How is the Constitution Interpreted?

7/9/2009--The Netroots Nation convention is having a session on a progressive vision of church and state. Information about the session is elsewhere on this blog. But the first question a proposal for a new interpretation of any provision of the Constitution must answer is, how should the Constitution be interpreted?

Conservatives say that the way to interpret is through history and text. Anything else is “making up” the law rather than interpreting it. Conservatives do not always, or even usually, practice what they preach, (see giving constitutional rights to corporations or protecting advertising under free speech) but that is what they say.

Liberals usually oppose that kind of interpretive approach. If one followed it, women and gays would not be protected from discrimination. But in the area of establishment of religion, liberals change course and pretend that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed at the secular state.

So, at times, everybody pretends that the Constitution is not a matter of political struggle but has an eternal meaning. But that is not how our system has ever worked. Yet when that is pointed out, we act surprised.

Thus, listen to the description of a recent book about the Supreme Court’s decision making:

“Lucas A. Powe Jr. The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008

In this engaging--and disturbing--book, a leading historian of the Court reveals the close fit between its decisions and the nation's politics. ...Lucas Powe shows how virtually every major Supreme Court ruling,however deftly framed in constitutionally terms, suited the wishes of the most powerful politicians of the time.”

The above is how Powe’s publisher describes the book. But how could this information come as a surprise? Constitutional law is another form of politics. What else is new?

What is the Difference Really Between Believers and Nonbelievers?

7/8/2009--Much of our present political and legal disputes are premised on a divide between religion on the one hand and secularism on the other. But how well founded is this assumed division?

That is obviously an important question in the context of Hallowed Secularism, which, both in its book and blog forms, has a religious tone. That is why some secularists distrust it.

But religious believers are subject to the same pressures and assumptions that nonbelievers are. Listen, for example, to Chris Hedges, in Fred Clarkson’s book, Dispatches from the Religious Left:

“God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty. …The question is not whether God exists. The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence. God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty and goodness.”

Certainly there are issues here. For example, what does human life “transcend”? Or is transcendence built in, somehow? But if the secularist responds by saying, I can do all that without religion, she may be making a category mistake. Maybe doing all that is religion.

How Will the Children of Secularists Return to Religion?

7/4/2009—Happy Fourth of July, a day of rejoicing unless you are a native American.

This is a day to consider the words of the Declaration of Independence: “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. Secularists must come to terms with these words. They cannot be unconstitutional.

But I also want to address a story that appeared in the New York Times back on June 14, entitled, "A Child Turns to the Fold". The story tells of Ryan Sweeney, age 13, who suddenly started going to church, much to the surprise of his parents, and took his father with him, and later his mother too. Ryan’s father had been pretty religious once. His mother really not at all. Ryan had been raised without religion.

The story is a familiar one of children shaming their parents by being more serious about life than they are. It could have been about raising money for charity, but it was about going to church.

But what is this all about really? Ryan finds the sermons “pretty interesting”. But listen to the rest of his reasons for going: “Among the many reasons Ryan wanted to go: he’s a big reader, enjoys fantasy literature and has seen theories suggesting the world may end in 2013… . In that case, he said, it would be nice to be on good terms with God.”

Look, I’m not knocking a 13 year old. His thoughts are silly, naturally. But when is someone going to have a serious talk with him? And who is there who can have a serious talk with him?

I wanted my kids to engage ideas about God and religion while they were young. And I believe they did. I was always afraid, not that they would have no religion, but that they would have bad religion. Apparently that is what can happen when you raise a child, like Ryan, with no religion at all.

Divinity in a Secular World

7/2/2009—Last Sunday, June 28, in the New York Times book review section, Paul Bloom reviewed “The Evolution of God” by Robert Wright. Wright’s thesis is that the concept of God has evolved and changed over the millennia. Wright had previously told the story of a moral direction in human history, in “Nonzero” (2000). Now he tells that story in terms of the moral evolution of the concept of God, ever expanding in the circle of empathy.

This does not mean that God actually exists and Wright is careful to distinguish the concept of God from God. Wright does consider the question of God’s existence as well, however: “Wright tentatively explores another claim, that the history of religion actually affirms ‘the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity.’”

Wright comes to a provocative possibility: “he wonders why the universe is so constituted that moral progress takes place. ‘If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.’”

This God is not a being. Divinity would be the moral arc of the universe itself, bending toward justice, in the words of MLK, Jr.

Bloom says this is a minimalist God, not one that “anyone is looking for”. But this is not true. The idea that there is such a thing as moral progress, or moral backsliding, says that not every value is a personal opinion. That resolves the fundamental question of higher or natural law. Now we can say that genocide or slavery, or blowing up schools for girls is actually wrong and there is more to morality than self-interest. Now we secularists can stand as much for ultimate truth as any religious believer. What's minimalist about all that?

Bloom, apparently, has never really encountered the post-modern spirit.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs on Public Judaism

6/30/2009--Jill Jacobs has written an op-ed for Jewish Telegraphic Agency (http://jta.org/news/article/2009/06/30/1006223/op-ed-embracing-public-judaism) calling on Jews to enter more fully into public issues on expressly Jewish grounds: “religious traditions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam and others -- have much to say not only about social and cultural norms, but also about economic policy, equality and inequality, and interpersonal behavior. …In addition to pushing us to change laws in order to create a sustainable and just economic system, Judaism teaches specific laws aimed at guaranteeing that employers will not take unfair advantage of low-income workers, that landlords will not evict tenants without fair warning, and that the criminal justice system will preserve the dignity of both victims and perpetrators.”

Naturally, Rabbi Jacobs could not propose such an agenda without considering the separation of church and state. She acknowledges Jewish “attempts to protect ourselves from the intrusion of Christian practice into public institutions, have persuaded us that Judaism has no place in the public sphere.” But then she adds, “A powerful rejoinder to this view was offered up by the theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

‘We affirm the principle of separation of church and state,’ the rabbi wrote. ‘We reject the separation of religion and the human situation.’”

This sounds like trying to have it both ways. Religion is to be a strong influence but Christian symbols are nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless it is a step forward to a liberal Jew to acknowledge that religion must be on the street and not just in the home. This is more evidence that there cannot be a political wall of separation.

"Is Democracy Possible Here?"

6/28/2009--This is how Paul Starr, reviewing Ronald Dworkin’s book, Is Democracy Possible Here? in the New York Review of Books (7/16/2009), describes Dworkin’s thought about religion in public life:

“In discussing the role of religion in public life, he avoids any suggestion that conservatives are intolerant and instead identifies the central divide as a choice between conceiving of America as a "tolerant religious society" or as a "tolerant secular society." The first model views the nation as "collectively committed to the values of faith and worship, but with tolerance for religious minorities, including nonbelievers," while the second sees the nation as "committed to thoroughly secular government but with tolerance and accommodation for people of religious faith." From the first standpoint, though government cannot favor any particular religion, it can endorse religious belief in general by providing for ecumenical prayer in public schools, incorporating references to God in public ceremonies, oaths, and justifications of public decisions, and punishing practices such as homosexuality that the religious majority sees as violating God's will.

By contrast, the second standpoint insists, as Dworkin conceives it, on the principle of personal responsibility, which requires the state to afford individuals the ethical freedom to define value in their own lives. That requirement prevents the state from using its power to favor faith over nonbelief or to punish practices of a minority on the basis of religious convictions. He argues unequivocally that those who celebrate the traditions of marriage and family life should not deny the accumulated experience and benefits of those traditions to homosexuals who want to marry.”

There are two points to note here for our purposes. First, Dworkin is wrong, I hope, if he believes we must choose between the tolerant religious, or the tolerant secular society. We need a model that allows more common ground than that—tolerance is not such a ground. Second, Dworkin puts his rabbit in the hat if he suggests that the majority may not “punish” on the basis of religious belief. The majority in America has already agreed that gay sex may not be criminalized.

The question is whether policy can be made on the basis of religious belief. Certainly it seems that one should not do that—prohibit practices based on religious belief—when the question is whether to permit gay marriage. The matter would look very different, however, if the religious position were integration a la MLK, Jr., or universal healthcare or fairness to illegal immigrants. Now, suddenly, the objection that the majority is legislating religion rings hollow, in fact becomes unworkable. We cannot even say when our motives and purposes are religious or not.

