Introduction: Theology and the American Civil Conversation

Theology and the American Civil Conversation

The essays composing this volume address a subject that has come to command increased attention over the course of the past thirty years, namely, the subject of religion and American public life. This is not to suggest, however, that the essays focus on the particular political controversies that come to mind when the subject of religion and politics is invoked—controversies over things like the meaning of “separation of church and state,” abortion, gay marriage, the teaching of evolution and “intelligent design” in the public schools, abstinence-only sex education, embryonic stem cell research, etc. Nor is it to suggest that they explore the political activities of various religious leaders and faith communities, the impact of religion on voting behavior and elections, or the changing contours of the interaction between religion and American political culture. Rather, in a variety of diverse ways, these essays explore the broader and deeper question of the possible contribution of theology and theologically informed moral reflection to the contemporary quest for a public philosophy capable of sustaining and advancing America’s ongoing experiment in self-government and ordered liberty. They take shape against the backdrop of two sets of developments in what John Courtney Murray liked to call the American civil conversation. The first of these concerns the resurgence of public religion; the second, the state of American public life.

REDISCOVERY OF PUBLIC RELIGION

Contrary to expectations, recent decades have brought a growing recognition of the resilience of religious belief in the modern world. I say “contrary to expectations” here for the simple reason that modern thinking about the whole subject of religion and modern culture has been dominated by what is usually called the secularization thesis.[1] The proponents of this thesis, as Wilfred M. McClay has written, “were convinced that secularization was merely one inevitable facet of that great and powerful monolith called ‘modernization’ and hence they trusted that secularization would come along bundled with a comprehensive package: urbanization, rationalization, professionalization, functional differentiation, bureaucratization and all the rest.”[2] As these processes advanced, religion was fated to disappear—to wither away first in the public sphere life and then in the lives of individuals; religion was destined to experience first privatization and then extinction. Modernization, in short, entailed secularization.

Today, however, the secularization thesis has fallen upon hard times. Contrary to expectations, with the possible exception of Western Europe, modernization has led to neither the disappearance of religion nor its relegation to the private sphere. The world of the early twenty-first century, as McClay writes, “remains vibrantly, energetically, and at times, maniacally religious, in ways large and small, good and bad, superficial and profound, now as much as ever.” Indeed, as he notes, the continuing vitality of religion in America, the most modern of nations, represents “exhibit A” in the case against the secularization thesis.[3] And, it should be stressed, that we are speaking here not merely of private religion, but of public religion as well. Religion has survived and, indeed, prospered under conditions of modernization, not just as a private refuge from a bureaucratically organized and impersonal public world, but as a public phenomenon. Indeed, it has been argued that what we are witnessing is a revival of public religion, a veritable “deprivatization of religion,” as religion not only refused to disappear but assertively sought a public role.[4]

Thus, the past several decades have brought not just a recognition of the continuing vitality of religion in the modern world, but a rediscovery of “public religion,” of religion that, in Jose Casanova’s words, “has, assumes, or tries to assume a public character, function, or role.”[5] The past several decades have witnessed, this is to say, the rediscovery of religion not merely as a private avocation—or even a private vice—but as a visible, corporate reality, a community of thought, that profoundly affects public life. The events that have compelled this rediscovery—I say “compelled” here because to many this rediscovery has not, to put it mildly, been a welcome one—are well-known and include the emergence of the Solidarity movement in Poland and, more broadly, the role of religion in the demise of communism; the role of religious groups and institutions in democratization’s “third wave”; the resurgence of Islam and, in particular, the rise of what is sometimes termed “jihadism” culminating in the events of 9/11 and their aftermath; and the rise of the “Religious Right” as an important political force in American politics. And, the rediscovery of religion as a public force in the modern world, in turn, has spurred a rediscovery of the inescapable linkage between religion and public life.

