a narrow interpretation of churchstate relations by columnist George Will.
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As Hauerwas and Baxter explain, for Will the “heart of the constitutional understanding of ‘religion,’” is the “distinction between ‘conduct’ and ‘mere belief.’”
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According to the authors, Will elaborates this distinction by saying that the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the religious controversies that plagued Europe by establishing in religion’s stead the commercial republic of capitalism. Influenced by John Locke, who maintained that the truth of religion cannot be established by reason, Thomas Jefferson shaped the American doctrine of the free exercise of religions, which made religions private and subordinate to the political order. As long as religion is mere belief and private, the logic goes, it is free and unrestricted. But when it becomes a matter of conduct or behavior, religion is subject to the rule of law. For Will, this represents the Founders’ genius; for Hauerwas and Baxter, it is sheer anathema, an intolerable rub.

But Will has a severely limited and self-serving view of the First Amendment. Even if we acknowledge the distinctions many Founders made between belief and behavior, we are not automatically bound to Will’s interpretation of their views. Indeed Hauerwas and Baxter’s worries are legitimate only if Will’s argument about the Founders’ beliefs turns out to be the crucial distinction in the constitutional view of religion. But the most important distinction is not between conduct and mere belief, but between freedom of conscience and the coercion to believe. This distinction is made clear when we carefully consider in historical context the easily misinterpreted terms of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the prime architects of the constitutional concept of freedom of religion.

James Madison, who contributed key phrases to the important Virginia Declaration of Rights, an exemplary document defending freedom of religion, proposed the language of the First Amendment that was eventually revised and enacted by the First Congress.
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In proposing the First Amendment, Madison was as greatly influenced by the suffering of religious dissenters at the hands of the Church of England as by enlightenment ideals of reason’s superiority and the doctrine of natural rights.
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These ideals led Madison to declare that religion “can be directed only by reason and conviction.”
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And the brutal battles fought over religious freedom led him to conclude that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience.”
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Such religious battles also convinced Madison that religious belief must not be established or imposed by the state. This was especially true for a revealed religion like Christianity, whose claims to the exclusive possession of truth also opened the possibility of religiously justified claims to political power.
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To circumvent this possibility in the embryonic nation, Christianity had to be shorn of its potential political authority, a strategy achieved by challenging Christianity’s biblical authority and asserting its status as a reason-governed discourse, a transformation that profoundly shaped Madison’s views of religion, and Jefferson’s as well.
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Indeed, Jefferson, in the strong embrace of Lockean liberalism, natural rights philosophy, and enlightenment rationality, also rejected Christianity’s status as revelation.
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With Madison and other similarly enlightened men, Jefferson declared religion to be a matter of opinion.
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This view led him to proclaim that, should the neighbors of Americans say that there are twenty gods, or no God, such a statement would neither “break their legs or pick their pockets,” precisely because it is not backed by the force of law.
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For Jefferson and the Founders, such an opinion is distinguished from officially established and recognized beliefs. Since the government is derived from the natural rights of human beings and not divine revelation, such opinions would neither mandate punishment nor require exceptional protection for their utterance. To act otherwise, as if the religious opinion that there was no God or that there were twenty gods could cause injury to be inflicted upon its bearer, is to acknowledge that such an utterance fractured a legally sanctioned belief about God. But this would be contrary to the constitutional view of religion.

And more important for the fledgling nation, Christianity was no longer to be protected from challenge or dissent under cover of legal sanction. Thus, the interests of nonbelievers, unorthodox believers, and dissenting Christians converged around the disestablishment of religion and the establishment of religious freedom. In view of this history, the central distinction in the constitutional view of religion is indeed between freedom of conscience and the coercion to believe. Hauerwas and Baxter’s acceptance of Will’s distinction between mere belief and conduct as the primary constitutional religious issue causes them to overlook the bitter cultural and interpretive wars fought over the freedom of religion by citizens oppressed by the intolerant behavior of the established church. By viewing the issue of the freedom of religion in relation to the historical events I have just sketched, Hauerwas and Baxter might be led to accentuate the struggles of oppressed Christians and other citizens against the power of the church when it is officially entrenched by law in a classic Constantinian contract with the state.
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Ironically, the Constantinian compromise of the church is a favorite theme of Hauerwas’s ethical reflections, and invites vigorous exposition in the present context.
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But Hauerwas and Baxter’s pursuit of a less important constitutional distinction has diverted their attention from a suitable occasion to press one of Hauerwas’s more powerful charges.

Even a cursory reading of the events precipitating the development of the First Amendment suggests that it was a brilliantly preemptive and bloodless resolution of religious conflict. By disestablishing religion and establishing religious freedom, the Founders translated an a priori denial of privilege to any one religion in particular as the principle for extending privilege to them all. The crucial distinction in the constitutional view of religion is the one between enforced religious views and the freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice or community. Viewing the freedom of religion debate in this manner allows us to understand what really was at stake for citizens who endured hardship because of their opposition to the politically protected claims of official and legal Christianity.

But Hauerwas and Baxter’s silence on this aspect of the churchstate debate is rooted perhaps in a presumption of the homogeneity of the Christian experience, a point I will take up in greater detail later. For now, it is enough to say that the freedom of religion debate pointed to the vibrant religious diversity, especially within Christianity itself, that was mocked by the rigid constraints and narrow practices of the Church of England and by established religion in the colonies. Established religion defined the church in the singular, but the existence of New Light Presbyterians, Strict Congregationalists, Separate Baptists, and even Methodists demanded that it be reconceived in the plural.
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Conflicts created by the quest for the tolerance of religious pluralism is an inescapably key theme that must be addressed in any credible account of the events surrounding and leading to the First Amendment. Their avoidance is certain to lead to truncated and self-serving versions of events that shaped, in principle, the democratic destiny of our nation. Indeed, the religious question played a crucial role “in the beginning of free government. No question was then more important,
none played so prominent a role in the thought of the pertinent theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Bayle, and, to a lesser but still significant extent, even Montesquieu—and even if it could be said that they solved it, or answered it, in principle, it was left to the American Founders to be the first to solve it, or to try to solve it, in practice.
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Of course, as Hauerwas and Baxter’s discussion of
Employment Divison, Dept. of
Human Resources of the State of Oregon v. Smith and Black
proves, freedom of religion has met limitations in the form of state proscription of religious beliefs that intersect the nebulous area between important aspects of law and faith. We have also seen the opposite effect in the case of the Jonestown mass suicides, where the failure of state intervention in the name of freedom of religion perhaps inadvertently aided the economic and religious exploitation and deaths of over nine hundred persons.
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But uses of freedom of religion have largely safeguarded the religious liberties of faith communities to pursue the practice of their beliefs in a society where religious prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance were not given legal underpinning.

The glaring exception, of course, is chattel slaves, who were for most of their enslavement legally barred from free worship without white supervision. But even black Christians came to cherish the First Amendment because it protected their hard-won freedom to worship without governance, while also giving legal expression to their concern that other groups not suffer similar penalties of social and religious intolerance. The formulation of the First Amendment by the Founders presented a tenable solution to the religious suffering created by the legalization of Christianity. It may be cogently argued that with the First Amendment, a large and vital Christian purpose was served, that the ideals of Christian love and tolerance were ironically promoted through the government’s refusal to cede Christianity official status. By keeping believers from maiming one another over religious dispute, the government instituted in law what Christian belief aimed for in principle but failed to practice. It would not be the last time the government intervened in the face of the failure of Christians to act on their beliefs, a topic about which I shall have more to say later.