No Political Wall of Separation

6/26/2009--With one exception, the controversy over the netroots nation panel for a new progressive vision of church and state comes as no surprise. After all, I am proposing a mixing of religious symbols and language in public life and that is precisely the kind of thing some secularists have been fighting for years. People who oppose my proposals do not even know that I am a secularist. Nor, by and large, have they read other secularists who are looking anew at religion for inspiration and social resources.

But the one suggestion I make that I did not anticipate would be controversial is that there is no such thing as a political separation of church and state. I mean by this that the motivation of a voter to support of oppose public policy is really irrelevant to the merits of that voter’s position. So, if a voter supports a carbon tax because God wants human beings to protect His Creation, that religious motive is not subject to criticism in and of itself. Obviously, the rest of us are unimpressed with this religious reason and we would not support a carbon tax because someone says this is God’s will. To convince the rest of us, the religious believer will have to speak our language. Nevertheless, the believer does not need our permission to vote in accordance with God’s will.

If you think about it, motivation has to be usually irrelevant in a political debate. A lot of people simply vote their own material self-interest. So, rich people often support lower taxes. Poor people often support more government services. But no one suggests that such a motivation is subject to some special limit. Maybe people should vote the common interest, but they often do not.

Of course some public policy positions are currently unconstitutional. If a Catholic wants to remove the right of choosing abortion, for example, that policy would be found unconstitutional. But the reason for that is not the religious motivation, but the substance of the policy being proposed. The same could be true of opposition to gay marriage if the federal courts were to find such a right.

To my surprise, I am hearing from some critics that it is a violation of the separation of church and state for voters to vote their religious convictions. This just cannot be true. For one thing, we often don’t even know why we support and oppose certain policies.

Does the Iranian Struggle Demonstrate that Religion and Democracy are Incompatible?

6/23/2009--Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a New York Times op-ed on Sunday that we are witnessing “two incompatible ideas” in irrevocable conflict: the idea that God’s would rule or that the people would rule. This, he writes, is the tension between theocracy and democracy.

But, as Gerecht acknowledges, these are only incompatible because of the structure in Iran of who decides what the will of God is. What makes Iran a theocracy is not that the will of God controls. What makes Iran a theocracy is that a group of clerics decides what the will of God is.

Imagine instead a country composed entirely of pious Muslims. Every person in this society agrees that the country must be run in accordance with the will of Allah. But they also believe that Allah speaks to every person and that two heads are better than one. So they conclude that whenever there is a dispute about what is to be done, about anything, the most reliable way to determine the will of Allah will be to vote.

Is such a country a theocracy? No. It is a democracy.

Democracy means, with some rough edges, that we vote about what should be done. Therefore, if some religious Americans vote against abortion or gay marriage because God tells them to, this is democracy, not theocracy.

Iran is experiencing the tension between dictatorship and democracy, not between religion and democracy.

"Netroots Nation Dives into Inanity."

6/21/2009--The above quote is from science blogger PZ Myers describing the panel I will be participating in at the August convention in Pittsburgh: A New Progressive Vision for Church and State: How I Learned to Accept “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and Stop Losing Elections. When Fred Clarkson, the well-known journalist and author announced that he was participating, the proposal for the subject got attention. Fred, who was candid with me in indicating he was participating primarily to voice objections (other participants are as well), has posted some of the controversy on the Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/19/744453/-PrePie-fighting-Netroots-Nation

None of this comes as any surprise to me. I just hope people will remember two things. First, the words “under God” are in the Pledge of Allegiance. I did not put them there. No court will take them out. No national politician will support taking the words out. If you think gun control is a losing issue, or legalization of marijuana, or gay marriage, try drumming up support for taking on God.

I am proposing a reinterpretation of religious language in which “God” stands as a symbol for a quite naturalistic understanding of reality and the Ten Commandments stands as the promise of universal human rights. The issue for me is relativism and nihilism, which I oppose, but which many secularists also oppose. To put this another way, why isn’t the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional? Answer, because grounding human rights in a Creator is a political assertion about rights, not a theological assertion about a Creator-God.

Second, for all the controversy, secularists have to be able to live actual lives. This means thinking about the very same things that religious believers think about. I tried to capture that in my book, Hallowed Secularism. Reverence is a human term, not a religious one.

More on the Church and State Panel at the Netroots Convention in Pittsburgh in August

6/16/2009--The moderator for the panel will be Chuck Freeman of Soul Talk Radio. The panelists are: Frederick Clarkson, well-known journalist, left wing religious thinker and author of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America, Ig Publishing, October 2008, Kyoki Roberts of the Zen Center of Pittsburgh and Vic Walczak, Legal Director of the Pennsylvania ACLU.

It is pretty much a certainty that none of them will agree with the proposal for the future of church and state that I am making. But, everyone must answer the following question: are the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance constitutional? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said “no” in 2003. The Supreme Court reversed without reaching the merits of the issue.

What is the progressive vision here? Thom Hartmann once said to me on his radio show, well the Pledge is just symbolic. That suggests that we progressives think the Pledge is unconstitutional but it’s not important enough to take the political heat of doing anything about it.

That is what progressives said about gun control and look where we are now. At some point we have to come clean and fight for our vision of the future. My future vision of church and state sees a secularism comfortable with religious imagery. So, to me, the Pledge is ok.

Pens Win

6/13/2009--Does this mean there is a God, after all?

The Sixth Wind

6/11/2009--The cover story of World’s Magazine’s current issue raises the question of the decline of Christianity in the United States—“Is Christianity in the U.S. doomed?” One aspect of that story is an essay by the publisher Marvin Olasky entitled “The Sixth Wind?”

Olasky makes several points about reports such as the American Religious Identification Survey to which I have often referred. First, almost all of the decrease in Christian identification and increase in nonreligious identification took place between 1990-2001. There has been little change since then. Second, nonreligiously identified people often report that they believe in God and that religion is important to them. Third, nonreligion turns out to be unstable. The children of the nonreligious turn to religion at a greater rate than the children of the religious turn away.

But Olasky is more interested in kinds of religious belief—he calls it quality—rather than in numbers per se. What may be happening is that nominal Christians, or nominal religious believers generally, are now more honest with pollsters than they had been in the past. There is perhaps a polarization: people who don’t care about religion now are willing to say so, whereas serious religious belief is on the increase.

All of this is intriguing and we should all ponder Olasky’s views. On the other hand, Olasky had lunch with the authors of God is Back, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge and he gets part of his message from them. In doing this, Olasky is playing a dangerous game and he knows it. Micklethwait and Wooldridge are employed by The Economist magazine and it shows. God is Back is pure individualist capitalism, with God playing the part of the item to be consumed and the believer the part of the customer. There is no real religion there. Olasky would be better off with atheism. At least atheism does not defile the name of God.

Netroots Nation National Convention in Pittsburgh in August

6/8/2009--Netroots Nation has recently announced that one of the panels at this year’s convention will concern the relationship of Church and state: A New Progressive Vision for Church and State: How I Learned to Accept "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and Stop Losing Elections.

Here is the description of the session: The progressive vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. President Obama welcomed both believers and nonbelievers into his campaign and inauguration. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible. A new approach is needed and would have two parts. It would admit that there is no political wall of separation. Thus, voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. The other side, however, is that when government speaks and acts, messages must be universal. The burden is on religious believers, therefore, to explain public references such as "under God" or Ten Commandments monuments in universal terms. For example, the word God can refer to the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal would help heal culture-war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition.

I will be leading the session with mostly critical voices from the progressive movement to critique. Details on date and time will follow, but the convention is August 13-15.

Barack Obama: Theologian-in-Chief

6/5/2009--What a great speech in Cairo. Subtle. Elegant. Hopeful. But did you notice how religious it was? God wants the children of Abraham to live in peace together in his holy city Jerusalem. You would expect that from the Pope. If George Bush had delivered that speech, secularists would be all over him. Why will they give President Obama a pass?

Several reasons. First, we are partisans and he is our guy. Second, the Muslim world is religion saturated. A speech to that world to be effective must be religious in tone. Third, we don’t believe Obama really is religious. He appreciates religion, calls himself a Christian and his appreciation of Islam was on display. But he isn’t run by some primitive version of the Bible, as we thought Bush was. (Probably wrongly).

Now you see the importance of hallowed secularism, for that is what we think Obama actually is. At the very least, to talk to the world, secularism must retain a taste for the infinite.

Who is Responsible for the Murder of Dr. George Tiller?

6/2/2009--Are the pro-life activists who called Dr. Tiller a mass-murderer responsible for his death? This is an old question. It was the same question raised in the 1960’s when some anti-war activists turned to violence to oppose U.S. policies in Vietnam. Was the anti-war movement and its rhetoric to blame for the violence and death?

