Despite the constitutional separation of church and state—which Jefferson considered his proudest achievement—religion has always played a role in American political life. And it has not always been the organized religious congregations that have been leaders in crossing the line that the Constitution tries to establish. Religion touches deeper; it affects the language through which people express themselves as well as their vision of the nation to which they belong. What is new in the last two decades is the rise of a religious right that has become an active voting bloc bringing into politics social and cultural (or moral) issues that had been left previously to the private sphere. To interpret this new role of religion, sociological considerations have to be joined to historical and philosophical analysis. It is not enough to cast anathemas on fundamentalism or to denounce its use by one’s political enemies.
The first step in the transformation that has taken place was the democratization of the nominating process by which American political parties select their presidential candidates that followed the disastrous designation of Hubert Humphrey as presidential candidate by the party leadership at the Democratic Party’s 1968 Chicago convention. This democratization by means of an extensive system of primary elections had an unintended consequence that has come to haunt the political process. Only the most engaged and partisan voters turn out for the primary elections, with the result that candidates have to slant their platforms toward the extremes of their respective parties in order to win the nomination and then have to seek to return to the center of the political chessboard for the November election. Thus, to take a recent example, the moderate Bob Dole had to move to the right in order to win the support of the Christian Coalition in 1996 and then seek vainly to return to the center in the general election. The same fate met then-president George H. W. Bush in 1992, who had to move to the right after his near-defeat by Pat Buchanan in the New Hampshire primaries and was unable to find his way back to the center for the general election against the moderate Bill Clinton. The current president, George W. Bush, faced a similar problem in his primary campaign, when he had to rally the faithful to hold off John McCain. It remains to be seen how he will redeem his debt to these groups while maintaining the support of the center.
These examples seem to indicate that religious fundamentalists play a crucial role especially in the Republican Party today. An article in Time magazine (May 11, 1998) is typical; headlined “The G.O.P. Mantra: Keep Dobson Happy,” it explains that James Dobson is “the country’s most powerful representative of conservative Christianity.” But this manner of exercising influence marks a shift in the way religion had attempted to make its strength felt. A decade earlier, in 1988, the representative of the religious fundamentalists, Pat Robertson, ran personally in the primaries against the then vice-president George Bush. Robertson claimed to represent a moral majority and presented himself as a direct political challenge. Yet in the end Reverend Robertson could exercise only the traditional indirect influence on the process. The reverend’s claim to represent a moral majority proved itself not to be a political claim; the role of religion is oriented to social reform. Indeed, if one watches the sermons of the media evangelists, of whom James Dobson is typical, their preaching is more pragmatic than political (and Mr. Dobson is a psychologist, not a pastor). Similarly, the rise and fall of figures like Jim and Tammy Baker or Jimmy Swaggert, testify to a traditional social orientation that is only indirectly political.
But what then explains the political strength of the religious fundamentalists? One can’t say that they manipulate their followers, since their followers have to be already receptive to their message. Moreover, their message is not unambiguously found on the political right. True, it is shocking for those who believe in progress through scientific enlightenment to read in the New York Times (March 6, 1996) the surprising headline, “70 Years After Scopes Trial, Creation Debate Lives.”1 But it should be recalled that when Scopes, a high school biology teacher who was put on trial in 1921 in Tennessee for violating that state’s law forbidding the teaching of evolution, the lawyer for the state was none other than William Jennings Bryan, formerly the populist candidate for president, who later became Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. Bryan’s argument was both that the majority has the right to vote whatever laws it wishes and that religion is central to democratic society. “If it is necessary to give up either religion or education,” he argued, “then it is education that should be abandoned.”2 But Bryan’s appeal to the democratic rights of the majority was not without echoes. His attempt to bind together democracy and religion was not a solitary venture; he had previously made his mark nationally with a speech denouncing attempts of the wealthy “to crucify us on a cross of gold.”