As the term rediscovery suggests, the recognition that religion and public life are necessarily connected is not exactly a new one. Present in the work of Plato at the very dawn of the Western intellectual tradition, this connection has been an enduring theme in that tradition ever since. Indeed, as Robert N. Bellah observes:

It is one of the oldest sociological generalizations that any coherent and viable society rests on a common set of moral understandings . . . in the realm of individual and social action. It is almost as widely held that these common moral understandings must also in turn rest upon a common set of religious understandings that provide a picture of the universe in terms of which the moral understandings make sense.[6]

The reason for this linkage, moreover, is not mysterious. “There is,” as Tocqueville wrote, “hardly any human action however private it may be which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their soul, and of their duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all originates.”[7] The “all” in question here, he was at pains to stress, necessarily included politics: “Every religion has some political opinion linked to it by affinity” and the natural tendency of the human spirit is “to harmonize heaven and earth” by regulating “political society and the City of God in a uniform fashion.”[8]

Our understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of human existence, in other words, will necessarily affect our understanding of how human social life should be organized. Of its very nature, therefore, religion has public implications. Indeed, as Casanova points out, this is true even of the most otherworldly religions. Even religions which call for withdrawal from the world have “external consequences in the world,” affecting public life even if only indirectly.[9]

Indeed, and more than a little ironically, the very notion of a “secular” public sphere presupposes a distinction between the enterprises of “religion” and “politics” that is not a universal feature of human culture but a novel feature of Western civilization whose roots are ultimately found in the peculiarities of Western religious history. As innumerable scholars have pointed out, the distinctions we take for granted between the sacred and secular, religion and politics, and church and state, mark a fundamental break with the vision of society that prevailed in both the non-Western world and in Western culture itself in classical times. The decisive factor in the emergence of these distinctions as defining elements of Western society’s political consciousness was the rise of Christianity. Implicit in the Christian notion of humanity’s transcendent destiny and distinction between “the things that are God’s” and “the things that are Caesar’s” was a distinction between the secular and sacred orders, between a secular sphere of temporal concerns and a religious—“spiritual”—sphere concerned with matters bearing on our transtemporal destiny, between politics and religion. The effect of these distinctions was to limit, relativize, and secularize the claims of the body politic, in Voegelin’s apt phrase, to de-divinize political life.[10] And, what emerged under their impact was a dyarchical understanding of the ontological structure of society in which the “polis” or “empire” became “the state,” a “temporal” organization with this-worldly (i.e., secular) objectives and was forced to share the stage of social life with a new actor, the Church, a “spiritual” organization responsible for shepherding man to his ultimate destiny.[11]

The point is that the distinctions between the sacred and secular, religion and politics, and church and state that we take for granted aren’t universal features of human society, but arise out of the revolution in political life inaugurated in Western political life by Christianity, a revolution that has done much to give Western civilization its distinctive shape.[12] This isn’t to suggest, of course, that Christianity requires the privatization of religion, the establishment of what Richard John Neuhaus has famously called the naked public square, a public order from which “particularist religious and moral belief” is excluded.[13] Rather, it is to suggest that absent the distinctions between the sacred and the secular, and religion and politics, first introduced into Western society’s cultural consciousness by Christianity, the very idea of the public square as a secular space hermetically sealed to religious belief isn’t even conceivable. Before we can separate religion from politics, we must first distinguish between the two enterprises. Ironically, it was the public impact of the dominant religion of Western culture that made the idea of the privatization of religion and the secular public square conceptually available to Western culture.

BEYOND THE ENLIGHTENMENT CRITIQUE

As was noted earlier, furthermore, in many quarters the rediscovery of public religion has been not merely a surprising development but an unwelcome one. The hostility prompted by contemporary resurgence of public religion—a hostility that finds its most vivid expression in the rise of what is sometimes called “the new atheism”[14] —cannot be fully explained by the fact that it empirically falsifies one of the most influential theories in modern social science (although this no doubt plays a role). Indeed, as a cursory familiarity with the new atheism suggests, the animosity generated by the continued salience of public religion must be seen against the backdrop of the Enlightenment critique of religion.[15] Widely embraced by cultural elites, the account of the origins, nature, and role of religion embodied in this critique provided the intellectual soil from which the secularization thesis grew.