As a member of the anti-war movement at the time, I remember thinking that US policy was responsible for the protests and violence, not the anti-war movement. Now, as someone who is pro-life, I cannot say that Roe v. Wade is responsible for this violence and the other acts of violence against doctors and medical personnel. For without that judicial decision, America would still have permissive abortion laws. They would simply have been passed democratically.

Yet, I don’t see how a person who believes that life begins at conception can avoid calling a doctor performing abortions a murderer, or something similar. So, no, I don’t think pro-life rhetoric is responsible for this criminal act. On the other hand, there is a fringe element in the pro-life movement that winks at code words for violence. There is a grievous fault there that I keep waiting for other pro-life persons to denounce.

What about the nonviolent civil disobedience that the pro-life movement practices constantly? Does this set a precedent for law violation that includes acts of murder? That I totally reject. It would be like blaming sit-ins in the civil rights movement for the riots that later rent American cities. Nonviolent civil disobedience is an honorable and public act of conscience. It is the opposite from gunning down a doctor.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Judicial Activism

5/27/2009--It is tiresome to hear conservatives instantly trot out the script of judicial activism in attacking the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. The issue of the balance between judicial decision and decision by elected officials is obviously important, but it cannot be decided by slogans.

When conservatives say judicial activism, they are referring almost exclusively to abortion rights and the possibility that the United States Supreme Court might recognize gay marriage as a fundamental right. But consider instead the right to bear arms. When in 2008 the Court recognized a personal right to bear arms that the federal courts had rejected for over 200 years, conservatives did not call this judicial activism. They called it a belated recognition of constitutional rights.

The same can be said for the constitutional rights of corporations and free speech protection for advertising, both of which would have seemed lunacy to the framers of the Constitution. I could also add constitutional protections against regulation of property under the Takings Clause. All of these are rights of capitalism against democracy. All are supported by conservatives. All are policy crafted by judges.

Then there are the powers of Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce individual’s constitutional rights. But when Congress does so, the Court second guesses these decisions, usually in the name of state rights. Conservatives support this also.

All of this is policy made by federal judges. Maybe it is all inescapable. But it is all activism.

President Barack Obama’s Criteria for Justice of the Supreme Court

5/24/2009--When President Obama describes his criteria for a Supreme Court nominee, he is also describing his understanding of the role of a Justice and of the Court. This is how the New York Times today described President Obama’s criteria.

• President Obama, who has often cited intellect and empathy as qualities he wants in a Supreme Court nominee, said in a television interview broadcast Saturday that he was also looking for “somebody who has common sense and somebody who has a sense of how American society works and how the American people live.”

In the interview, the president, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago before coming to Washington, suggested that he prized real-world experience and a common touch as much as scholarly thought in seeking a successor to Justice David H. Souter, who is retiring.

“What I want is not just ivory tower learning,” Mr. Obama told Steve Scully, the C-Span political editor, who conducted the interview on Friday in the White House library. “I want somebody who has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and has a practical sense of how the world works.”


Now contrast this description with what a Justice Scalia would say should be criteria for a judge—technical legal skills such an analysis of precedent and history. A feel for the country would not be Justice Scalia's main interest.

How would a liberal theorist describe the needed qualities? Ronald Dworkin did this recently in the New Review of Books. He wrote of interpretation of the Constitution as a moral theory.

President Obama’s approach, in contrast, seems to envision the Court as a part of a democratic government, with some responsibility for democratic legitimacy. Plenty of people would see that as a threat to minority rights, if they took President Obama seriously. Perhaps they do not. But I am beginning to think that he means it.

Tom Krattenmaker on the Rights of Religious Students at High School Graduations

5/21/2009--Tom Krattenmaker, who has been doing a lot of interesting religion work in the USA Today “On Religion” column, wrote a piece earlier this week on the religious rights of High School Valedictorian Brittany McComb. A few years ago, her microphone was turned off when she began to speak about the virtues of her Christian faith in her graduation speech. Her case is working its way to the Supreme Court.

Krattenmaker’s point is that we should all be a little more tolerant of student references like these. The secularist should understand that “for many believers, experiencing momentous events like graduation without gratitude and witness to God is as distasteful as it is for an atheist to be subjected to hard-edged proselytizing.”

I disagree with Krattenmaker about this, but in an unusual way. In American Religious Democracy, I argued that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the separation of church and state is the reason we have this problem of religious student speech. It used to be that adult educators could simply tell students that too much religious speech is inappropriate for a mixed audience and, at the same time, that the religious need that Krattenmaker notes was satisfied in a general, nonsectarian prayer before and after the graduation. These general prayers were much less offensive to anybody than the "come to Jesus” student speech we get now.

The United States Supreme Court struck down nonsectarian prayer at high school graduations in Lee v. Weisman in 1992. But the Court did not remove religion from graduations, since the religious instinct is still there. The Court only removed a more universal language along with adult supervision.

The caselaw is a mess because in general the rights of student speech are in decline. But because of a judicial intuition that religion is different, student speech here is more protected.

The proper approach is to recognize and allow a form of prayer at public occasions that is genuinely shared because it is capable of reinterpretation along secular lines. Beyond that, students could be given guidelines so that their graduation talks are appropriate for mixed secular and religious audiences. As usual, the law is the problem.

For the Establishment of Religion

5/19/2009--While my manuscript For the Establishment of Religion is still being considered by publishers, I can introduce readers here to its essential argument: Government should be permitted to endorse a set of related ideas that constitute the common core of all the world’s religions as well as the common core of the beliefs of most secularists. These ideas include the objectivity of values and the meaningfulness of history.

These ideas are by no means universally held. They are opposed by materialists, humanists, relativists and nihilists. Government should be allowed to disagree with these persons and to say so.

The above position is not actually controversial. The book goes on to argue, however, that in endorsing these ideas Government should be allowed to utilize traditional religious imagery and symbols. These religious objects and phrases are used not to endorse religion but to endorse these ideas.

This proposal is highly controversial. So I want to illustrate here how it works. Here is the opening of the Introduction by Professor Robert F. Cochran, Jr., to the just-published Pepperdine Law Review symposium issue, Is There a Higher Law? Does it Matter?

“When I was a law student at the University of Virginia in the mid-1970’s, my jurisprudence professor Calvin Woodward used the law school’s architecture to illustrate the twentieth century’s major jurisprudential shift. Above the columns at the entrance to Clark Hall, where I spent my first year of law school, carved in stone was the statement: ‘That those alone may be servants of the law who labor with learning, courage, and devotion to preserve liberty and promote justice.’
From the front, we walked into a massive entry hall, adorned on either side with murals. On one side was Moses presenting the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. On the other was what appeared to be a debate in a Greek public square. As we gazed up at the larger-than-life figures, they seemed to represent the higher aspirations of the law.”

The rest of Professor Cochran’s Introduction makes it clear that the essence of the jurisprudential change was skepticism or relativism concerning justice and related notions. Simply put, the authors of the entryway believed that justice was real. Many in the legal academy no longer do.

The reader can see that the University of Virginia endorsed the view that justice is real, and not just a temporary invention, and used two scenes—one religious one secular—to illustrate this commitment. The Ten Commandments scene was not meant to endorse the particular theology of the Old Testament, but to make a point about values that sidestepped revelation.

I claim in my book that government in general may do what the University of Virginia did here.

Confusion Over America’s Spiritual Heritage

5/17/2009--The American Center for Law & Justice, which supports religion in American public life, sent out the following message last week:

“It's clear that President Obama - through his actions and his words - is a strict church/state separationist.

Thankfully, there's a strong move taking place on Capitol Hill to refute this troubling denial by President Obama and preserve America's Judeo-Christian heritage.

Give generously to support the ACLJ's nationwide campaign to defend - and protect -America's Judeo-Christian heritage!

Congressman Randy Forbes has put forward a phenomenal resolution called 'America's Spiritual Heritage Resolution’(H.R. 397).

In essence, the resolution outlines the progression of faith and freedom in our country - from its very inception - and supports the designation of the first week in May as ‘America's Spiritual Heritage Week.’

Without a doubt, there's reliance upon the Lord in our country, and we must recognize and respect our rich religious heritage.

As Rep. Forbes (VA) said, ‘If in fact we WERE a Judeo-Christian nation, at what point in time did we CEASE being one?’”

