A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify,
A never dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.
To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfil,
O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master’s will!
from the hymn by Charles Wesley, as quoted by George W. Bush,
A Charge to Keep, p. 44
I recognise that government has no business endorsing a religious creed, or directly funding religious worship or religious teaching. That is not the business of the government.
George W. Bush, speaking to a White House conference on faith-based and community initiatives, Philadelphia, 12 December 2002
Religion in America
George W. Bush is a Christian. His heart, he has told us, is committed to Jesus. As war with Iraq loomed, he read the Bible every day.143 He also prays daily. He believes in ‘a divine plan that supersedes all human plans’.144 He carries his faith into his public life. He says that liberty is ‘the plan of Heaven for humanity’. He thinks that a president should speak for ‘the power of faith’.145 In the Bush White House, as his former speechwriter David Frum put it,‘attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory’.146 He opens cabinet meetings with a prayer.147 When he ordered General Franks to attack Iraq, he asked God to bless him and the troops.148 He speaks on the radio—on the day before Easter— about relying on ‘the creator who made us’, and placing ‘our sorrows and cares before him’.149 When the space shuttle Columbia was lost, he drew on words of the prophet Isaiah, saying,‘The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.’150 Obviously such an important part of Bush’s life and beliefs, and one closely intertwined with his ethical views, is relevant to any inquiry into Bush’s ethics. We also need to ask to what extent it is appropriate for the elected leaders of pluralist societies to invoke their religious faith on official occasions, in speeches and radio broadcasts, and to use it as a basis for policy on issues that affect others in the community who do not share their beliefs.
Religion and politics in America make a curious mix. On the one hand, the First Amendment prohibition on congress making any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ’ has led to church and state being much more strictly separated than in many other liberal democracies. In Britain, for example, there is an established church and the Queen is both the head of state and the head of the church. Some Anglican schools (but not schools adhering to any other religion) are fully state-funded. In Australia, although there is no established church, private schools, including those that are religious, are eligible for state financial assistance. In secular Australian state schools, there is often a Christmas concert at which children sing Christmas carols they have been taught in class. These practices rarely cause much controversy—Australian organisations defending civil liberties reserve their energies for more serious battles. Similar things could be said about most European countries. But that is not because the Britons, Australians, or French are highly religious people, pleased to see the state supporting religion. On the contrary, poll after poll shows that Americans are much more religious than the citizens of any other developed country. In Europe fewer than 20 per cent of the population go to church once a week or more. In North America, if we can believe what people tell pollsters, it is 47 per cent. More than eight out of ten North Americans say that God is important in their lives; fewer than half of all Europeans say that. About 94 per cent of Americans believe in God, 89 per cent in heaven, and 72 per cent in hell and the devil. These differences are also reflected in politics. It is the role of religion that has kept the issue of abortion at the centre of American politics, when it has long ceased to be a key issue in other developed nations, with the exception of Ireland.
How then can we understand the greater scrutiny paid to the separation of church and state in the US as compared with other developed countries? One explanation might be that it is precisely where religion is most fervently held that the need to limit its scope is strongest. To most Australians, Christmas carols are traditional songs, some quite beautiful, that small children, whether or not they believe in Jesus, enjoy singing. Political leaders are generally careful to keep their religious beliefs—if they have any—separate from their public life. They rarely, if ever, mention God or their religious faith, and if they were to finish a political speech by saying ‘God bless Australia’, people would wonder why they feel it necessary to make public reference to their private beliefs. Indeed, surprising as it may seem to many Americans, other liberal democracies often elect leaders who are open about not being religious and not attending church or any other form of worship. When taking the oath of office, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder refused to say the customary words ‘so help me God’. This did not prevent him being re-elected.152 This is scarcely imaginable in America, where polls have shown that although there is now near-universal willingness to vote for a Catholic or Jewish candidate, only a minority is prepared to vote for an atheist.153 It seems that the line separating church and state does not need to be so strictly policed in other liberal democracies, not because the environment is more favourable to religion, but because it is less favourable. In the US religion has a more serious prospect of changing the nature of society than it has in any other developed country.