In this view, the historical prevalence of religion represented a sign of human immaturity fated to disappear as our understanding and mastery of the world grew. Religion, in this view, represented a vestige of humanity’s childhood; and secularity would follow religiosity as naturally and inevitably as adulthood follows childhood and adolescence. Whatever it may have contributed to civilization, the fact was that, taken as a whole, religion had been an obstacle not merely to our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us, but to the cause of human freedom and dignity. Religion thus represented something that the human race must leave behind on its road to maturity, enlightenment, and freedom. The withering of religion under the impact of modernization thus must not merely be accepted as a historical inevitability—it must be embraced as a victory for the cause of humanity.

While we await its eventual disappearance, moreover, religion must be culturally marginalized. While some individuals may still feel an emotional or psychological “need” for the comforts and certainties provided by religious faith, religion itself must be seen as a purely personal matter concerning only the feelings and conscience of the individual. It thus must be privatized—restricted to the private realm and strictly forbidden to impinge on public life. In essence, it must be treated as a vice, a weakness, which individuals, although free to indulge in privately, must not be allowed to inflict upon others or society as a whole.

Like the secularization thesis itself, the Enlightenment critique of religion has fallen on hard times. To begin with, as we have seen, despite our growing understanding and mastery of the world around us, religion shows no sign of disappearing or withdrawing to the private sphere. Indeed, it is increasingly apparent that the Enlightenment critique of religion is rooted not only in a misunderstanding about the origins of religious belief, but in an impoverished understanding of human nature itself. Far from being doomed to disappear with the progress of science, religiosity is a perennial and ineradicable feature of human nature itself rooted in the human quest for meaning and purpose. One can’t but think here of Mircea Eliade’s famous characterization of man as “homo religiosus.”[16] It would thus require, as Peter Berger remarks, “something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish” the religious “impulse for good.”[17]

At the same time, the account of religion’s historical role that informs this theory can no longer be accepted uncritically. While there is no question that crimes can be attributed to particular religious institutions and leaders, religion cannot simply be dismissed as a force of darkness and oppression. One or two examples from the Western experience will suffice to illustrate the point. On the one hand, contemporary scholarship has made it increasingly clear that the Biblical understanding of the world as the orderly creation of a rational, lawgiving God who transcends the world he created and of man’s role as the steward of creation, played a significant role in laying the intellectual and cultural foundations for the rise of modern natural science.[18]

On the other hand, there’s the role played by the Christian understanding of the person and the ontological structure of human social life in laying the intellectual groundwork for the free societies of the modern West. As we have seen, the Christian distinction between the things that are God’s and the things that are Caesar’s, and the distinction between Church and state in which it found expression, had the effect of relativizing, secularizing, and limiting the claims of the state. Implicit in these distinctions, moreover, were a host of principles that were to play a critical role in Western political history. These included the distinction between state and society; normative pluralism, the idea that our nature as social beings isn’t exhausted in the state but finds expression in a wide array of diverse institutions and communities which have the right to exist and to discharge their distinctive responsibilities; and limited government, the idea that the goals of the state are not co-extensive with overall goals of human life but are confined to certain limited secular purposes.

Equally consequential here is what Glenn Tinder described as Christianity’s exaltation of the individual, an exaltation implicit in its view of individual human beings as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, redeemed through the sacrificial death of His only son, and called to communion with God. The affirmation of human dignity implicit in this view had far-reaching and revolutionary social consequences. It meant, in Tinder’s words, that “no one . . . belongs at the bottom, enslaved, irremediably poor, consigned to silence”[19]; that individual human beings must be treated as ends rather than means and hence could not be viewed simply as instruments to be put to civic purposes; and that freedom and equality were essential defining features of a rightly ordered society.

It is no coincidence, as Brian Tierney suggests in his seminal study of the origins of the idea of natural rights, that this idea “grew up . . . in a religious culture . . . with a faith in which humans were seen as children of a caring God.”[20] The point can be generalized: It is no accident that the free societies of the modern West emerged on the soil of what had been Christendom for the simple reason that these societies are unimaginable absent the revolution in human self-understanding inaugurated by Christianity. If, by ignoring the role played of various secular intellectual currents, Jacques Maritain’s claim that “the democratic impulse has arisen in human history as a temporal manifestation of the inspiration of Gospel”[21] oversimplifies matters, it nevertheless conveys an important and often forgotten truth by reminding us of the indispensible critical role of religion in laying the cultural groundwork for modern democracy. Indeed, if America provides exhibit A for the resilience of religious faith in modern society, it also provides exhibit A for what Tocqueville terms the “harmony” of “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.”[22]