It should not be concluded hastily that religion influences only right-wing politics. After all, the civil rights movement of the 1960s can hardly be imagined without the spiritual support its participants derived from their faith and the material aid brought by the churches (black and white, united). Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor, and his organization was called unambiguously the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But it is also worth noting that, at the time of his assassination, the Reverend King was in Memphis to support striking municipal garbage workers. This was no anomaly. Going further back in American history, Richard Hofstadter points out that one of the most anti-Darwinian counties in the United States—Kanawha County in West Virginia—voted more heavily for the socialist Eugene Debs in the 1924 elections than did any other county in the United States.3
This radical populist role of religion should not be surprising any more than is the aid religion offers to conservatives. Did not the liberating word of Luther inspire the militants of Thomas Münzer as well as the rigorous but republican institutions of Calvin’s Geneva, while Luther himself took the side of the princes? Thus it is not surprising that one of the most forceful advocates of creationism in contemporary America is Pat Buchanan, who, in his primary races against George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, made himself the advocate of the working class against the untamed forces of the global economy and free trade. In short, religious fundamentalism is not a univocal political phenomenon. Its relation to the political needs to be examined more carefully.
THE ROOTS OF FUNDAMENTALISM
In order to see the novelty of the recent rise of religious fundamentalism and its relation to politics, it is useful to recall the role of religion in the work of the two founding fathers of contemporary sociology, Durkheim and Weber. Although Durkheim was a friend of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès and a practicing republican, his Cartesian spirit did not in the least incline him to deny the contribution of religion to modernity. What he called the “elementary form” of religion was based on a distinction between the sacred and the profane that arises when the individual is forced to recognize that society is greater than the individual and that social experience takes men and women beyond their everyday secular experience. But Durkheim understood that this definition did not yet suffice to distinguish religion from magic, which gives rise to a similar experience that transcends the everyday private world of the individual. For this reason, he added a further criterion: since religion is not something individual but is by its very nature social, a church is also necessary to give stability to the religious experience.
At the time of the Dreyfus affair, in 1898, Durkheim developed the political implications of this conception of religion in a modern society. He argued that what he called the modern form of religion is based on the critical spirit of science and the sanctity of the individual; its church is the republic, which must protect the members of its congregation, whose faith in turn provides the ties that bind them together in a community. Those who refused to consider the possible innocence of Captain Dreyfus claimed that to question the verdict condemning him (and, even more, to question the army that prosecuted him) was a threat to the national community. But their refusal to accept the criticisms of the evidence, Durkheim replied, was itself a violation of the critical and individualist “religion” that was the very foundation of the republic. The nature of this modern individual who has become “sacred,” as well as that of his republican church, will concern me later. For now, it suffices to note that Durkheim’s modern religion leaves no room for fundamentalism; its individualism is critical and self-critical.
Another aspect of the religion of the modern individual is suggested by Max Weber’s study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber analyzes the genesis of an “inner-worldly asceticism” that is the basis of an activism whose results led to the modernization of traditional society. The strict doctrines of predestination and of the incomprehensibility of the grace to be accorded by a deus absconditus throw the individual into doubt, anguish, and the fear of eternal condemnation. Three implications follow, although the first, which will be important for the discussion later on, is only implicit in Weber. First, no sign permits an individual to know his destiny or that of other men. Hence Calvinism will have to give way to a religion of toleration that will give birth to a plurality of beliefs and practices. Second, a methodical behavior is meanwhile adopted, reflecting the will to act in this world in a way that is at least compatible with the Divine Will. This is a way to confront the doubt and fear, but it will become also the basis on which the “spirit” of capitalism—and only then its material reality—will arise. But, finally, the success of capitalism tends to destabilize the religious premises on which it was built. This explains Weber’s pessimism and his famous thesis concerning the “disenchantment of the world.” The inner-worldly asceticism that sought to avoid self-doubt by doing the will of God can begin to think of its success as a visible sign that it has been chosen. With that changed perspective, the taut springs of willful action begin to loosen, and the spirit cedes to the desires of the flesh.