Funding faith-based charities
In the American media, the big issue about religion and politics that Bush’s presidency has raised is whether state funding of faith-based charities, a key part of Bush’s compassionate conservatism social agenda, breaches the constitutional barrier against establishing a religion. Soon after taking office, Bush began pushing for legislation to enable religious organisations to get government funds, arguing that past treatment of religious organisations by the federal government was unfair. He gave examples: an Iowa organisation was told to return grant money to the government because the board of directors was not secular enough; a South Dakota shelter for the homeless was denied a grant because voluntary prayers were offered before meals; and a New York Council on Jewish Poverty was discouraged from applying for federal funds because it had the word ‘Jewish’ in its name. The House of Representatives passed a version of the legislation he sought, but the Senate rejected it. So in December 2002 he signed an executive order informing federal agencies that religious organisations are eligible for public funding. ‘If a charity is helping the needy,’ the president told a White House Conference on Faith-based and Community Initiatives just before signing the order, ‘it should not matter if there is a rabbi on the board, or a cross or a crescent on the wall, or a religious commitment in the charter. The days of discriminating against religious groups just because they are religious are coming to an end.’154
Bush said that under his executive order, ‘no funds will be used to directly support inherently religious activities,’ but he then promised that ‘no organization that qualifies for funds will ever be forced to change its identity’.155 To make both those statements hold will require some exceedingly difficult line-drawing. The Interfaith Housing Commision in Dallas, for example, is an organisation about which Melvin Olasky, Bush’s guru on compassionate conservatism, is enthusiastic. It helps homeless people find housing and employment—after they begin the day with a ‘motivational Bible lesson’. Will the staff who conduct the Bible lesson be funded from private sources while the same staff are funded from government sources when they advise people on finding employment? That will require a lot of careful accounting—and checking up on it would need just the sort of bureaucratic red tape that Bush deplores. The situation is made even worse by a plan to allow federal funds to be used for buildings where religious worship is held, as long as a part of the building is used for social services. How will the cost of building a church be separated out from the cost of building rooms within the overall structure in which nonreligious forms of counselling are offered?156
No doubt the courts will eventually decide what is or is not constitutional in this area. From an ethical perspective, there is nothing inherently wrong with using the resources of the state to support faith-based charities that assist the poor and homeless, or those on drugs, as long as the charities are supported strictly on the basis of their ability to help those in need, and the help that the faith-based charities provide is also available to those who do not wish to take part in religious activities. Again, this appears to be Bush’s view. He told the White House Conference on Faith-based and Community Initiatives:‘When decisions are made on public funding, we should not focus on the religion you practice; we should focus on the results you deliver.’ Assessing results isn’t easy. We can measure the number of people helped by different organisations who become self-supporting, drug free, and stay out of prison, but some programs are selective about who they help, and drop people if they don’t follow strict rules.157 Comparing success rates between organisations is meaningful only when the organisations have similar pools of people they are helping, and count those who they reject as well as those they ‘graduate’ from their program. Despite some hopeful claims for faith-based charities, Anna Greenberg of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University concluded a survey of the field by observing that there ‘is little hard evidence that faith-based communities do a better job than government at solving our society’s social and economic problems’.158
A more difficult issue raised by Bush’s measure is that it allows faith-based organisations that receive federal aid to take the religion of job applicants into account when hiring. So a Christian organisation could receive federal funds and then use them to advertise a position for which only Christians with a set of religious beliefs similar to those of the organisation itself would be eligible. This has led to claims that the government is ‘funding religious discrimination’. But an organisation working on the assumption that religious faith helps overcome poverty can hardly do anything else. A secular person could not convey the faith that, the organisation believes, the poor need to help them get out of poverty. The organisation is, therefore, appointing those it views as best for the task it wishes to undertake, and these people will necessarily share the organisation’s religious faith.
Whether this really will work—whether faith can be used as a means of helping large numbers of people out of poverty, hunger, drugs and homelessness—remains to be seen. Whether it is a good thing if it does work, is a question of values. There is a cost to be paid for inculcating religious faith. It could diminish the inquiring spirit that is the basis of scientific investigation and technological progress. It leads to forms of belief that are potentially divisive and dangerous, because they are beyond argument and outside public reason. Nevertheless, those dangers are speculative and many people will think that, even if religious faith is a delusion, a delusion that reduces poverty, hunger, drug use and homelessness is worth having.
