The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (34 page)

Overall the First Amendment has been very good for Christianity. It forced Christian churches to appeal to potential adherents on the basis of persuasive preaching, sound theology, superior ways of life, and sacrificial action.
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Once they were cut from the strings of official obligation, independent Christian churches were free to prophetically address the state and to criticize practices that were offensive to moral principles to which churches strongly adhered. The benefits of the separation of church and state are nicely summarized by John Bennett, who says that it fulfills the “need of religious institutions to be free from control by the state,” that it satisfies the “need to protect citizens from interference with their religious liberty” by either state power or religious groups, and that it “is favorable to the health and vitality of churches.”
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The alarm set off in Hauerwas and Baxter by Will’s insistence that the free exercise of religion rests on religion’s privatization and subordination is largely
unnecessary. Perhaps we can reach a clearer understanding if we examine the two terms of Will’s contention separately. To proclaim that religion will not carry the weight of law by being disestablished is not the same as saying religion will be made private.
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It is very important not to collapse the two as Will has done, a move Hauerwas and Baxter fail to challenge. Indeed, many of the Founders promoted the advantage of the public expression of religion even as they asserted the necessity for religion’s disestablishment.

Because the Founders were not orthodox Christians, the views they held about the role of religion in the republic had more to do with its preservative function in national life and its support of political institutions than its strictly redemptive role as envisioned by partisan believers.
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Benjamin Franklin, for instance, saw the virtue of what he called “public religion,” the forerunner of what we know today as civil religion.
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Martin Marty says that by public religion Franklin “meant not the end of sects but of sectarianism, not the end of their freedoms but the increase of their duty to produce a common morality. Wherever he saw churches agreeing, he encouraged their support of the commonweal, and he opposed their spats over their peculiarities. His faith . . . was in . . . the need to do good.”
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Franklin’s views resonated with other Founders, who sought to fashion a public polity based on the premise that a common moral community underlay the republic. As Marty says: “Fortunately for later America, the Founding Fathers, following the example of Franklin, put their public religion to good use. While church leaders usually forayed only briefly into the public arena and then scurried back to mind their own shops, men of the Enlightenment worked to form a social fabric that assured freedom to the several churches, yet stressed common concerns of society.”
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George Washington, too, subscribed to a belief in the public utility of religion, asserting the link between religion and public morality as the foundation of national flourishing. In his farewell address, Washington stated:

And even Thomas Jefferson, despite his unorthodox Christian beliefs and his individualization of religious faith, demonstrated appreciation for religion’s public function in the republic, especially since the proliferation of religious bodies would serve as a built-in check and balance to American religious life. According to Jefferson, the function of “several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.”
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He also valued religion for lending moral support to political
liberty when he queried, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
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Of course, it is exactly the public expression of religion along these lines that disturbs Hauerwas and Baxter, who hold that national or civil religion is “counterfeit” Christianity uprooted from an account of the good. Even if one maintains this view, however, it doesn’t negate the fact that there is nothing in the First Amendment that prohibits the public expression of religion, including Christianity, in the republic. Thus, as Hauerwas and Baxter present his case, Charles Taylor’s arguments about religion and political life are on target: there was neither intent nor need in the separation of church and state to exclude God or religion from the republic.

Similarly, the subordination of religion to the political order is not as bad as Hauerwas and Baxter deem it to be, because it doesn’t mean what they fear it to imply. I have already hinted at my response earlier by suggesting that one virtue of the separation of church and state is Christianity’s enhanced potential to address the state on politically independent terms. But Will’s claim is also legitimate, that religion was to be made subordinate to the political order. The tension that arises from these apparently contradictory claims can be relieved by examining the two ways in which we can read religious subordination: either functionally or morally.

First, since American society was deliberately constructed upon secular principles to avoid the fatal conflicts occasioned by established religion in the England of the Founders’ recent memory, the subordination of religion to the state went hand in hand with the creation of the nation and the establishment of the freedom of religion. Saying that religion is subordinate to the political order is the positive statement of its more generally repeated negative formulation: that religion will not be established, or politically justified, in American society. What is meant is that religion will not function officially to adjudicate national disputes, will not occupy legal status to enforce civil codes, and will not be the means by which social goods are distributed. These functions are left to the political realm. Hence, in a legal sense, religion is functionally subordinate to politics.

On the other hand, if by subordinate it is meant that religion will surrender its independence to the political order to merely justify, or even sanctify, its practices; that religion will abdicate its role as critic of governmental and state practices; that religion will no longer provide moral visions and ethical principles by which advocates of justice may call society to judgment, then religion is without question morally insubordinate to and politically independent of the political realm. Its functional subordination by no means entails its moral subordination.