Today, we seem to be living in the world that Weber foresaw and feared. An all-powerful economic logic has replaced the methodical rationalization of the Calvinist’s inner-worldly asceticism. Speaking of the United States, which he knew well, Weber described “a race for wealth stripped of its religious or ethical sense,” which has become a “sport.” And he concludes his study with the famous lines: “No one knows … whether at the end of this fantastic development there will arise new prophets or whether there will be a great renaissance of old ideas and ideals—or, instead of either of these possibilities, we will not undergo a mechanical petrification embellished by forms of behavior that take themselves too seriously.”4 Does this mean that rationalization—which for Weber coexists with the modern (and capitalist) world—ends with its own self-negation? In that case, the present return of the religious would be a kind of “charismatic” new beginning of a history that has become petrified. Such a reading would be compatible with Weber’s broad use of the term “charisma,” whose roots in the religious sphere spread across the different domains that he analyzes methodically in his masterwork Economy and Society. But it is also tempting to follow Weber’s later distinction, in “Politics as a Vocation,” between a politics of conviction—whose essence is in a sense religious—and a more secular and sober politics of responsibility. It is too soon to draw either conclusion—although we should recall that Weber himself predicted a “war of the gods” that no rationality can bring to an end.
ROOTS OF THE PRESENT RELIGIOUS RENEWAL
Leaving aside Durkheim for the moment, this brief recall of Weber’s sociology of religion points to one of the most innovative aspects of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. The American theologian Harvey Cox has recently published a new study, Fire from Heaven, that, together with his 1968 study The Secular City, which predicted an accelerating secularization of modern society, shows that the ambiguity seen by Weber is still present today.5 The new book’s subtitle explains its purpose: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Cox introduces the reader to the Pentecostal world by returning to two roughly contemporaneous events at the end of the nineteenth century whose social and religious signification reflect what I have presented as the Weberian dilemma. The first is the Great Colombian Exposition held at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, at which the organizers convened what they proudly called a “parliament” of all the world’s religions for a discussion of the foundations of their doctrines. The local newspapers could count on the religious literacy of their readers, so they could not help invoking the metaphor of a “pentecost” uniting the world’s “languages” and overcoming the division that resulted from the human hubris that dared construct the Tower of Babel. The results of the meeting, however, were simply formal, academic, and in a way even secular. The second event, in 1906, took place in an informal church that began meeting in a former stable in Los Angeles. Here, on Azusa Street, the Spirit seemed truly to descend on a gathering of simple and poor people of both sexes and all races. Whereas the meeting in Chicago was a formality, the spirit of the stable on Azusa Street gave birth to the Pentecostal movement, the religious denomination whose worldwide growth has surpassed that of all others. This is the theme of Harvey Cox’s exploration.
Without referring to Weber’s distinction between a church and a sect, Cox distinguishes fundamentalism, which fixes the identity of the faithful by recourse to a churchlike, formal, and written set of rules, from a Pentecostal experience that, like a sect, opens to a future based on hope. The two are radically opposed. Fundamentalists insist on doctrinal purity and attack modern forms of religion such as Bible criticism, scientific Darwinism, or the idea of a church that intervenes in society. Pentecostals refuse the coldness and formality of a church that has become foreign to the individual experience of religion while it consecrates established social divisions. The opposition, in a word, is between the letter and the spirit.6 It follows from this opposition that fundamentalism lends itself to a conservative reading of social-political life; in the United States, it yearns for the simple and believing country that formerly united homogeneous families in a moral and hard-working society.7 On the other hand, Pentecostals, moved by millenarian expectations, look to a future that will realize their hopes and whose arrival seems to be confirmed by the intensity of their own intimate religious experiences. This, concludes Harvey Cox, explains the attractiveness of Pentecostalism to the 87 percent of the world’s population who live beneath the threshold of poverty.8 It explains Cox’s own enthusiasm as well, but also his inability to understand the American manifestations of this new type of religious engagement.
Harvey Cox’s post-Weberian analysis points to the ambiguous role of religion in American political life. For him, fundamentalism would stand on the right, Pentecostalism on the left. But the United States proves to be the exception to the rule. That is why, after having offered his readers a guided tour across the Pentecostal world and shown how this new form of religion seems to incarnate a populist-democratic revolt capable of displacing the Marx-inspired theology of liberation, Harvey Cox returns to the United States. Here, he has to admit that his Pentecostals can also be drawn to reactionary politics, to megalomaniacal or paranoiac forms of nationalism, and to anti-Semitism and that they can be manipulated by false prophets using the mass media to create the illusion of a personal religious experience. The groups of whom he is speaking are called the “Third Wave.” They have invented a new theologico-political cosmology—what Cox, always academically à la mode, calls a new narrative—according to which, without being aware of it, Jimmy Carter, the Masonic Lodges, the Council on Foreign Relations, and even George H. W. Bush—in alliance with Wall Street and the Communist International—are doing the work of Lucifer while working for the creation of a “new world order.”9 At the end of his chapter, Cox admits to “truly regretting” what he has just described; he says he is “disillusioned,” “furious,” “exasperated,” and “truly fearful” for the future if such people are to come to power in the United States. His only consolation, he says, is that if such theories—or theologies—exist, they have taken root only in white society.10 In an America that has long been divided by the racial question, that is a rather meager consolation. I will return to it in a moment.