To an observer from a more secular liberal democracy, it is a mistake for defenders of the separation between church and state to focus all their attention on Bush’s proposal to fund faith-based charities, as if this were the only, or even the main, issue raised by his presidency about religion and its role in political life. We should ask whether political leaders who are religious use their official positions to push their own religious views onto the community as a whole, and to what extent decisions made on behalf of the state are influenced by religious teachings and ways of thinking. On that basis, there may well be more to be concerned about than the funding of faith-based charities. But first, I want to ask a question about something that few Americans would ever contemplate challenging: the ethics of Bush’s faith.
The ethics of belief
The nineteenth-century English mathematician and philosopher William Clifford wrote an essay on the ethics of belief that began with a story about a ship owner about to send off to sea a ship full of emigrants. He knew that the ship was old and needed repairs, so he had doubts about whether it was seaworthy, and wondered if he should go to the expense of having it thoroughly overhauled and refitted. But he decided instead to put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all those families leaving their homeland to seek a better life abroad. So he convinced himself that all would be well, and watched the ship sail without any qualms. When the ship sank with great loss of life, his losses were covered by the insurance company.
Clifford’s point is that the sincerity of the ship owner’s belief does not absolve him of guilt for the lives lost, because on the evidence he had before him, he had no right to believe that the ship was fit to make the voyage. As Clifford says: ‘He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.’ Even if the ship had proved to be sound and had made the journey safely, that would not mean that the owner was justified in believing it seaworthy. He would still have been wrong to allow the lives of the passengers to hang on his faith, rather than on sound evidence that the ship was seaworthy.159
In the light of this example, consider Bush’s own account, in A Charge to Keep, of his decision to ‘recommit my heart to Jesus Christ’. He traces this to a walk along the beach in Maine with the Christian evangelist Billy Graham. Conversing with Graham, Bush was, he says,‘humbled to learn that God had sent His Son to die for a sinner like me’. After his decision to recommit himself to Jesus, Bush tells us, he began to read the Bible regularly, and joined a Bible study group. Later, when Bush describes a visit to Israel that he and his wife Laura made in 1998, we get a further insight into his view of the gospels as history. George and Laura went, he tells us, to the Sea of Galilee and ‘stood atop the hill where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount’. It was, he adds, ‘an overwhelming feeling to stand in the spot where the most famous speech in the history of the world was delivered, the spot where Jesus outlined the character and conduct of a believer and gave his disciples and the world the beatitudes, the golden rule, and the Lord’s Prayer’. Bush concludes his account of his visit to Israel by saying he knows that faith changes lives, because ‘faith changed mine’. This faith is something that enables him to build his life on ‘a foundation that will not shift’.160
Bush here presents a picture of a man who accepts what he is told without asking himself any critical questions about it. The question of how people come to have religious faith is too large a topic to discuss here, but there is still something about such unquestioning acceptance that should make us uneasy. Reflective people who are used to questioning what they are told will struggle over the decision to embrace the Christian idea that the world is made according to a divine plan. They will notice that the single chief determinant of belief in the Christian religion is being brought up as a Christian, and that few people brought up in Islamic, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist homes believe that Jesus is the son of God. Bush seems to believe that only Christians have a place in heaven.161 Most Muslims believe, just as fervently, that only Muslims do. They cannot both be right (although they can both be wrong). Is the Christian claim to know the truth any better founded than the Islamic, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist claim? We should be sceptical of claims to know something when belief in that thing is so immune to any objective evidence or argument that it depends largely on what one’s family believes, and on the customs and beliefs of the society in which one was raised.
None of this seems to trouble Bush in the least. He ‘learns’ that God sent his only son to die for sinners, as if it were just like learning that George Washington was the first president of the United States. When he goes to Israel he is so confident that he is standing on the hill where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, that the reader might assume he had come across an inscription recording the event carved by the disciples who were present. It never crosses his mind that since the Gospel According to Luke tells us that the sermon was given ‘in the plain’, the gospels might not be entirely reliable.162 Most New Testament scholars believe that whoever wrote the gospel according to Matthew himself composed the Sermon on the Mount, basing it on various sayings of Jesus that had been written down earlier. If that is right, we needn’t bother about the problem of identifying the hill (or plain) from which Jesus preached the Sermon, since he never preached it at all.163
Many Americans will not see a problem here. They share Bush’s faith, and are all the more ready to vote for him because of it. But we are considering the ethics of his beliefs, not whether they are widespread, or politically convenient. Even if many Americans share Bush’s naive beliefs, the rest of us need to ask what we are to think, ethically, of someone who bases his or her life on unquestioning faith. In other words, what are we to think of someone who, although he talks and writes a lot about his religious belief, shows no signs of having struggled with the question at all—someone for whom religious belief is an unquestioned ‘foundation that will not shift’. As the philosopher Karl Popper aptly said, the difference between science and dogma is that a scientific theory must always be open to falsification, on the basis of evidence.164 Bush seems almost to boast that his view of the truth is not open to falsification on the basis of evidence.