The difference is that functional subordination is the very premise by which American religions can claim their freedom to express faith and exercise their belief, especially in the social and public sphere. But moral insubordination is the way religions preserve their integrity and viability and perform their real worth to the republic by calling it to judgment in relation to their specific moral visions.
Moreover, as I will more fully argue later, if the moral visions of religion are to have public persuasion, they must be cast in terms that transcend narrow or sectarian religious language and concern, demonstrating their relevance by their prophetic judgment of, or application to, the nation in compelling public terms.
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Given these distinctions, Hauerwas and Baxter’s worries that religion becomes private and subordinate to the state in the First Amendment are dissolved when we bring more precision to our understanding of the terms of religion’s relation to the state. If Hauerwas and Baxter’s real concern is to resist the privatization and moral subordination of Christianity, their fight is not with constitutional views of religion, but with forms of Christian experience and belief that claim that the church’s most perfect social expression is limited to ecclesial expressions, as Hauerwas and Baxter proclaim.

Ironically, then, it is Hauerwas and Baxter who turn out to be the real opponents of the full social embodiment of Christianity. By refusing to acknowledge the legitimate expression of Christian faith outside the perimeters of the church, Hauerwas and Baxter contribute to a fatal narrowing of religious belief, a position that has led to Hauerwas being characterized (fairly I think) as a sectarian.
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Their sectarian belief conflicts with Hauerwas and Baxter’s intent to resist the privatization, and indirectly, the subordination of Christianity.

Their views also lead them to deemphasize the crucial features of the churchstate debate that have the best chance to illumine the historical conflicts over religious tolerance, plurality, difference, and diversity, issues that also clearly affect our contemporary religious and cultural scene. More important, their position also reduces the potential impact of the gospel on the lives of Christians struggling to understand the proper role of faith in contemporary political debates.

Hauerwas and Baxter’s deficiencies are further magnified in the way they make analogies between freedom of speech and freedom of religion in pressing their case. Drawing on an essay by Stanley Fish, the authors claim that just as freedom of speech has paved the way for “indifferentism” in speech, so freedom of religion has led to “religious indifferentism.” According to Hauerwas and Baxter, Fish claims that speech has become a matter of indifference because it has been severed from an account of the good that assigns value to “free speech,” which in reality has builtin limits against those expressions its exponents deem harmful to its flourishing.

In this view, freedom of speech is really an illusion. Furthermore, all the distinctions that Will made about religion find analogous expression in “a private sphere not only of speech and ideas, but also of ‘mere speech’ and ‘mere ideas,’ of speech and ideas understood apart from any substantive account of the good which they serve.”
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The same holds for religion. As Hauerwas and Baxter say, “Inherent in Christian convictions is a substantive account of the good,” an account that is in tension with “all so-called ‘political’ accounts of the good.”
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Moreover, when political accounts of the good underwrite a vision of God and Christianity that are rooted in civil religion, there is conflict with genuine Christianity. Hauerwas and Baxter state that when Christianity gets separated from its embodied social form,
Christian belief becomes “asocial” and degenerates into mere belief, while a “counterfeit” religion, a religion of the nation, rises to take Christianity’s place.

On the face of it—judging from the passages they cite—Hauerwas and Baxter’s use of Fish’s work appears consonant with their project, an act of untroubled appropriation. But closer reading of Fish’s essay suggests that there are irresolvable tensions between his views and Hauerwas and Baxter’s, tensions that have to do primarily with theological presumptions in Fish’s work that are diametrically opposed to Hauerwas and Baxter’s beliefs. Such tensions place Hauerwas and Baxter in a confounding dilemma. As a result, for Hauerwas and Baxter to successfully adopt Fish’s arguments, they will either have to substantially alter their positions or give up their present beliefs about the appropriate social expression of Christian faith.

The tensions between Fish’s analysis and Hauerwas and Baxter’s use of it are glimpsed in Fish’s discussion of the possible objections to his view of free speech as articulated by its defenders. What the defenders of free speech could say, Fish hypothesizes, is that he has not appropriately anticipated future revisions to his specific account of the good for which speech stands, thus prematurely closing possible valid interpretations to future generations: “My mistake, it could be said, is to equate the something in whose service speech is with some locally espoused value (e.g., the end of racism, the empowerment of disadvantaged minorities), whereas in fact we should think of that something as a now inchoate shape . . . we cannot now know . . . and therefore we must not prematurely fix it in ways that will bind successive generations to error.”
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But Fish demurs from this position on the First Amendment, saying that it “continues in a secular form the Puritan celebration of millenarian hopes, but it imposes a requirement so severe that one would expect more justification than is usually provided.”
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Fish continues: “The requirement is that we endure whatever pain racist and hate speech inflicts for the sake of a future whose emergence we can only take on faith. In a specifically religious vision like Milton’s, this makes perfect sense (it is indeed the whole of Christianity), but in the context of a politics that puts its trust in the world and not in the Holy Spirit, it raises more questions than it answers.”
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For Fish, this alternative to his view makes “perfect sense” only if it is rooted in a Christian interpretation of events that he implies does not prevail in our culture, or at least not in the political realms where decisions about the First Amendment are debated and resolved. Such a Christian interpretation of events, which would counsel enduring the present penalties imposed by free speech, could only be supported by belief in a future guaranteed by religious faith. Moreover, such a Christian perspective is only coherent within a political framework that puts its trust in the Holy Spirit. Thus, the key features of this opposing view to Fish’s position are dependent upon the premises of a religious worldview to make its claims cogent.