WHY POLITICS?
What needs to be explained first is the move from religion to politics. Doesn’t the Christian tradition (the doctrine of the two swords) teach us to render unto Caesar that which belongs to him? After all, these are people for whom the Bible is the Word of God and, in the case of the Pentecostals, people who stress the personal experience of the Spirit. Indeed, until quite recently, studies of electoral participation by all types of so-called fundamentalists showed that they tend to abstain from politics. What counts for them is the sacred, preparation for the other world, obedience to the divine commandments, as well as the humility of God’s creatures in this world. It might be thought that this new concern with politics can be explained as a sort of secularization of the Protestant spirit, analogous to Weber’s “inner-worldly asceticism.” These are people who are living a return of the religious while endowing their secular participation with a sacredness that confirms their faith despite (or sometimes because of) the frustrations that result from this secular and political practice. It is this latter fact that invalidates the analogy to Weber’s Calvinists who created the “spirit of capitalism” before its reality could be materialized. The new Christian concern with politics seeks to influence an already existing field of modern life.
It is tempting to fall back on an economic explanation that connects the new political-religious spirit to the long economic crisis that began in the wake of the oil shock of 1973 (and only seemed to end in the second Clinton term). A sociological account of the effects of this slow and now more rapid economic decline on the “little people” who are its victims could explain their resentment of an unleashed speculative spirit that has enriched the already wealthy. This would explain the narrative that sees a new world order emerging. The Luciferian hypothesis in turn would be confirmed by the fact that this new order emerged during the eight-year presidency of one of their own: Ronald Reagan. Recalling Harvey Cox’s “consolation” that this paranoid style seems to affect only whites, one could explain this as the result of lower-class whites thinking that the government is increasing their taxes in order to subsidize welfare for the needy whom they think—wrongly—are mainly minorities.11 As a result of this spectacle of the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of others, what are called social and moral questions come to play a political role. People say to themselves that at least in this domain they can make themselves heard, impose their values, feel that they are participating in society. And moreover the values they are defending are not relativist; they are the Word of God, immutable across the ages, beyond the tides of fortune.
Such a socioeconomic analysis is certainly not false, but it is incomplete. It doesn’t explain the phenomenon that concerns me here: the appearance of a politics based on religion. In effect, just as Weber’s “spirit of capitalism” cannot be explained in terms of an already existing capitalist economy, so too the politicization of religion cannot be explained by a political analysis of socioeconomic reality. That doesn’t mean that the analysis is irrelevant; it can serve to explain the use to which the politicization of religion is then put by private interests (who benefit disproportionately from the tax reductions won in the name of small government). But the problem with such reductionist demystification is that its results often reinforce the feeling of powerlessness and the resentment of victimization by forces too great to be mastered. Indeed, it is this feeling of powerlessness (that earlier analysts such as Hofstadter or Bell attributed to “status anxiety” in a modernizing world) that explains in part the cosmological political paranoia of the “Third Wave.” Its theologico-cosmological narrative confirms their conspiratorial theses and simultaneously reinforces their beliefs. This latter aspect seems specific to the new movements.
If one must render unto Caesar, one must also render unto God. Harvey Cox points to an important theological transformation: the shift from a premillinarian theology to a postmillinarian eschatology. The premillinarian theology assumed that the Last Days will be announced by a series of catastrophes that are the sign that Christ will return. In other words, Christ will return before the establishment of His Kingdom. This implies that there is no reason to be concerned with the secular and profane world. On the other hand, the postmillinarian theology assumes that justice will slowly but surely be established on earth and that this will prepare the return of Christ, who will sanctify a purified world. This version of the religious narrative encourages political engagement. The fact that this postmillinarian doctrine contradicts the Pentecostal appeal to immediate spiritual experience is ignored by Harvey Cox.12 Rather, he points to the biblical passage (Genesis 1:27) on which the postmillinarian thesis is based: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the face of the earth” (the italics are Cox’s, not the Bible’s, from which the passage is paraphrased). From the postmillinarian standpoint, this passage commands man to impose his law here and now upon everything in this world—institutions as well as those who refuse to obey the Divine Law. Only then will the earth be ready for the return of Christ; only then will the millennium come.