It will also be said that our religious beliefs are a private matter, and therefore not a proper subject of ethical evaluation. But Bush has made his religion a matter of public interest by referring to it frequently and asserting that it influences his public decisions. It matters to us all because Bush’s faith, like that of Clifford’s ship owner, may make him more certain that he is right than he should be. In 1999, as he prepared to run for president, he assembled leading pastors in the Texas governor’s mansion and told them that he had been ‘called’ to seek a higher office. After September 11, 2001, he told Karl Rove, his political adviser, ‘I’m here for a reason.’165 In the month before he launched a war against Iraq, Bush attended the convention of National Religious Broadcasters, and listened without demur while he was described as ‘God’s chosen man for this hour in our nation’.166 Howard Fineman, writing on Bush in Newsweek, says that faith ‘helps Bush pick a course and not look back’.167 We don’t have to look far to see where such an attitude to belief can lead. Those who planned and brought about the deaths of 3000 innocent Americans on September 11, 2001 were people of deep religious faith who prayed frequently and, before they died, commended their souls to God’s care. One of the ironies of American life is that these attacks by religious fanatics brought about even more public displays of religious belief than is usual in American public life, including the televised singing of ‘God Bless America’ by members of Congress on the night of the attacks. Experts on Islam, hastily summoned before television cameras, said that the problem was not Islam, let alone religious faith itself. The terrorists had misinterpreted their own religion. But if everything depends on faith, then why should terrorists not have faith that their particular version of Islam is right? Why should they not ‘learn’ from an eminent religious teacher that God wants them to destroy the greatest power standing against an Islamic way of life?
Of course, there is a crucial moral difference between those whose faith tells them to murder innocent people, and those whose faith tells them to respect life. But the difference is not something we can get from faith. The Islamic militant who believes he is doing the will of God when he flies a plane full of passengers into the World Trade Center is just as much a person of faith as the Christian who believes she is doing the will of God when she spends her days picketing a clinic that offers abortions. Faith cannot tell us who is right and who is wrong, because each will simply assert that his or her faith is the true one. In the absence of a willingness to offer reasons, evidence or arguments for why it is better to do one thing rather than another, there is no progress to be made. If we try to dissuade people from becoming radical Islamic terrorists, not by persuading them to be more thoughtful and reflective about their religious beliefs, but by encouraging them to switch from one unquestioned religious faith to another, we are fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. Much better, therefore, to insist that there is an ethical obligation to base one’s views about life on evidence and sound reasoning. Bush, unfortunately, is in no position to insist on such an ethical obligation, for his own religious beliefs are no more based on critically examined evidence than are the religious beliefs of Osama bin Laden.
One further comment by Clifford about the effect of credulity takes on new significance in the light of the recent controversy about the administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda:
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me. Men speak the truth to one another when each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other’s mind; but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am careless about it, when I believe things because I want to believe them, and when they are comforting and pleasant?…The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat…168
When, more than a century after Clifford wrote those words, doubts were raised about the Bush administration’s use of questionable information to build its case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Greg Thielmann, a proliferation expert who worked for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, explained what had happened in terms that Clifford would have seen as confirming his view. Thielmann said:‘This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude:“We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.”When you sense this kind of attitude, you quash the spirit of intellectual inquiry and integrity.’169 Former Vice-President Al Gore said something similar when he pointed out that Americans have always believed that democracy depends on open debate and ‘a shared respect for the rule of reason as the best way to establish the truth’—and then added that the Bush administration does not respect that process because they ‘feel as if they already know the truth’ and are ‘true believers in each other’s agendas’.170
Religion in public life
In his inaugural address, Bush uttered the following three consecutive sentences:
And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity.
I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power larger than ourselves who creates us equal in His image.