This message illustrates an important confusion about church and state among certain religious conservatives. First, yes, America has a spiritual heritage among its people and leaders. Christians built this nation. No reason not to celebrate that.

But, no, America was never a Judeo-Christian nation. Because of the Establishment Clause, America was never officially Christian or Judeo-Christian.

As to when we ceased to be a Judeo-Christian nation in the first sense that most people in America have been Jews or Christians, we are still that, but now the number is down to 78% Christians and Jews and likely to fall further.

The problem with the Resolution is that it seeks to imply that Judaism and Christianity are true. The government cannot do that.

What the Resolution could well celebrate is that certain founding principles of this nation, such as universal human rights, are built upon Judeo-Christian foundations. They are and we can celebrate that. We can celebrate that, however, without being Christians or Jews or suggesting that those religions are true.

Was Darwin a Darwinist?

5/15/2009--Well, of course he was. But what kind of Darwinist? For a Daniel Dennett or a Richard Dawkins, evolution is based on chance. This suggests a blind, indifferent universe. Ultimately, then, existence might be thought to be without meaning. Or at least that is the sense they give me. I remember Dennett crowing in March in NYC, "What you are, your presumed self, is actually an alliance of machines in your brain."

Darwin may not have been a Darwinist of that sort. Here is the last paragraph of Darwin’s masterpiece, Of the Origin of the Species:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

There is nothing in this description to demoralize one’s hope that existence might be grand and beautiful. And for that matter that there might be a point of evolving “the higher animals.” Such a general direction might reflect something more than chance. I don’t mean the will of God, but perhaps a tendency built into matter toward consciousness. Anyway, the question of direction, purpose and meaning would have to be left open.

How Religion Dies and Secularism Takes Hold

5/11/2009--The following news story was recently sent to me:


JAKARTA, Indonesia — The secular party of Indonesia’s president tripled its share of the vote in parliamentary elections as support for religious parties nose-dived in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
After years of unpopular laws pushed through by religious hard-liners, regulating women’s dress and banning everything from smoking to yoga, even devout Muslims in Indonesia say they have had enough with religion in politics.


What we learn from this story is how support for the separation of church and state arises, as well as how a people falls away from its religious roots. When religion tries to control political life, and when religion instigates conflict, eventually it is religion that falls into disrespect. This is what happened in Europe sometime after the Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Religion itself was delegitimized.

Something similar may be happening today in Indonesia. Perhaps if America and Israel had not been so hasty in refusing to recognize the democratic success of Hamas, something similar might today be happening among the Palestinians.

People today see a resurgence in religion and they assume that this means that secularism is not growing. On the contrary, nothing promotes secularism like religious rule and religious conflict.

The Pope's Visit to Jordan

5/9/2009--The media reported today on Pope Benedict’s visit to Jordan. The headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette read “Pope Expresses Respect for Islam on Mideast Trip.” The subtext was that the Pope would be more careful about what he said concerning Islam after his 2006 remarks seeming to criticize Islam for its willingness to spread its faith by the sword led to outrage and even violence.

I think the media have a hard time understanding Pope Benedict. My impression from reading two of his works before becoming Pope, Truth and Tolerance and Many Religions-One Covenant, is that Pope Benedict does not have to watch what he says. His respect for Islam, and for that matter all the World Religions, is quite sincere. On the other hand, he believes that the revelation of God reached its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Naturally, therefore, he also sincerely criticizes the limitations of any way of life, Muslim or secular, that lacks a connection to Christ. He is not criticizing them for not recognizing Christ, but for the errors in understanding the nature of God (or ultimate reality) that flow from the failure to come to full relationship with Christ.

I am certain that Benedict has never waivered from his refusal to judge the ultimate truth of any religion for salvation. He has called that “a question that can in fact be decided only by him who shall judge the world… .” (Truth, 18). Of course that does not reduce his commitment to truth in the Catholic understanding of Christ, but it does prohibit his viewing himself as arbiter of the World Religions.

Judicial Pragmatism and Justice Souter's Replacement

5/6/2009--There was a very revealing quote attributed to “former colleagues and students” at the University of Chicago in the New York Times article by Jodi Kantor last Sunday that discussed President Obama's possible choice for the Supreme Court. Kantor wrote, “Mr. Obama believes the court must never get too far ahead of or behind public sentiment… .”

This sentiment is called “pragmatic” in the article and I guess it could be considered that. The context of the article was selecting the next nominee for the Supreme Court and President Obama might be signaling that his choice will not be very controversial.

But there is also here a theory of constitutional interpretation at work and it is not one I thought Obama shared. It is the understanding that the people own the Constitution. Their understanding of what the Constitution means is ultimately the proper standard by which to judge decisions of the courts.

This view, an organic view of the role of the courts, is not today accepted by either the left or the right. From the point of view of a Justice Scalia, the role of the courts is to interpret constitutional language in terms of its original language (that is what he claims; he does not always do this and rarely explains why not). From the point of view of the left, the role of the courts might be said to be the protection of fundamental rights more or less independent of history.

We can see the different approaches at work in the realm of gay marriage. The conservative says that Equal Protection did not include gays when it was adopted (thus ignoring the question of why it now protects women). The liberal says that marriage is a fundamental right and gays should constitute a protected class. The organic constitutionalist asks whether America is ready for an immediate national solution to the issue of gay marriage, and answers, no.

Justice Souter’s Replacement and the Future of the Establishment Clause

5/3/2009--The current Supreme Court majority on matters of Church and State consists of Chief Justice John Roberts (age 54), and Justices Antonin Scalia (73), Anthony Kennedy (72), Clarence Thomas (60), and Samuel Alito (59). This majority can even be joined by Justice Stephen Breyer, as it was in upholding a public Ten Commandments display in Texas in 2005.

This majority is doctrinally incoherent but chronologically stable. It is going to uphold most instances of public religious symbols and it is going to uphold vouchers for private schools. It is not going to advance Establishment Clause doctrine, by which I mean that it is not going to tell us why religion and politics can be mixed, and it is not going to let government go overboard in endorsing religion. Prayer, for example, will not return to public schools.

As you can tell by their ages, this majority is probably not going away any time soon. Justice Kennedy might retire before the end of President Obama’s second term, or might pass away, but Justice Scalia would presumably like to be replaced by a more conservative President. In any event, there will not be any immediate change.

It is in this light that one must evaluate President Obama’s first choice of Supreme Court Justice. He can change the dynamics on the Court by choosing a more ideological Justice than was David Souter, but he cannot move the Court to the left—in this case meaning toward a more stringent separation of Church and State—by replacing Justice Souter with a younger but comparable version of himself.

This suggests that the Court will stay away from religion cases for now, no mater whom President Obama selects.

The Growth of Secularism

4/29/2009--First, it was ARIS with its 15% statistic on the nonreligious in America. Then it was Newsweek, with its End of Christian America. Now, the New York Times on Monday, 4/27 and ReligionDispatches on 4/28, continue the growth of secularism story: Laurie Goldstein, More Atheists Shout it From the Rooftops and Ronald Aronson, 40 Million Nonbelievers in America? Aronson is the author of Living Without God.

The main point is that Americans must get used to thinking of secularists as a potential majority, not as a beleaguered minority. That will take some years, of course, but some readers will live to see it.

What does secularism need in order to form a flourishing human civilization? If not religion, what will be the framework of meaningfulness? The answer to that question is not so obvious.

Religious Revival?

4/26/2009--Hanna Rosin reports in the NY Times Book Review section today on the religious revival taking place in the world, in her review of the book, God is Back, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The book and the review are part of the large literature claiming that the secularization thesis has been discredited. Modernization does not bring increasing secularization, as had been thought. Europe is the exception. America is the new norm.

Well, as readers of this blog know, these reports now appear to have been premature. The world is certainly very religious and more religious probably than 25 years ago. But secularization is rapidly growing in America, now constituting 15% of the public and even a higher percentage among the young. It turns out that science really does undermine at least a certain kind of religion, that dependent on miracle and the supernatural.

People can be misled by the growth of religious wars and tensions into thinking that religion is stronger than it is. It should be remembered that the religious wars of the 17th Century presaged an enormous growth in secularism. The same thing may happen again, and relatively soon. It would not surprise me if the current, hate-filled interpretation of Islam that is being presented to the world by a small Muslim minority ends up discrediting Islam itself. If that happens, young Muslims might turn away from religion and create the kind of secular Islamic culture that is largely absent in the world today.

Why Do We Need Religion?