What does all this mean for the whole question of religion and public life in America? As countless observers have shown, while both American religion and the precise nature of its public role have changed over time, America’s public life and discourse—our civil conversation, to employ Murray’s terminology—have always been profoundly shaped by religious influences.[23] (Here again, one can’t but think of Tocqueville’s work; and, in particular, his famous observation that one “can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores” and characterization of “religion” as “the first” of America’s “political institutions.[24] ) The conclusion toward which all this points is simple and straightforward: predictions—or even wishes—to the contrary notwithstanding, there is absolutely no reason to expect religion to either disappear or cease to play a public role in the future.

ANOMIC DEMOCRACY

The second development against whose backdrop these essays take shape concerns the state of American democracy itself and contemporary America’s search for a public philosophy. It is now widely recognized that the celebration of “the end of history” that took place in the 1990s was premature. Liberal democracy today confronts serious challenges both from without—one thinks here immediately of both radical Islam and the increasingly assertive authoritarian regimes of Russia and China—and within. Indeed, at the very moment of its greatest triumph liberal democracy seems to be experiencing a grave crisis.

America provides a case in point. In recent years, a host of commentators occupying disparate positions on our political spectrum have concluded that something is seriously amiss with the American body politic. Politically, we have witnessed a decline in public spiritedness and the loss of any overarching sense of community or of a common good to which private interests must be subordinated. The result has been the rise of what has been called “anomic” democracy: the fragmenting of the body politic into a plethora of increasingly aggressive interests whose ever-escalating and conflicting demands reduce politics to a struggle over the divvying up of the spoils and produce political paralysis.[25] The resultant paralysis combined with the perception that laws and public policy are a product of cynical deals among self-interested groups have combined to produce a far-reaching crisis of confidence in our political institutions.

Simultaneously, we have experienced the ascendancy of a new and highly problematic type of “rights talk” whose defining characteristics, as Mary Ann Glendon has pointed out, is “its starkness and simplicity, its prodigality in bestowing the rights label, its legalistic character, its exaggerated absoluteness, its hyperindividualism, its insularity, and its silence with respect to personal, civic, and collective responsibilities.”

Producing an environment in which every strongly felt desire tends to be elevated to the status of a right, it has issued in a seemingly endless multiplication of often conflicting rights claims with, as Glendon observes, little or no “consideration of the ends to which they are directed, their relationship to one another, to corresponding responsibilities, or to the general welfare.”[26] As Richard Morgan has argued, the cumulative effect of this rights mania has been the progressive disabling of “major American institutions, both governmental and private.”[27] At the heart of contemporary rights discourse, moreover, is found what Gerard Bradley terms the “megaright” of individuals to autonomy, their right to choose their own lifestyle, goals, and values, a right to which government and other social institutions must bend and which is understood to trump the demands of such competing goods as communal solidarity, public morality, and the public good.[28]

Equally disconcerting has been the continuing expansion of the scope of the state whose effect, as Robert A. Nisbet observes, has been “the conversion” of an ever-increasing number of “once-traditional, once-autonomous, once-social relationships into those of the law and the courts,” the transformation of more and more social relations and institutions into “the handmaiden of legislature, law office, regulatory agency, and courtroom.”[29] Tocqueville’s warning against the well-meaning but nevertheless stultifying despotism of the omnicompetent nanny state seems increasingly prescient. Ironically, however, the expansion of state power has issued in what William Ernest Hocking termed “the impotence of the state”: the ever-expanding bureaucratic state seems increasingly incapable of effectively exercising the vast responsibilities it has assumed.[30]

Socially, as Robert Putnam and others have documented, we have witnessed a far-reaching erosion of the matrix of non-state, nonmarket groups, communities, and institutions that collectively compose what is sometimes called civil society.[31] Perhaps the most visible sign of this erosion is the profound crisis that has engulfed the American family. The result has been a far-reaching unraveling of the social fabric and an unprecedented level of social pathologies.