And we are confident in principles that unite and lead us onward.
The first and the third sentences refer to the desirability of unity among Americans, but they are separated by a sentence that introduces a divisive note. Even if a large majority of Americans share their president’s belief that we are guided by a power larger than ourselves who created us equal in his image, there remain millions who do not.
One of the virtues of a democratic system of government is that it offers a peaceful way of resolving disagreements between people with fundamentally different views. But within a broadly democratic system, there are varying models of how such a resolution should occur. One way is to regard democratic politics merely as a method of deciding who shall exercise power. On this model, those who win elections gain power and use it to impose their will on society as a whole. If religious fundamentalists gain power they may send homosexuals to jail, or prohibit the sale of contraceptives and prevent stores and cinemas opening on the sabbath. In defence of such laws, on this view of democracy, they need give no better reason than that they believe it to be God’s will, and were elected by a majority who shares this belief. On this model there is no incompatibility between democracy and theocracy, as long as the theocrats allow free and fair elections, and the supporters of theocracy continue to win at the ballot box.
A succession of elected theocracies, however, is not the model of democracy that the American founders envisaged. They wanted limits on the power of the majority. They enacted a constitution protecting freedom of expression and opinion, so that people can say what they want, and have the opportunity to persuade others to change their minds. Judging that better decisions emerge from open discussion, they created public arenas, like town meetings and the two chambers of Congress, so that political debates could help to build an educated and informed citizenry, and an effective democracy. They did not want adherents of one religion, no matter how large a majority they might be, to impose their religious beliefs on the remainder.
Bush has said, as the quotation at the start of this chapter indicates, that ‘endorsing a religious creed’ or ‘directly funding religious teaching’ is ‘not the business of the government’.171 It is against this background that we should look at Bush’s frequent references, while speaking as president, to his religious beliefs. For if the head of state and chief executive of the nation is constantly referring to God, or his faith, in his speeches on official occasions is that not a government endorsing a religious creed? Simply by referring to God in the singular, he leaves out many—polytheists who believe in more than one god; Buddhists, who are generally considered to be religious, but do not believe in a God or gods; agnostics, who are doubtful about the existence of God; and atheists, who are convinced that there is no God. Even when he makes no specific reference to Christianity, what Bush professes in his public statements as president is a religious creed, and the most senior employee of the US government is endorsing and teaching it. (I am not the only one to think this. The quotation just referred to comes from a speech so religious in tone and content that while Bush was delivering it, one audience member called out ‘Preach on, brother!’ and the audience, consisting largely of members of faith-based organisations, applauded.)
Philosophers and political theorists holding a wide variety of philosophical views use the terms ‘public reason’ and ‘public justification’ to describe a broad framework for a discussion in which everyone in a community can take part.172 Supporters of the idea of public justification see democratic politics not so much as a battle for power, settled by elections, but rather as a kind of public conversation about issues of common concern, with a decision-procedure for reaching temporary closure on these issues when the time for action has come. When we take part in this conversation, we seek to justify our views to others, and in so doing we should acknowledge the fact of political and religious pluralism. We should show that we recognise that we live in a community with a diversity of political and religious views. Hence we should offer reasons that can appeal to all, not only to other members of our own community of belief. Otherwise there can be no public conversation that embraces the entire society;we are implicitly dividing society into separate communities that do not seek to persuade each other. That is a recipe for increasing antagonism and mutual hostility between separate groups, divided along lines of belief. From Northern Ireland to Sudan, in Nigeria and in India, we have many examples of such societies, and the destructive conflicts to which they give rise, from past history and from our own times. Debates within a broad framework of public reason are one way to cross the divisions that separate these communities of belief.
Consider some examples of public policy discussions on controversial issues in ethics. We have already looked at the issue of killing human embryos for research. Obviously the argument for doing such research—improving the chances of finding cures for diseases that affect 128 million Americans—is something everyone can appreciate, so it is a justification that falls within the arena of public reason. Against that argument, someone might say:
We all agree that it is wrong to kill a normal human being. But human development from conception to maturity is so gradual that there is no place at which we can sensibly draw a line and say,‘Here, and not before, the developing human being gains a right to life.’ Hence we should accept that the developing human has a right to life from the moment of conception.