4/21/2009--The fundamental claim of Hallowed Secularism is that our rapidly growing secular culture will require continuing contact with religion in order to sustain flourishing human civilization. This claim elicits disdain among some secularists. Why do we need religion, they repeatedly ask.

I am slowly working on vocabulary to illustrate the need for religion to secularists who have both a truncated and unrealistic idea of what religion is and a seemingly naïve view of what it takes to sustain culture. It is not easy.

In this entry, let me concentrate on the relativism of values. In American Babylon, the late Richard John Neuhaus attacked the thinking of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty who argued that we make up morality and that there is no way to privilege one citizen’s first principles over any others (quote from Charles Morris’ review in New York Times). Neuhaus argued not so much from scripture as from the natural law tradition that values are real.

While the Rorty position extolling irony is defensible in itself, Rorty apparently understood that one could not really raise children with his viewpoint. It would quickly undermine a society’s morale.

But aside from that problem, genuine relativism is not what we mean when we say something is right or wrong. We don’t mean right or wrong from a certain point of view, but really right or wrong.

Since we are all going to die and since the universe itself will end and since there is no God to redeem all this, there is a troubling question of why I should bother to do good when doing so does not suit me and does not benefit me. My answer to this is that a good deed enables me to participate in eternity. A single good deed is so true that its truth somehow will outlast the universe itself.

It is obvious that I learned to see things this way from my religious upbringing. And it also obvious, at least to me, that it is good for a society that it members have this feeling. Religion instills it. It is called the pull of the absolute.

America is not a Christian Nation

4/17/2009--President Barak Obama stirred up controversy by his statement at a news conference in Turkey that America is not a Christian nation. On one level, controversy over this statement makes no sense. Whatever the Establishment Clause means, it certainly means that much. There is not one vote on the Supreme Court today that would allow Congress to declare that we are one nation “under Christ”. Every Justice at one time or another has declared a willingness to prohibit sectarian symbols sponsored by government. So, why the controversy?

Of course America is a Christian country in absolute numbers and in its history. Most Americans are Christians and despite growing secularization and religious pluralism, that is going to remain true for quite some time. Our national habits of mind, such as our exceptionalism and our desire to save the world, are gifts of our Protestant heritage. But still, we are not a Christian nation in any official sense.

Religious conservatives don’t really believe that Obama’s statement is untrue. Most such persons—Justice Scalia is a perfect example—would say we are a Judeo-Christian nation or perhaps a monotheistic nation. Even if that extension strikes the secularist as arbitrary, it still does not make us a Christian nation. So, Obama’s statement is still accurate.

I think what is bothering some religious people, or at least some of those I speak with, is the sense that there are only two choices open to us as a nation. Either we are a Christian nation or we are a nation of materialism, post-modern humanism and nihilism. I don’t mean to use those words as smears. I mean to identify some very specific habits of mind. The late Richard Rorty fits here. So does Christopher Hitchens. And many secularists are guilty of supposing that government may not only not establish religion but may not oppose these philosophic positions either.

My argument in the manuscript I have not yet found a publisher for is that government may indeed oppose these schools of thought and should do so. Government may endorse the objectivity of values. I even go further and suggest that government may use some traditional religious symbols in doing so. Given that reassurance, many people can accept that we are not a Christian nation.

What Can the Courts Do About Gay Marriage?

4/16/2009--I wrote an entry on The Huffington Post yesterday concerning the routes taken by Vermont and Iowa to legalize gay marriage. I praised the legislature in Vermont and criticized the State Supreme Court in Iowa, although they got to similar results. I suggested that the result in Iowa might bring conservative politicians and the Republican Party back into power. This criticism is part of my general view that courts should not attempt to resolve social issues until something of a consensus begins to emerge among the public.

The comments in Huffington suggested that I am willing to sacrifice the interests of gay people to other progressive causes. I can see how people might get that impression. So, I want to say here what I may have left out there: it is not just that courts should not impose views contrary to that of settled majorities in the nation, but that they cannot. Such judicial efforts will fail.

We see this in America already in that some 30 states have now placed barriers to legislative pro-gay reforms in either the State Constitution or the statute book. Many of these efforts pointed to legalization by court decision as a reason to remove gay marriage from ordinary politics, where it belongs. In Iowa itself, the court decision may be reversed by a constitutional convention, which is an effort the Democratic legislature cannot block. Such conventions are very unpredictable. I’m not sure anybody will be happy with that result should it occur.

I am not the first to cast doubt on the heroic thesis that the courts can change fundamental political outcomes. The political scientist Robert Dahl made the same argument in the 1950’s. The courts are not all-powerful in a democracy, nor should they be.

Courts can only lead. This means in regard to gay marriage, like other controversial decisions, that such decisions will be lasting if they are ultimately persuasive. I see little evidence that judges even appreciate that aspect of their roles. Courts are a part of political change, not something apart from it.

The Victory Over Death

4/12/2009--Happy Easter to any Christian readers of this blog. Certainly, the Christian claim of victory over death is the key difference between Christianity and secularism. That claim has two aspects. One is the promise of an after-life in heaven. Surprisingly, this is clearly not what the early church thought Easter symbolized. Easter represented the preview of Christ’s second coming when the faithful would all be resurrected, as Jesus had been. His resurrection had been the “first fruit” of the promise, as Paul put it.

This early church understanding reflected the Jewish foundation of Christianity. By the time of Jesus’ birth, many Jews had begun to expect a Messiah and an end time in which God would bring resurrection to the dead. But the Jewish understanding of heaven had not been worked out (indeed it never has really been worked out in Judaism).

There are Christian writers, or writers out of a Christian perspective, such as Peter Berger, for whom this ultimate promise of victory over death is the crucial difference between the believer and the nonbeliever. But I wonder if this is true. If, as I expect, the West becomes ever more secular in orientation, this change may be reflected in an insistence that the natural laws of the universe are invariant. One of those laws is that life if physically based. There cannot be a heaven because our personalities are a part of the physical world. There is no Bruce Ledewitz without the body of Bruce Ledewitz. Thus, there cannot be a continuation of personality after death. This physicality rules out resurrection as well.

If this view begins to infect even Christian believers, a kind of secular Christianity may begin to emerge. Indeed, such a Christianity may not even be distinguishable from Hallowed Secularism.

The Hard Secular Mindset

4/9/2009--I have now had the experience several times of blogging on The Huffington Post and receiving a substantial number of the same kind of response—what I will call for now the hard secular response. I think these responses are revealing of a certain type of secular mindset. I don’t mean to suggest that the views expressed are defective. I don’t agree with them, but my point here is to begin to think about them as a place where some, maybe many, secularists are now.

The starting point for hard secularism is that religion is superstition and that nonreligion is scientific or evidence based. In other words, religion is a total negative. This is the Christopher Hitchens’ view. Obviously, people who feel this way have no use for my premise in Hallowed Secularism that secularism needs religion in some way.

What is odd to me about this view is that it seems to find human life self-evident. I used as an example in the blog Daniel Dennett’s statement that people don’t need religion to be good. I suggested that our religions don’t claim that they make people good. They mostly, especially Christianity, emphasize that people are not good and that they need help. I stated that this is the more realistic view.

Most of the commentators, however, agreed with Dennett. People are mostly fine. I find this hard to believe given recent human history.

Religion is also much more scientific than the hard secular mindset wants to admit. But more of that later.

No Constitutional Right to Shoot Police Officers

4/6/2009--Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller (2008), recognizing a right to possess a gun in one’s home for purposes of lawful self-defense, had little to do with the paranoid rhetoric that led to the horrific shooting of three police officers in Pittsburgh last Saturday. The shooter, Richard Poplawski, apparently subscribed to hate group websites, denounced Blacks, Latinos and Jews, and fanaticized about President Obama taking away his gun rights. Poplawski was heavily armed and protected by a bullet-proof vest when he gunned down the three unsuspecting officers. After some hours, Poplawski, lacking the courage of his announced commitment to die in a shoot out with police, surrendered. It says a great deal about the Pittsburgh police that Poplawski was permitted to leave his house alive.

Aside from Poplawski himself, who is responsible for these shootings? The Heller case had nothing to do with the gun-rights rhetoric one often hears in this country. Justice Scalia did not invoke Hitler’s confiscation of the weapons owned by the German people. Scalia was nowhere suggesting a right of violent resistance against government authority. All that is protected, wrote Scalia, is the right to bear arms for traditional lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Yet we hear people actually claim that the amendment protects weapons to be used against our own government.