Culturally, a moral and spiritual void has developed at the center of Western life manifesting itself in a corrosive individualism, a widespread moral relativism, a soulless hedonism, a shallow materialism, and a pervasive pursuit of immediate gratification. Living in a society increasingly shaped by what Alasdair MacIntyre terms emotivism, right and wrong, truth, beauty, and goodness are more and more reduced to matters of mere individual taste or preference.[32] Indeed, for millions today, the very idea of a knowable, objective, and obligatory moral order transcending the subjective desires of individuals represents a threat to human freedom and dignity. Increasingly, we lack any type of publicly compelling answer to what Irving Kristol once called “the ultimate subversive question: why not?”[33]

At the same time, our rapidly expanding pluralism has caused the collapse of the type of substantive consensus about human nature, the human good, and the structure of social relations that should inform human life on which our polity has historically traded. As a result, while there is widespread consensus in support of the institutional and procedural components of American democracy, there is increasing disagreement about the substance of the common good that these institutional arrangements are intended to serve. “What is in short supply in democratic societies,” as one study notes, “is not a consensus on the rules of the game but a sense of the purpose that one should achieve by playing the game.”[34]

The result is both a pronounced tendency toward “gridlock”—absent common purposes, “there is no basis for common priorities, and without priorities there are no grounds for distinguishing among competing private interests and claims”[35] —and the debilitating culture war that today wracks the American polity, at issue in which is nothing less than which understanding of the human person and the human good will inform our public life. Lacking a common universe of discourse in which our differences can be intelligibly stated and argued, and common ground that can provide the basis for mutually acceptable compromise, our politics has increasingly become, in MacIntyre’s famous phrase, “civil war carried on by other means.”[36]

PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE UNENCUMBERED SELF

It is perhaps no accident that the same decades that have witnessed these disturbing developments have also witnessed the ascendancy of a new model of human nature and social life to the status of something approximating America’s reigning public philosophy. At its heart, as Michael J. Sandel has pointed out, is a vision of human beings as “unencumbered selves,” ”free and independent selves” who are unbound by “ends we have not chosen—ends given by nature or God, for example, or by our identities as members of families, peoples, cultures, or traditions.” The self is thus “installed as sovereign, cast as the author of the only obligations that constrain”—save for a small number of “natural duties” which “we owe to persons qua persons” such as doing “justice” and avoiding “cruelty.”[37] In this view, as Bellah and his collaborators remark, individual human beings are simply “arbitrary centers of volition,” sovereign wills free to make of themselves and the world whatever they choose.[38]

This vision of the person, in turn, provides the starting point for the understanding of society, the human good, and politics that dominates the discourse of contemporary American society. At the level of social ontology, this understanding reflects a radically voluntarist conception of human social relations. In this view, social relations are understood as something artificial, external, and contractual, as, in Sandel’s formulation, “a possible aim of antecedently individualized selves,” rather than “an ingredient or constituent” of the identity of individuals.[39] By understanding social relations as the essentially arbitrary products of the wills and interests of naturally autonomous individuals, this ontology deprives social institutions of any determinate character, and requires that they be understood—and treated in law and public policy—as temporary aggregations of individuals united for reasons of mutual utility.

As William M. Sullivan observes, this instrumentalist understanding of society has as “its corollary, the subjective and finally arbitrary nature of value,” the idea that “ends and purposes are . . . subjective.”[40] This understanding of the human person issues in what Stanley Brubaker has termed a “dogmatic doubt” about the existence of a knowable, objective, and substantive human good,[41] and thus in a commitment to what George Will has described as “the moral equality of appetites.”[42]

The end product of this is a political morality that demands, in Francis Canavan’s words, “a steady choice of individual freedom over any other human or social good that conflicts with it, an unrelenting subordination of all allegedly objective goods to the subjective good of individual choice.”[43] Precisely because choice is the human good, the purpose of political institutions is to create a framework of peace and order within which individuals can pursue their self-chosen conceptions, their goals restricted only by the equal right of others to do the same. Political life, in short, exists to secure the sovereignty of the self. This, in turn, requires the establishment of Neuhaus’ naked public square: since no one has the right to “impose” their “morality,” their distinctive conception of the good life, on others, while individuals are free to believe what they choose, then particularist moral and religious convictions must be checked at the door of the public square.