This argument also offers a public justification, and of course it is open to responses within the same framework of public reason, perhaps suggesting places where a line can be drawn to indicate when the developing human gains a right to life. We may end up disagreeing, but our disagreements are within a shared framework of reason and argument. We can each understand what moves the other, and accept that it is a reason, of some kind, even if we are not fully convinced by it.
Now take another issue. Suppose someone says:‘We should clone human beings because aliens have told us to do so.’We would, if we were to take this ridiculous claim seriously, ask for evidence that these aliens really exist, that they have told us to clone humans, and that there is some reason why we should do what they tell us to do. Suppose that the response to our questions is:‘I have encountered these aliens in moments of deep despair, and they have entered into my head and my heart, and I love them and know I can trust them. Open your hearts to them, and you too will come to love them and see that they are right.’ If we are told that no evidence for the existence of the aliens will be offered, and we should take these claims on faith, we would, rightly, refuse to pay them any further attention. What, though, if someone tells us that human embryos should not be destroyed because ‘human life is a sacred gift from our Creator’. He also refuses to offer evidence, and when asked how he knows this, says it is a matter of faith, and we should open our heart to the Lord, and to Jesus, his only son, and we too will see things as he does. That answer may be more widely held than the justification that the bizarre Raelian sect has given for setting out to produce a human clone, but as a justification for public policy within the sphere of public reason, it fares no better.
The same point applies to other areas of public policy. Most prominent are those relating to the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception, like Bush’s immediate reinstatement of Reagan’s ‘global gag rule’ that denies US assistance to any foreign non-governmental organisations that provide information to women on the option of legal abortion and where they can get safe abortion services, even if the organisations fund such activities separately.173 (Bush’s apparent belief that it is not possible to separate the provision of information about planned parenthood from the provision of abortion services makes an odd contrast with his belief that when funding faith-based organisations it is possible to separate the provision of social services from religious activities.) Or there is Bush’s statement, in signing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, that the right to life ‘cannot be granted or denied by government because it does not come from government, it comes from the Creator of life’.174 But there are also other policy decisions on issues where principles like equality and individual freedom run counter to traditional Christian principles.
In one of the debates he held with Vice-President Gore, Bush was asked what he thought about gay marriage. His answer was: ‘I think marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.’175 The term ‘sacred’ suggests a religious basis for his opposition to some civil recognition of unions between people of the same sex, and Bush apparently saw no need to provide any other arguments that would appeal to those who did not share his religious views. In office, he has not favoured giving gays and lesbians the legal protection that would provide health and tax benefits to their domestic partners.176 He also expressed his confidence in a leading Republican senator, Rick Santorum, who compared sodomy to incest, and stated his support for laws making sodomy a crime—a position that the Supreme Court shortly afterwards decisively rejected.177
The Bush administration’s attitude to providing information about contraception and the use of condoms to prevent both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is very difficult to explain on any grounds other than that it is driven by religious faith. The government’s Center for Disease Control had evaluated a number of sex education programs for teenagers to see which were most effective in reducing teenage pregnancies. In 2002, under an initiative called ‘Programs That Work’, it identified on its website five effective programs. None were promoting only abstinence, without the use of contraception. Subsequently, without any scientific justification, the Center for Disease Control ended its ‘Programs That Work’ initiative and put on its website a message saying:‘The CDC has discontinued PTW and is considering a new process that is more responsive to changing needs and concerns of state and local education and health agencies and community organizations.’178 In a similar manner, Bush adminstration officials pulled from government websites scientifically based information about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing transmission of HIV and replaced it with much vaguer and less positive language. The Department of Health and Human Services appointed an inspector general to investigate AIDS programs to see if their content is too sexually explicit or promotes sexual activity.