The practical consequences of this theological reorientation are illustrated by the decision of Pat Robertson—a candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1988—to shift his field of activity and rebaptize the university he had founded Regents University. A regent is someone who governs on earth during the absence of the true sovereign. The change of names is hardly benign.13 In his book, published in 1991 under the title The New World Order, Pat Robertson explains that “there will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?”14 This is the creed of the new fundamentalists, the truly politically correct of today.15 How can we understand what moves them? Why have they appeared specifically in the United States? To answer, one has to return to American history.
A VERY AMERICAN KIND OF POLITICS
The fact that Pat Robertson founded a university in order to propagate his faith is not an innovation in American history. Yale University was created by religious dissidents who believed that Harvard had given too much freedom to Unitarian temptations. A few years later, Princeton University owed its birth to a similar pattern; it was followed by Oberlin College in Ohio and a series of others throughout the nineteenth century. This phenomenon points to one of the crucial elements of American religion (and of religion in America): its relation to a sometimes confusing democratic vision that is at once individualist and populist. Fleeing European social hierarchies, Americans rejected the idea of an established church whose existence would consecrate a social elite.16 American denominational religions were (in Weber’s terminology) sects that maintain themselves by the unity of a belief whose questioning they forbid. One does not enter such sects ascriptively, by birth or inheritance, but from a free individual choice based on a private spiritual experience. But the very individual freedom that makes for the strength of the sect also explains its weakness. In order to maintain itself, it has to rationalize and fix its liturgy because individual faith cannot endure without the help of rules and institutions accepted by all. But sooner or later this makes the sect into what Weber called a church. At that point, the formal liturgy that replaces the experienced spiritual unity of the believers comes to be felt as a fetter; it not only justifies the domination of the letter over the spirit but also consecrates a social hierarchy that is resented by those in the lower ranks. Those at the bottom (in terms of their status in the group, not simply in economic terms) will tend to leave,17 to create or join a new sect that in its turn will eventually feel the necessity of dictating rules, rigidifying doctrines, closing itself off from the living sources of spirituality. Each sect appeals to the Bible, but each reserves to itself the right to interpret it according to its own lights—or its enthusiasms. And yet each of the new sects will consider biblical criticism and free debate a threat to the faithful.
This fissiparity of religion in the United States has often been pointed out. It is said to explain the exacerbated individualism of Americans as well as their populist antistatism. The particular form of American egalitarianism also has its source in the stress on the equal validity of the (spiritual) experience of each person. Hence the American goal is not the creation of a real equality but simply to ensure that each has the possibility of entering life’s race without pregiven handicaps. The populist anti-elitism that results from this attitude has a darker side. It is based on the idea that each person can—and therefore must—perfect himself … and that a person who is unable to do so is responsible for his own failure. More than that: such a person is condemnable for not having made sufficient efforts. Worse: he is the incarnation of immorality and does not merit either our compassion or our aid. After all, just as he was free to choose his denomination, so he is free to choose the path to salvation. (The only state aid that is considered legitimate on this account is that given to education, since each individual needs a minimal education in order to combat sinfulness, and everyone can benefit equally from such education—an attitude that helps explain the mediocrity of the precollege student in America, because the goal of education is not to create an elite but to educate the average citizen.)18
These characteristics explain why conservative politics in the United States is quite compatible with laissez-faire, deregulationist economics. After all, the rich man is considered to be a person just like me; I could find myself in his place tomorrow, for we do not live in a hierarchical or caste society. Hence there is no reason to sacrifice my interests for the common good, since the common good is nothing but private and individual liberty and equality interpreted in this very American manner. But this still does not explain why people with such attitudes should take part in politics. To understand that further step, it is necessary to look at what makes up the exceptional characteristics of American political life itself. While many criticize Americans for their denial of the importance of politics in their own national development, a closer look suggests that in its own way America is a deeply political nation. This is true not only of its founding moments or its republican-democratic institutions but also of the social experience that forms what Durkheim called an “elementary form” of religious life.