Given the Heller case, one can no longer deny that there is a constitutional right to bear arms. Undoubtedly some gun control programs are therefore unconstitutional, as was the D.C. law struck down in Heller itself.

But there is no right to bear arms against the government. And it is time to confront the violent rhetoric, sometimes enunciated by otherwise reputable leaders, that leads someone like Poplawski to shoot police officers in the name of an imagined “right to bear arms.” The Second Amendment is not the basis of all our other rights. It is not an ace in the hole on an imagined day that our government becomes a dictatorship. The Court has held that it is a right to hold a criminal at bay while one calls the police. It is not a right against the very same police.

The Two Cultures, 2009

4/4/2009--It was 50 years ago that C.P. Snow delivered a famous lecture at Cambridge entitled, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, which he later turned into a book. The two cultures he had in mind were science and literature. Literary scholars knew nothing of science. The complaint was not about two cultures, really, but was, as Peter Dizikes wrote in the New York Times Book Review on March 22, that science was not being received.

We can think of two cultures today as well. Since the influence of all the arts has declined since 1959, the two cultures today are science and religion. I don’t know many scientists, so I am not sure whether scientists as a group are cut off from religion and religious thinking. I do know that students of religion are not cut off from science. At least since Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit Priest and paleontologist, theologians have known that coming to terms with science is a key theological project of the modern age.

Where we see the two cultures cut off from one another is among those who do not know the best thinking of either one. Average religious people do not know science and some seem prepared and proud to reject it. Average secular people who are often admirers of science but know little about it, can be hostile toward all things religious. These two sides are visible in the culture wars, especially the fight over teaching evolution.

The divide between science and religion does a great deal of harm to both sides. When religion contradicts the sense in a culture of what is possible, it opens itself to irrelevance. This may be part of what is happening today in America among the young. While it is true that religion at its best always contradicts common sense—Jesus did not “look out for number one”—it cannot contradict the plausible worldview of a society. If the Gospel stands or falls on whether the eye could have evolved naturally through evolution, the Gospel is doomed.

The harm to secularism is even more pronounced. The search for scientific truth may be a beautiful way of life, but it is not one that most people are currently pursuing. If non-scientists reject religion in the name of science, they just end up with flat materialism and unrealistic humanism. For most of us nonscientists, it is religion rather than science that helps orient us in the universe and ask the big questions—who am I, why am I here and how am I to live? Even if science has a great deal to contribute to the answers to these questions, it is not well suited to leading us to ask them.

The Secular Mind on the Huffington Post

4/2/2009--Since I began to blog semi-regularly on the Huffington Post, I have seen attributes of the secular mind that I intuited in my book, Hallowed Secularism, but had not encountered regularly before. My blogs always say about the same thing: that secularists should be more open to religious wisdom, symbols, language and images, that secularism needs these things to become a flourishing civilization and that nothing about this kind of borrowing threatens legitimate secular values. The somewhat heated responses usually run in the following channels. (I’m not going to respond to these perspectives at any length today. That requires more space.)

“I don’t need religion to be a good person”. Daniel Dennett told a New School audience just this in New York City last month. I address this point in Hallowed Secularism, in which I suggest that there really are very few good people in the world, and even if religion does not produce much goodness, secularism doesn’t produce any more and maybe a lot less. People who talk this way are not confronting the issue of how to raise children. If you don’t need religion, you need something. So, what will secularism do for that something?

“The framers of the Constitution separated church and state”. Considering that many of the people who respond to me are pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, this assignment of sovereignty to history is just odd. In any event, that history is by no means clear. Thanksgiving to God is an old United States tradition.

“Religious believers should not force their beliefs on others”. This is really the heart of the matter. Secularists often think of religion as a personal matter. The believer can always pray privately, so why should any public manifestations of religion be thought necessary? But, as Justice Scalia likes to say, this view ignores the fact that there is a clash of values present in church/state controversies. Believers often think of their religion as social, rather than private. Think of the plagues of Egypt. Slavery was a public issue and its justice was a religious issue. A certain kind of religion can be relegated to private life, but not anything like biblical religion. That kind of religion is inescapably public.

Religion Can Be the Worst Secularism

3/31/2009--In today’s New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book, God Is Back, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, who both work at The Economist. Kakutani describes the book’s central message as follows:

[They] argue that religion is “returning to public life” around the world, that “the great forces of modernity — technology and democracy, choice and freedom — are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it,” that these days “religion is playing a much more important role in public and intellectual life.” They assert that “religion is becoming a matter of choice,” something that individuals themselves decide to believe in instead of something imposed upon them, and that “the surge of religion is being driven by the same two things that have driven the success of market capitalism: competition and choice.”

Kakutani calls this argument “unpersuasive” and “poorly argued” because, as the recent American Religious Identity Survey shows, secularism is growing. In this way, Kakutani makes a false criticism and ignores the real problem with the book.

Religion can be growing in global public importance, which it obviously is, while at the same time, secularism is also growing. How can this be? Because secularism is still quite small. The ARIS, for example, to which Kakutani referred, shows that secularism has doubled in America since 1990, but only to 15% of the population.

The criticism Kakutani should have leveled is that the phenomenon the authors point to is not religion. It is capitalism. Specifically, it is consumer choice in religion. Kakutani does call some of the churches Micklethwait and Wooldridge describe “suburban malls” rather than houses of worship, with day care centers, bowling alleys, food courts and all the rest. But the problem is not the amenities but the message. Religion calls on us to confront reality, no matter how unpleasant that reality may be. This is true of sin in Christianity and of suffering in Buddhism. Real religion tells us what to we should do. Real religion is not a matter of choice, ever.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge are aware of the power of this criticism. They claim that the hard stuff is inside and that the marketing is outside. But they cannot have it both ways. Either growing religion is a function of “pastopreneurs” “compet[ing] for maket share” among customers “who apply the same consumerist mentality to spiritual life as they do to every other aspect of their experience” or it is a function of a genuine change in spiritual life. Since the authors believe it is the former rather than the latter, it really doesn’t matter whether religion is growing. This sort of religion is the worst kind of secularism.

The Dalai Lama and Secular Ethics

3/28/2009--In an important article about Chinese repression in Tibet, published in the New York Review of Books’ April 9, 2009 issue, Pico Iyer mentions the favorite lecture topic of the Dalai Lama: "secular ethics"—the logical basis for thinking of others, whether or not you have a religion. This reference raises the question of how we will think about ethics in a future, secular world.

This question is not unrelated, in the mind of the Dalai Lama, to the issue of Tibet’s future. In his view, China will eventually face the same spiritual emptiness that the West faces now: “the Dalai Lama has seen one country after another—in the West and more recently in places like Japan and Taiwan—gain prosperity and modern institutions and then come to him asking what to do with their sense of emptiness, their broken families. At some point, he suggested, China is going to have to find something to support it at some level deeper than just growth rates.” That something could very well be, not Tibetan Buddhism as such, but the Buddhist tone that might lead China away from its burgeoning materialism back to its own spiritual roots.

This is not a matter of the separation of church and state. The Dalai Lama says that he supports such separation in the political sense. There should not be in Tibet any merger of religion and government. That would mean the end of the institution of the figure of the Dalia Lama as such.

But of course that political separation does not mean spiritual separation. This is a mistake that American courts are prone to make. Public references to religious values are not a violation of the separation of church and state. That separation should be an institutional separation only. I’m sure the Dalai Lama hopes that all government leaders, and voters too, will be motivated by the deepest spiritual values and that public policy will promote such religious and spiritual values.

The Economic Failure of Our Religions

3/26/2009--In the book Hallowed Secularism, I suggested that one of the reasons that secularism is growing is that religion has failed the tests of modernity, including the acceptance of science, the role of women and the treatment of gays. I still think that is the case, but there is another feature that may be more important, the failure of Our Religions to address the need for a new worldwide economic system.

Beset by cultural issues, especially those relating to sex, the religious voice on the current economic downturn has been muted. At the G-20 meeting next week, there will be talk of restructuring the world’s economy, but it will be technical and political: the role of the dollar as reserve currency and the place of the United States.

The real issue will not be addressed: Has this recession finally put an end to the exclusive capitalist model of development? Since socialism has never succeeded, is some third way possible? The Catholic Church used to talk seriously about that very topic, but now all we hear about is condoms.

We can do better as a species than the dogged road of unsustainable consumption. But until Our Religions get serious about economics, there will not be a contrary voice at the world financial table.