Similar attitudes have been put forward at an international level, although with less success. At the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference, held in December 2002, the US delegation sought to prevent reaffirmation of a 1994 agreement, at the International Conference on Population and Development, which committed the governments of the world to take specific action for women’s health and rights. Although the US had been a willing party to the agreement when it was first reached, Bush’s administration objected to the terms ‘reproductive health services’ and ‘reproductive rights’, and tried to remove language that supported the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The US delegation also stated that ‘the United States supports the sanctity of life from conception to natural death’. (One member of the US delegation was John Klink, who served as the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations from 1994–2000, and therefore had plenty of experience in advocating such positions.) The Bush administration’s proposal was defeated by a vote of 32-1.179
On the other hand, to his great credit, when in 2003 Bush finally became convinced of the need for a major US initiative to tackle HIV/AIDS at a global level, he did not insist on avoiding talk of condoms altogether. Although the president used biblical language to urge funding for his HIV/AIDS initiative (‘When we see the wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not—America will not—pass to the other side of the road’), in the face of a crisis that threatens tens of millions of lives, he was prepared to put compassion ahead of religious fears that condoms condone promiscuity. The bill he signed stipulated only that one-third of the funds going to prevention should be set aside for programs that exclusively promote sexual abstinence until marriage; the remainder was available for use in programs promoting condom use.180
At this point those seeking to extend the influence of religion in politics will object that to define public reason in a manner that excludes appeals to religious faith is to do what the theocrats do, but in reverse: to impose a secular framework on public life, thereby unfairly excluding religious perspectives.181 This sounds like a strong argument, until we realise that it is not religious beliefs, as such, that are excluded from the realm of public reason, but methods of reaching those beliefs that are not accessible to public justification of a kind that we accept in every other area of decision-making. There is no reason of principle why claims about the existence of God, and what he or she wishes us to do, should not be part of public political debate. The problem arises only when religious belief is put into a realm that protects it from the usual rules of scrutiny. If someone tells us that embryo research should be prohibited because human life is a sacred gift from our Creator, then it is reasonable to ask how we know this. If the answer is that it is written in scripture, we need to know why those particular writings are to be believed. If this depends on historical claims about the origins of these scriptures, then experts on the texts may be called in to consider whether these claims are sound…and so on. If all these questions can be given answers that are open to the usual rules of critical scrutiny, public justification is satisfied. But if, at some point, further inquiry is cut off with an appeal to faith, then the position is not one that other reasonable people have any grounds to accept, and the original recommendation for the prohibition of embryo research has not been defended within the framework of public reason. It is not the content of the belief—whether it is about God, or gods, or evil spirits, or curses—that determines whether it is a matter of public reason, but the way in which the belief is held and defended. The great medieval Christian philosophers, like Anselm and Aquinas, thought that the existence of God could be proved by rational argument. Whatever we think of their arguments, at least they were concerned to justify their beliefs in terms of what we now call public reason. It is only those who scorn reason who exclude themselves from the field of reasonable public debate.
Appeals to people’s religious sensitivities are also not excluded from the sphere of public reason. In debating the proposal to allow federal funds to be used for research that destroys embryos, it is reasonable to assert that millions of Americans believe that only God has the right to take innocent human life, and they will be deeply disturbed if their taxes are used to kill embryos. That is a claim about a matter of fact that can be investigated, and weighed in the balance against competing claims, like the potential of stem cells to cure diseases. From the standpoint of public reason, the fact of offence is the issue, not how well grounded the offence might be. (Although John Stuart Mill and other defenders of freedom have argued that mere offence should not, in the absence of more specific harm, be a ground for infringing individual liberty. Once we grant that a risk of offence to some justifies restricting the liberty of others, we have introduced a sweeping argument for prohibiting any kind of behaviour, public or private. What offends people is not fixed. People can learn to be more tolerant, and that is a better solution than restricting the liberty of others.)
The suggestion that public policy be debated within the framework of public justification does not seek to restrict freedom of expression or religion. People should, of course, be free to express their religious beliefs, to worship as they choose, and to seek, without coercion, to convert others. The issue is not one of who may say what, but of what reasons should be given weight when we decide issues of public policy, and make laws that affect all members of society. If someone wants to base a policy recommendation on religious beliefs that they hold on faith, they are free to do so, but the rest of us are also free to ignore them—and whether we ourselves are religious or not, we should ignore them, or encourage them to attempt to restate their views in ways that appeal to those who do not share their religious faith. In doing so, we are acting on a sound understanding of what makes for a well-functioning democratic society.
