The organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State, founded in 1947, declares that the “U.S. Constitution is a wholly secular document” in making the case that America is and always has been a secular nation. The authors of a new book not only refute this theory but set out to make the case that the religious character of the country is a feature, not a bug. Civil Religion and the Renewal of American Politics by two political science professors is a welcome entry into the ongoing debate about the nation’s religious character.
To be sure, Amy E. Black, who teaches at Wheaton, and Douglas Koopman, who teaches at Calvin College, also don’t believe America is a distinctly Christian nation, but they do acknowledge and commend the uniquely religious shape of our democracy.
While the Founding Fathers did not seek to create a national government that distinctly favored Christianity and codified its beliefs in law, Christian practices and ideals distinctly shaped ideas inherent in the Constitution and aspects of the government they designed. The Founders believed in the foundation of rule of law and the connection between law and morality. They expected that generally shared religious principles were essential to unify society and provide the underpinning for moral order and mutual accountability.
The book, a comprehensive historical and empirical analysis, is divided into three sections. The first covers religion in colonial America, the forming of the Constitution, and the outworking of religious freedom as the states began to move past established churches. This section isn’t intended to be a thorough analysis of these developments as compared to more book-length treatments by scholars such as Thomas Kidd, Mark David Hall, John Fea, and Gordon Wood. Still, the authors draw upon voices such as these to build their case for the unique tensions between what Tocqueville called “The spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion.” For example: “Although the Framers believed virtue was a necessary foundation for society, they did not trust humanity to always do what was right. They created governing institutions with the capacity for human sinfulness.” I believe Black and Koopman are correct in this assertion, as the Founders both desired the promotion of virtue and lauded the presence of religion, but it was the influence of Christianity that motivated them to separate powers and restrain the national government from violating the conscience.
The second and biggest section explores the ways religious expression has changed and grown throughout American history, beginning first with a detailed analysis of Protestantism and then working its way through the fits and starts of Catholicism’s place in our public life. Black and Koopman then analyze the emergence of minority religions, including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and more niche or sectarian religions, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is even a chapter on the rise of nonreligious cohorts and the difference between the so-called nones and the aggressively secular. These chapters might be the most valuable part of the book just for the thorough historical analysis. Readers will learn quite a bit about the emergence of a more religiously pluralistic America and the expansion of religious liberty that followed in its wake.
It is in the third section of Civil Religion and American Politics that the authors drill down on the specifics of what they’re advocating for. They begin first with an examination of divisions in America, pointing the finger at the loss of trust in institutions, declining religious fervor, the politicization of religion, and the way religious and social institutions have broken down along racial lines. Even here, they rely on empirical analysis and are open-handed toward disagreements about the best way to address these modern maladies. This sets readers up for a robust chapter on the manifold ways in which religion helps hold American society together and serves as a healing agent. “Religious engagement not only helps build social capital, but helps maintain it,” they write. “Social capital is not static.” The authors cite numerous studies that affirm this conclusion, including the billions of dollars spent in providing such social services as healthcare, poverty alleviation, addiction recovery, and education. The book distinguishes between more insular religious communities and those whose adherents do the work of social bridge-building. Some of the anecdotes and studies may provoke disagreement, including the so-called Utah compromise on religious liberty and gay marriage. To their credit, the authors also cite the critics of this arrangement in a fair way.
In bringing the book to a conclusion, it is made clear that Black and Koopman oppose both Christian nationalism and strict secularism in favor of a civil religion. What is enormously helpful and, one might add, courageous in the academic context in which they write is their substantive criticism of much of the discourse on Christian nationalism. “The current literature has weaknesses that complicate attempts to understand contemporary political dynamics. The widespread adoption of the label … is problematic.” For a book published by Cambridge University Press to express this is no small thing. Yet the authors do, rightly in my view, oppose the small but loud cohort of thinkers who advocate for an explicitly Christian state church to replace the current constitutional order.
The book also sees no place for the strict secularism, particularly in mid 20th century jurisprudence, that pushed religion, and I’d argue primarily Christianity, out of the public square. The book itself is an argument against the media cultural status quo that often sees religion as a strange curiosity at best or a danger to democracy at worst.
They argue instead for a broad public pluralism that sees religion as a necessary component for American democracy and a legal and social arrangement that allows Americans to continue to worship and practice their faith freely.
This they label “civil religion.” I would probably define the social arrangement differently. I see civil religion as the generic theism that nods to a transcendent deity in the Declaration of Independence, in the many statements of our civil and religious leaders (past and present), and in the “under God” terminology in our pledge and on our coins. The authors actually oppose the latter, believing it to be an imposition on nonreligious citizens, but I disagree and see these expressions as humble acknowledgments of history and reality. Moreover, the phrase serves as a warning to politicians who wish to see themselves as godlike. The Founders understood that our God-give rights come from somewhere. I would have liked a bit more exploration of the Richad John Neuhaus thesis that the public square isn’t ever neutral. There is a nod to this in the final chapter as they applaud a society where Americans bring their deeply held beliefs to the voting booth, to our social debates, and to the practice of making public policy.
These semantic differences notwithstanding, I commend this work not only for it’s thorough analysis of religion in America but also for its robust defense of both religious liberty and the social necessity of religion, recapturing what was undoubtedly a priority of the Founders.