Another Reason to be Secular

3/23/2009—Want another reason why the young are turning away from religion? Look no further than the New York Times story on March 22, in the Week in Review Section. The story tells how Orthodox Jewish influence is growing in the Israeli army and how its teachings influenced some military in the Gaza fighting: A Religious War in Israel’s Army, by Ethan Bronner.

Some of the damning facts are not really in dispute. In Israel the ultra-Orthodox are exempt from military service. But modern Orthodox are not. As leaked by Dany Zamir, an investigation of alleged army atrocities in Gaza, including unecessary civilian deaths, revealed testimony like the following:

“the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

The military’s chief rabbi, Avichai Rontzki, publicized this slogan from a classic Jewish source: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

There is a religious left in Israel that argues against these interpretations of the Jewish tradition. But, from the point of view of the young, who needs a religion that can be interpreted to promote hatred and violence? Better to be secular.

A Restatement of the Establishment Clause

3/22/2009--The program yesterday at Duquesne Law School, a three-hour continuing legal education program featuring my work in the area of religion and American life, has led me to a recapitulation of my understanding of the meaning of the Establishment Clause of the first amendment.

First, there is no political wall of separation between church and state. There could not be in a democracy. Believers are free to promote policies in the public square on any basis they like, including arguing that a particular policy reflects divine will. Thus, religious support for Proposition 8 in California, opposing gay marriage, should not be characterized as a violation of constitutional principle, imposing religion on people. We vote on policies in this country and if you lose, you lose because democracy has imposed a policy, not because religion has done so.

Religious believers are even free to recommend policies that other people think violate constitutional rights, as long as we all understand that eventually that matter will be settled by the courts.

On the other hand, there is a constitutional wall of separation between church and state, so that when government speaks, as in the Pledge of Allegiance, or putting up public Ten Commandments displays, it must speak in universal terms. Universal means that the message must be aimed at all, not that everyone agrees with the message. So, the government may not urge people to believe in God or accept the biblical account of Sinai. Thus, we are entitled to ask, “What is the universal message behind the sectarian language of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments?”

I think there is such a universal message. The word God means far more than the Creator in the Bible. The word may stand for the claim of the universality and objectivity of fundamental values or the acknowledgment of gratitude for the ceaseless creativity of the universe. The Ten Commandments may stand for the claim that our rights are inherent in our humanity and need not be justified to human power.

Even if some religious believers would take these sectarian images to be endorsements of their particular religious traditions, it would be a helpful to force the language of universal messages into these Establishment Clause controversies. Eventually, all Americans might come to agree that when the Government speaks, it must speak to all.

Hallowed Secularism—Hints and Portents

3/19/2009--Sometimes it appears that Hallowed Secularism is catching on. Here is one such portent. Theodore Ziolkowski, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, has written Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (U. Chi. 2007). I just read a beautiful review of what must be a wonderful book by David Jasper in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Jasper is an Anglican priest and theologian, and currently Professor in Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Jasper writes that Ziolkowski is doing what a number of writers are doing, “trac[ing] the dissolution of forms of belief and the emergence of alternatives that mark not so much the absence of religion but the exploration of new options and avenues that might sustain the hunger for belief and meaning in contemporary life.” Ziolkowski does this in a unique way, through literature of an earlier period, that of the late 19th and early 20th century. He looks at 30 writers of the period who display a loss of faith in religion, usually Christianity.

Ziolkowski finds “new modes of faith” through these writers, all sorts of things, from eastern religion to socialism to art to even reconversion. The keynote of this book, writes Jasper, “is failure.” “We cannot do with religion and a ‘mode of faith,’ but neither can we do without them. Utopias become dystopias, the vision corrupts, art becomes an escape, India a dream, myth a word that we continually seek to recover as valid, but then inevitably it slips back into the negative as in I Timothy 1:4, in which we are bidden not to waste time on myths and endless speculations. Even the renewal of old ways seems to offer little genuine consolation in a disenchanted, fragmented world.”

Hopeless and harsh. Yet, why does Ziolkowski bother to write? The old hope does not disappear.

Proposition 8 and the Threat of, and to, Religious Liberty

3/16/2009--The online magazine ReligionDispatches ran a piece today in which I discussed the likelihood that the California Supreme Court would accept the will of the voters and uphold Proposition 8, thus overturning the court’s earlier decision validating gay marriage in California. You can access the piece at http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/1212/the_great_secret_of_constitutional_law%3A_why_proposition_8_will_(and_perhaps_should)_be_upheld/

One comment on the piece caught my eye—the claim that opposition to gay marriage is illegitimate because it reflects essentially a religious position.

There were a number of claims about the relationship between Proposition 8 and religious liberty that were made during the campaign before the vote. They struck me as quite dubious. Supporters of the effort to overturn gay marriage argued, and this argument may be the only reason Prop 8 passed, that the legalization of gay marriage threatened the religious liberty of conservative Christians who consider gay marriage to be immoral.

I never understood this argument. There are many things that are both legal and immoral. Most pornography, for example, is protected by the first amendment, but people, including ministers, still have no problem asserting that the possessions of pornography is immoral. I could also point to gambling and drinking. That claim by Proposition 8 supporters was just false and it would be a shame if that false claim sealed the fate of gay marriage in California.

On the other hand, there is nothing illegitimate about voting one’s religious commitments. If there were, Martin Luther King Jr.’s opposition to segregation would have been illegitimate. As another example, many people who support the criminalization of prostitution do so because of religious scruples. Surely no one thinks that we have to come up with some other reason than that or be forced to legalize prostitution.

Stem Cell Research

3/13/2009--Last week President Obama dropped Bush Administration restrictions on stem cell research. This research usually destroys a human embryo. Since I think a human embryo is an early stage of an existing human life, I oppose this change. The fact that such research is scientific makes no difference to me. The Nazis conducted real scientific research on human subjects too. It never occurred to me to ask whether their research might save more lives than it took.

Some people who support stem cell research do not agree with me and think that these embryos are the equivalent of any other cells. I have no beef with them. They are just mistaken. They are not immoral. Of course, they should not object to grinding the embryos up for cattle feed, or using them for electricity generation, like the Matrix movies.

But many people, including President Obama, apparently have moral qualms about the destruction of human embryos, even if it potentially helps others. These are the people who emphasize that the embryos are going to be destroyed anyway, which they are. These people remind me of the Chinese government reportedly harvesting organs from condemned prisoners. Such moral blindness is worse than simple intentional evil.

The problems with this position are basically two. First, as long as the destruction of human embryos is pointless, there is the possibility we will wake up and stop it. Stem cell research justifies the creation and destruction of human embryos in fertility treatments. Once that happens, there is no chance that the practice will be halted.

Second, as Marx might have said, stem cell research turns human embryos into a valuable commodity. I don’t know yet what uses capitalism will come up with for them, but don’t be surprised if big money eventually produces embryos just for these uses. Satan without horns is hard to see.

ARIS Survey Shows Need for Hallowed Secularism

3/9/2009—The new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) released today shows both the rapid secularization predicted by my book, Hallowed Secularism, and the emptiness that the book seeks to address. The study, sponsored by The Program on Public Values (somehow related to the Institute for the Study of Secularism and Culture) at Trinity College in Hartford, was reported as the first since 1990, but there are also figures from 2001.

The basic numbers are astounding. Just about every religious category shrank since 1990 while the “No religion” category grew from 8.2% to 15% of the population. Even that number may be an understatement, since the category, “Don’t Know/Refused (to answer)" also grew, from 2.3% to 5.2% of the population. One would have to assume that some of the people in that category are secular as well. So the total number of secularists in the population may be closer to 18%, or about 40 million people.

While America remains overwhelmingly a Christian country—about ¾ of the population identifies with some form of Christianity in the survey—secularism is now a mainstream phenomenon.

As my book Hallowed Secularism suggested, this secularizing trend is likely to continue because secularists probably represent a younger cohort of the population than do religious people. In addition, at least for the moment, it is much more likely that the children of secularists will remain secular than that the children of religious people will remain religious.

Unfortunately, the stories about the Survey also demonstrate the emptiness of this new secularism. Barry Kosmin, co-researcher for the Survey, was quoted in USA Today as follows about the no religion group: “These people aren’t secularized. They’re not thinking about religion and rejecting it; they’re not thinking about it at all.” What then is replacing religion as a source of meaning, a guide to action and a lens for history? Apparently nothing. The same story quoted Kosmin more generally, “More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself.’”