The ambivalent individualist and populist way of living religion in America affects what can be called the religion of America (which should not be equated with a banalized popular version of Rousseau’s notion of a “civil religion”). America was the first Protestant nation;19 it conceived of itself as a new Israel: Europe represented Egypt, America was the Promised Land. Or, varying the narrative themes, America is the return to paradise lost; its religion must thus be a sort of natural faith that cannot lose itself in the arcana of theory; all that is needed is a new trinity: to believe, to give witness to one’s good faith, to share an experience of common wealth (rather than of the artificial and formal government of the commonwealth). It follows that the independent United States itself would become a sort of sect whose sacred text is the Declaration of Independence.20 But that sect is peopled by individualist and egalitarian Protestants. Hence it is experienced as the incarnation of Good, which cannot be compromised in negotiations with Evil. That is why, as Seymour Martin Lipset notes, it is only in the United States that one can accuse a fellow citizen of disloyalty by calling him “un-American” (in France, for example, “un-French” is not used to suggest deviation from the nationally accepted norm).21 In effect, “America” represents a unique and unified experiential system of belief, a sort of living and lived ideology that one chooses in the same way that one chooses to enter into a denominational sect. One believes or one doesn’t: it is as simple as that. But, since belief expresses an act of will, it follows that evil is also the result of an act of will—of ill will—that has to be fought. And since the will is expressed by a yes or a no, everything that falls into the domain of the uncertain, the ambiguous, or the undetermined has to be rejected. The paradoxical result is that the populist and democratic individualism that was expressed in the plurality of sects becomes messianic: rigid, exclusive, and doctrinaire.
It is not necessary to stress the consequences of such a moralizing religiosity for domestic or foreign politics; the crusading spirit that from time to time takes hold of American political life is well known. The second volume of Democracy in America is rich with illustrations of this type of behavior, most strikingly in the chapter entitled “What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker than Others at the Beginning of a Campaign but more Formidable in Prolonged Warfare” (part 3, chap. 24). The resulting inability to take account of the role of accident, of human weakness, and of uncertainty is accompanied by a self-critical spirit founded on the perfectionist individualism that takes responsibility for the choice of salvation. That is why, significantly, as Seymour Martin Lipset notes, there have been movements opposing every American war.22
More important for my purposes is the fact that this American form of religiosity can explain the reason that the Pentecostal movement acquires a reactionary and paranoiac form in the United States. The American religion of the nation helps us understand the transition from pre- to postmillinarianism. If it is not to be arbitrary (or based on empirical accident), the explanation of such a transformation has to show the existence of a mediation that is present at the starting point as well as at the conclusion. In the present case, the individualist and egalitarian spirit manifested in the denominational life of American sects seeks to institutionalize virtue; in so doing, it makes religious passion into a kind of political morality. But the voluntarism that is inherent in the religiosity of the Protestant sects and the perfectionism that it presupposes and accentuates give a utopian orientation to that political morality by forbidding any compromise with Evil. In this way, the Pentecostal spirit in America is made into a new variant of fundamentalism. This explains the appearance here of all the reactionary elements that Harvey Cox thought the future-oriented Pentecostal spirit could avoid. The question now is whether this transformation is a new expression of what is called American Exceptionalism.
ON THE PROPER POLITICAL USE OF RELIGION
I stressed at the outset of these remarks that religion can lead to a right or a left orientation in politics and later demonstrated how the premillinarian orientation can also lead to an abstention from politics. What political role can religion play today? What role ought it to play?
Newt Gingrich was convinced that his liberal enemies had made politics into a secular religion; his riposte was the 1994 Contract with America that promised a return to the true values of the nation. On the other side of the spectrum, others tried to counter capitalism’s harshness with what Hillary Clinton espoused for a moment as a “politics of meaning,” while her husband preached the need for a “new Covenant”—in the biblical sense of the term—that he also called an “Alliance with the American Family.” American politics was reduced to the agitation of two sects incapable of communicating with one another. Politics was reduced to a choice of values.23 Such a politics of will is total and totalizing, as I have suggested. The politicization of religion leaves no room for politics—that is the weakness of fundamentalism, of whatever color and in whatever sphere of social life. It results only in sermons about political correctness that leave no place for the properly political work of seeking means to permit modern individuals to live together autonomously, without becoming dependent on the will of the others.