The ascendancy of this model of the human person and society is hardly unrelated to the crisis that has engulfed American democracy today. On the one hand, the transformation it has effected in the self-understanding of Western society has played a critical role in precipitating this crisis. While it is certainly not the only factor at work, the ascendancy of this model has certainly played a role in fostering the trends that are at the root of this crisis. Paradoxically, however, the very cultural and social trends that have helped drive this crisis have strengthened the appeal of this philosophy by enabling it to present itself as the only basis for social peace in a society so deeply divided on the question of the human good.

The problem isn’t merely that this philosophy embodies an impoverished view of human nature, society, politics, and the human good—a view, as Elshtain observes, that is “so ‘weightless’ it would evaporate were it not for the fact that . . . it has become dogma.”[44] It is also that it seems incapable of sustaining the virtues, affirmations, and social arrangements on which a democratic polity depends for its vitality. Indeed, the corrosive skepticism it has spawned has rendered us increasingly incapable of offering a principled defense of the values, principles, and institutions that lie at the heart of American democracy, thereby leaving us no alternative to ground these values, principles, institutions, and practices in some form of historical particularism. Constitutional democracy, in this view, has its foundation not in universal truths about human nature and politics, but simply in our culture’s particular traditions and preferences. Ironically, at the very moment of its triumph over its totalitarian adversaries in the Cold War, the ascendancy of this philosophy has rendered American democracy increasingly inarticulate, increasingly incapable of offering a principled defense of its deepest commitments. We desperately need a new and better public philosophy embodying a richer understanding of the human person, society, and political life.

THEOLOGY AND THE QUEST FOR AN AMERICAN PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY

Against the backdrop of these developments, the obvious question that suggests itself concerns the possible contribution of theology and theologically informed moral reflection to America’s public life and argument. More specifically, it concerns the question of whether our efforts to articulate the new and better public philosophy we need can and should draw on the resources provided by America’s religious traditions, whether these traditions are in fact capable of enriching the American civil conversation.

For religion to play this type of role in American public life, of course, would hardly be unprecedented. Nevertheless, the suggestion that theology and theologically informed moral thought can and should make an important contribution to contemporary America’s civil conversation, that they can and should play a role in shaping the vision of human nature, society, and the human good that superintends our public life, raises many complex questions. Some of these questions are historical: In what ways have our public life and argument reflected anthropological, moral, social, and political understandings deriving from the various religious traditions professed by Americans? Alternatively, how have our political institutions and culture shaped American religion? Others concern not the past, but the present and future: Exactly what distinctive resources do theology and theologically grounded moral thought offer to contemporary America’s ongoing search for a public philosophy adequate to contemporary realities? What alternatives can we discover in the various religious traditions professed by the American people to the understandings of the human person; the human good; the nature, origins, and goals of political life; the structure of social relationships required for human flourishing that dominate contemporary America’s public discourse? Is it possible in contemporary America for these traditions to play the kind of role in shaping our public philosophy that they have played in the past?

To pose this question, in turn, is to raise the whole question of religious pluralism. The story of American religion, after all, is a story of ever-expanding pluralism. If contemporary America is no longer the almost exclusively Protestant society of the time of the founding, neither is it any longer the America whose tripartite pluralism was described so brilliantly by Herberg in the aftermath of World War II.[45] In fact, one of most important events in American public life over the past half-century has been the loss by the so-called mainline churches of their long-standing culture-forming role, sometimes described as the transformation of the mainline into the “sideline.”

The obvious question here is whether under the conditions of the type of pluralism that now exists religion can be expected to play the type of public role it played in the past. How, given our far-reaching religious pluralism, can theology play a leading role in forging a public philosophy capable of commanding broad-based public assent? Indeed, does not the attempt to forge a theologically informed public philosophy for contemporary America run aground on the fact of our very pluralism—on the fact that we not only disagree on specific theological and moral questions, but inhabit different theological and moral universes, operate within the horizons of different theological and moral traditions, speak different theological and moral languages? Does it not run aground, in other words, on the whole problem of “incommensurabilty?”