Some will think that public reason is a quaint relic of enlightenment ideas about reason and progress, properly rejected in the postmodern world in which we now live. They will say it is naive to believe that anyone decides anything on the basis of reason, and will deny that there is any basis for privileging reason and argument above religious faith, or belief in witch doctors, or oracles, or any other way in which people might reach decisions about what to do. But those who say this do not fully think out the alternatives. There are methods of reaching decisions that we use every day, and would not want to do without. We do not want police to go before courts saying that they need no evidence that the accused committed the crimes of which he is accused, because they have faith that he did, and faith needs no evidence to support it. We want physicians who have studied what does or does not help sick people—and if we consult alternative healers, we look for evidence that their therapies really work. If we abandon the assumption that reason, evidence and argument can lead to better decisions, more innocent people will be jailed and more sick people will die. So those who want public justification to fit within the same broad framework are not imposing some narrow, sectional, set of standards on the debate. They are seeking standards of argument that everyone uses all the time.
Others will argue that even if we can agree on standards of reasoning for much of everyday life, we cannot prove the truth of any ethical principle. Therefore, since ethics is beyond reasoning and public justification, it is no less acceptable to get one’s ethics from religion than it is to get it from one’s culture, or one’s subjective beliefs. In fact, many Americans believe that the only alternatives to deriving moral judgments from religion are moral nihilism or moral relativism. (Interestingly, this is not an assumption that I have come across outside the United States, presumably because in more secular countries, it is obvious that there are many people who are not religious but still hold that morality is important, and not just a matter of subjective or cultural preferences.) But morality does not have to be religious in order to be real and important. We are each of us concerned about our own well-being, or the satisfaction of our wants and desires. When we think ethically, we should do so from an impartial perspective, from which we recognise that our own wants and desires are no more significant than the wants and desires of anyone else. To base judgments about the rights and wrongs of an action on the impact it will have on the welfare of those affected by it is to base ethics on something that is real and tangible. Because it is based on something that we all want, for ourselves, coupled with an argument for a form of impartiality in our reasoning, it meets the standards of public justification. That is why I agree with Bush that it is appropriate to make moral judgments, and that it is possible to educate— not indoctrinate—children to do so. We would be educating them in putting themselves in the place of others. When they are trying to decide what to do, we would encourage them to imagine what it would be like to be those who are harmed by their actions. This is, of course, a form of the Golden Rule, a principle that has been taught by all the major religions, and by secular ethicists, both ancient and modern, as well. Naturally, there is much more to be said on this topic, and there are alternative views of ethics that are defensible. While secular philosophers may disagree about what is the right thing to do, the same is true of religious thinkers, even among those who are Christians.
Bush is aware of the need to broaden his appeal beyond those who share his religious beliefs, and for this reason we may feel that his frequent references to God are innocuous, and it is petty to read too much into them. When he lays out reasons for his policies, he does not rely exclusively on religious grounds. In his speech on the use of embryos for research he states his belief that life is a sacred gift from the Creator, but he also tells us of his concerns about ‘a culture that devalues life’. That phrase suggests a link between permitting federal funds to be used for destroying embryos, and a more general loss of respect for life that we would all oppose, so it is an argument within the framework of public reason.
Not all leading members of Bush’s party are so careful. Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, and thus the most powerful Republican after Bush, has said that ‘Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world—only Christianity’. Part of what DeLay means by this can be gleaned from the suggestion he made that the tragic shootings at Columbine High School occurred ‘because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionised out of some primordial mud’.182 DeLay apparently believes that God is using him to promote ‘a biblical world view’ in American politics.183 Though Bush is not responsible for DeLay’s views, he does have control over his Secretary of Education, Rod Paige. Paige has been quoted as saying that he would prefer to have a child in a Christian school, partly because there were too many different values in the public schools to easily arrive at a value consensus.184 Apart from the fact that Paige was running down the schools it is his responsibility to improve, the remark implies that diversity and debate in ethics are not good, and that it would be preferable for all children to be brought up with just one—Christian—world view.
Despite his close proximity to people like DeLay and Paige, Bush has said that ‘We ought not to worry about faith in our society. We ought to welcome it into our programs. We ought to welcome it in the welfare system. We ought to recognize the healing power of faith in our society.’185 This has caused concern even for some religious organisations, at least the more broadminded of them. The Baptist Joint Committee, for example, decided that the president needed to be reminded that he had been elected ‘the political leader of the whole nation, not one segment of the religious community’.186 There are real grounds for fearing that using the presidential platform to make religious statements will lead to the promotion of religious faith in general and to the promotion of the religion favoured by the president and other leading members of his party. Then the separation of church and state will have broken down, and we will have a society in which non-Christians can no longer feel equal participants.