But fundamentalism exists, and in the United States its politicization is not accidental. Perhaps the question should be reformulated: what can this religious form of politics teach us about the political? This is where the double definition of the “elementary form” of religious life according to Durkheim becomes a useful analytic tool. With Durkheim, one must first distinguish the sacred from the profane and then go beyond individual belief to take into account the social and socialized practice of religion. As distinct from the sacred, the profane is not determined once and for all by the religious or moral will. This means that is is necessary to create conditions that make possible political deliberation about daily life. That is why I suggested earlier that—although he did not make the point explicitly—Weber’s Calvinists would necessarily have to become tolerant. If the sacred cannot be identified with the profane, the plurality of choices in society must be tolerated at the same time that the validity of each of them can be put into question because none of them can incarnate fully the sacred. No one can therefore claim to know the truth; each has only his own lived experience. But that experience has no meaning unless it is recognized, communicated, and shared; purely individual experience would lead to the paranoia that American historians like Hofstadter worried about. That is why Durkheim stressed the role of the church and recognized the political republic as its equivalent for modern individuals. But American social and cultural experience was not formed by the existence of a church; its basic experience was the denominational existence of the sects. Should one conclude that Durkheim’s vision of modern individualism makes sense only within the secular church that is the French type of (democratic) republic?
The role of religion in the civil rights movement in the United States suggests another possibility. The intervention of religion there adopted a unique political form. It was a nonviolent movement characterized by individual acts of witness. These acts expressed the strength of a belief and the choice of its individual expression in order to communicate with others and to bear witness before them. That expression took a specific form insofar as it sought to use instances of particular oppression to communicate a message that was universal and formulated in terms of rights. As opposed to the all-or-nothing politics of will engaged in by the fundamentalism of the religion of America, this was an attempt to communicate a form of judgment. Such a communication will be received only if it awakens in others a common experience; in other words, if it makes evident that each and all belong to a common church and share a common belief—a common sense. This communicational structure explains why Martin Luther King Jr. did not only appeal to an individual or moral faith but also to the Constitution of the church that America incarnates. This constitutional foundation of the civil rights movement made clear that it (as well as its allies who were seeking to create a new left) recognized that individual moral faith cannot survive without the public rights that ensure the difference of the sacred and the profane and guarantee in this way a principle of tolerance that contemporary fundamentalists who have turned to politics can neither accept nor even understand.
We can conclude that there are two fundamentalisms in the United States and that they represent a double threat: they can give rise to a political religion or to a religious politics, both of which are dangerous. A politsical religion would excommunicate some of its citizens from the shared political life; it would become rigid, dogmatic, and sclerotic. A religious politics would leave no room for individual choice; it would pursue the individual into the depths of private life, which would dry up as a result, becoming conformist, incapable of communicating.
This double threat cannot be avoided by a politics that ignores religion. Religion, like fundamentalism or Pentecostalism, is not just an illusion that can be debunked by materialist or positivist criticism. Weber has to be joined to Durkheim. Religion, as Durkheim knew, is only an expression of social life. Anyone who wants to better social life has to understand it in all its expressions. This means that fundamentalism in America can be avoided only if its two manifestations are avoided. This is what Weber understood: that, at least in the United States, an ethics of responsibility must be joined to an ethics of conviction in order to avoid the fundamentalist dead end that seems to be the only manner to avoid the “war of the gods” that he predicted and feared. Responsibility to the church that is America is only possible insofar as one accepts the egalitarian and antinomian individualism whose result is a critical spirit founded on the idea that no secular institution can pretend to possess once and for all the truth (and that the sacred, because it is sacred, remains beyond our ken). In the last resort, what was for Weber an antinomy—the ethics of conviction versus the ethics of responsibility—becomes, in the American (and Durkheimian) perspective, a complementarity. The vicious circle becomes a virtuous dialogue that enriches all participants and that cannot, in principle, ever be completed.24