Still other questions concern the whole subject of “public reason.” What language should believers employ in the public square? Does public discourse in a pluralistic society have its own distinctive character and requirements that believers must observe? Do they preclude the offering of “religious” arguments in the public arena? Are these requirements consistent with the demands of religious integrity, with the obligations of believers to remain faithful to God’s will as they understand it? Does a distinction between “religious” and secular” reasons make sense either conceptually or practically?

Likewise, the call for a religiously informed public philosophy necessarily raises complicated theological questions for believers. To what degree should religion be engaged in the affairs of the earthly city? Should religious believers seek to shape the civil conversation, to mold the public consensus? Is such an undertaking consistent with their religious responsibilities? What risks does it entail? Does it necessarily compromise religion’s distinctive identity and witness? What, in short, is the proper relationship between religion and culture, religion and society? These are questions, of course, that the adherents of different theological traditions might well approach very differently.

THE PLAN OF THE VOLUME

This volume brings together a diverse and interdisciplinary group of contributors—eminent theologians, moral philosophers, and political theorists—to discuss these questions and the broader problematic of which they are a part. The terms “diverse,” “interdisciplinary,” and “discuss” are important in this context. On the one hand, the contributors are united neither by a common disciplinary perspective nor by a common theological or religious orientation nor by a shared perspective on the full-range of subjects the volume explores. Rather, what unites them is a common commitment—in sharp contrast to so much of the contemporary academic world—to taking both religious belief and the enterprise of theology seriously; and a common recognition of both the importance of the questions this volume engages and the need to engage these questions in a rigorous, intellectually sophisticated, and interdisciplinary fashion. On the other hand, in the conviction that authentic dialogue about the type of questions being explored here is in short supply today—that, far too often, what passes for dialogue is really polemics or sloganeering, or, at best, a series of monologues in which the participants never really understand much less engage each other—this volume is organized in a manner designed to foster such dialogue. Each section of the book consists of an original essay focusing on a specific aspect of the problematic outlined above, followed by three responses engaging its argument or exploring the broader problem it addresses. The volume concludes with an afterword by Jean Bethke Elshtain reflecting on the essays and the issues they engage.

The first section of the volume, “Theology, Morality and Modernity’s Discontents,” explores the relationship between theology and modern moral culture. The lead essay, Charles Taylor’s “The Perils of Moralism,” argues that at the heart of contemporary Western culture is found a tendency to reduce the spiritual dimension of human existence to a matter of obedience to a moral code, a tendency whose source is found in a particular turn in Latin Christendom. Not surprisingly, the ascendancy of “nomolatry” has been accompanied by a succession of revolts against the impoverished conception of human existence it reflects. For Christianity to help modernity escape nomolatry, he concludes, it must itself first escape its own historic forms of “code fetishism” by recovering its eschatological dimension.

Taylor’s analysis and the broader issues it addresses are engaged by Kenneth L. Grasso, Fred Dallmayr, and William Schweiker. Grasso argues that an adequate account of the nature and origins of contemporary moral culture must encompass an appreciation of the role of several factors over and above nomolatry, and of “the nominalist revolution” in shaping the categories through which modern society understands moral life. Dallmayr and Schweiker, in turn, each express reservations about a few aspects of Taylor’s analysis (including his treatments of Protestantism) while seeking to augment and strengthen his argument. Dallmayr calls attention to some additional resources—biblical, philosophical, and literary—that can help us transcend the truncated spiritual and moral horizon Taylor laments. Schweiker seeks to show how we can escape the “traps of moralism” that prevent us “from responding theologically” to the political and cultural situation we confront.

The volume’s second section addresses the whole question of “Theology and the Foundations of Political Authority.” Nicholas Wolterstorff’s lead essay critiques the various attempts to understand political obligation in purely human terms that have dominated the modern intellectual landscape as ultimately unsatisfying, while drawing on the Bible to briefly sketch the outlines of an alternative account of the state authority. Deriving political authority from God, this account sees the essence of state authority as consisting in the power to render and compel compliance with judgments about justice.