Given what we know about ourselves, and especially given the bloody 20th century, is there any justification for such unwarranted belief in oneself? The biblical account of the fall seems a much more realistic starting point. It may be that Americans are not only ignorant and rejecting of religion, but of history, literature and philosophy too. At some point, this is just shallowness, not liberation from dictatorial religion.

I repeat here what I wrote in the book. Rejection of the supernatural makes sense. But rejection of the wisdom of Our Religions is crazy.

Day 2 of the Conference

3/7/2009--Day 2 of The New School Conference on the Religious/Secular Divide in America went in a somewhat surprising direction. The second day was devoted to politics past, present and future. Plainly, the moderators, and probably also the Conference organizers, expected to hear discussion of church/state issues, such as the word God in the Pledge of Allegiance. But this did not occur.

Most of the speakers were expecting new kinds of interactions of religion and secularism in the future. There was a great deal of hostility to religion in the audience, but very little on the podium. Most, although not all, of the speakers took their own secularism or weak religiosity for granted but did not seem in a mood to directly challenge the place of religion in America. There seemed to be a turning away from legal challenges, and even direct political action, to mutual cultural enrichment. This was not quietism, but perhaps a parallel to Obama-like post-partisanship.

One theme addressed only by one speaker was the role of Muslims in the U.S. I guess that most people did not expect hostility toward Islam to be any more of a problem for America than earlier hostility against Catholics, Jews and Mormons. That is, any overt discrimination would be quickly prohibited. It is remarkable that Americans, even in the middle of the War on Terror, do not expect the kind of problems that Europe and Canada are having over head scarves and other manifestations of Muslim identity. Maybe we have more to be thankful for in our constitutional tradition than we usually admit.

I was disappointed by the failure of the Conference to address the facts of religion and secularism on the ground. One questioner asked whether religion would lose support in the future and the panel said no. Obviously, this is not how things look to me.

Because the speakers did not anticipate fundamental sociological changes, they had no reason to consider the future of secularism in a serious way. So the central question of the sustainability of a genuinely secular society just did not come up. But that question is the one that will dominate the future.

Impressions from Day 1 of the New School Religion/Secular Conference

3/5/2009--Greetings from NYC, where the New School for Social Research is hosting a Conference on the U.S case of the religious/secular divide. Many big names are on the program and the presentations are impressive. Yet, my overwhelming reaction is disappointment.

I thought coming in that the point of the Conference would be to examine the presumptions of secularism and assess their adequacy. Thus, religion and secularism would appear as equals, and the worldview of each would be subject to critique. There were panelists who could have done this, such as Jose Casanova, who spoke on Secularism as an ideology.

Instead, the Conference has treated secularism as already an adequate way of encountering the world, without even raising the question of whether that is truly so. The organizers seem to share that view and those attending the Conference also seem to share it.

This is important to me because my efforts to reform secularism, to open it up to religious insight, are dependent on an understanding that secularism’s assumptions are not simply naively true. Thus, my recent post on Huffington (The Fight for the Soul of Secularism, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-ledewitz/the-fight-for-the-soul-of_b_171629.html) was met with the usual comments about people creating their own meaning and values, the emptiness of spiritual experience, and the harm and irrationality of religion. I thought this high-powered Conference would begin the process of throwing these, and other, assumptions into question.

It has been quite the opposite. The most powerful voices at the Conference have been Charles Taylor and Daniel Dennett. Dennett presented his usually powerful coherent defense of materialism and science as whatall that is real. ("What you are, your presumed self, is actually an alliance of machines in your brain"). There was no one to take him on at that level, no one to expose the hidden, and not even hidden, ontology that Dennett is pushing. There was no one who even tried to show that these assumptions are not themselves science, but faith claims.

Taylor was even worse in a way. He proposed dissolving the religious realm altogether, leaving all claims of conscience on an equal footing before the secular state. Taylor could not see that his vaunted value of the neutral state is impossible and even silly, since the state already endorses capitalism and nationalism, among many other values.

This became very clear when, in response to a question from the audience, Taylor stated that an uncompromising pro-life position is anti-democratic, presumably because it refuses to put the personhood of the unborn to a vote and genuinely accept the result. Taylor would have called Lincoln anti-democratic because Lincoln refused to accept Douglas’ proposal of popular sovereignty as the answer to the slavery issue. One cannot vote on the humanity of the slave, answered Lincoln. The membership of the human family is a precondition of democracy, not an issue democracy can resolve. Just so in abortion. Fundamentally, the two sides differ over who is a human being. Democracy functions only after that question is resolved. Neither side in that debate is more democratic than the other. My objection is that Taylor’s defense of neutrality and conscience masks just such power-plays and not just about abortion.

Holy Hullabaloo Over a Ten Commandments Display

3/3/2009--Jay Wexler, a professor of law at Boston University, and the author of the upcoming Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church-State Wars, (Beacon June 1, 2009) left a comment on the online magazine Religion Dispatches to the effect that the Summum case last week demonstrates the mistake that the Supreme Court made in holding in 2005 that at least some government sponsored Ten Commandments displays do not violate the Establishment Clause. Summum’s desire to put on its own monument shows that Ten Commandments displays are divisive, argues Wexler.

Now, it is not fair to criticize Professor Wexler for having a sense of humor and wanting to lessen the anger over church/state issues. That is what he apparently does in his new book and that is a good thing. On the other hand, there is a fine line between good-natured humor over our litigious culture, and making fun of bonehead fundamentalist right wing Christians, which is not really so funny and is what many secularists are wont to do.

These public religious symbols mean a great deal to many Americans. It is an odd starting point that says that banning them is not divisive but allowing them is. That is only the case if the Constitution clearly bans public religious displays to start with, which is the question, not an answer. Law professors have a tendency to view these religious disputes from on high because, frankly, many law professors are not particularly religious. If one is not pious, it is easy to imagine a world in which religion is not promoted by public expression. But if one is pious, such a world seems ominous.

This sounds like a criticism of Professor Wexler, which it is not. I haven’t read his book and I don’t know him or his religious leanings. But I think church and state will be funnier when we have found an inclusive constitutional interpretation of the Establishment Clause.

Imagine the Court Being Helpful

3/1/2009—Last Wednesday’s decision by the United States Supreme Court in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum did not advance our understanding of the Establishment Clause because the majority opinion by Justice Alito resolutely refused to discuss the Establishment Clause. The case was decided on uncontroversial free speech grounds.

In the case, Summum, a Gnostic Christian group, asked the City if it could donate a monument to be erected in a public park that already contained a Ten Commandments monument that had been donated by another private group in 1971. The City refused and the Supreme Court upheld that refusal.

The Court’s rationale, and there was no dissent on this point, was that when the government puts up something like a monument, the resulting display becomes the message of the government, not that of the private group if any that donated the monument. As “government speech” the government is usually permitted to endorse its own message and omit messages by everybody else, including here, Summum.

But as everyone in the case was well aware, there are limits on permissible government speech. One such limit is that the government may not prefer one religion over another. Reasonably thinking that might be the case here, the City preferring the Bible’s account of Sinai over the account offered by Summum, the religious group asked, if the Ten Commandments monument is government speech, what is it the City is trying to say? The real answer might have been, “only the Bible is true.”

Justice Alito sidestepped this Establishment Clause minefield by arguing that monuments don’t have simple messages. He pointed to the “Imagine” mosaic donated to New York City in memory of John Lennon. Then he quoted the lyrics of the song.

This was a beautiful moment in the opinion, and I mean that sarcastically. If Alito had quoted the lyrics of the Ten Commandments instead of tripping down memory lane with John Lennon, it would have been painfully obvious what message Pleasant Grove was probably offering. As readers of this blog know, what is needed is an inclusive account of these religious displays that does not endorse one religious tradition. Thus far, the Court has lacked the imagination and generosity to help America out of its culture war deadlock. For more, see my manuscript, For the Establishment of Religion.

Reactions to the Religion Dispatches Interview

2/25/2009--Because of the reach of the online magazine Religion Dispatches, and especially once Andrew Sullivan picked up the interview on his blog, there have been a lot of reactions on the Internet to the proposal for a Hallowed Secularism. This is all being done without anyone actually reading the book, of course, but the interview seems to me a fair capsule of the overall message. The discussion that is going on is probably reflective of what will be thought when people do read the book—at least those people who can afford it.

I have noticed two trends worth mentioning. One is the incipient atheist counterattack. Obviously Hallowed Secularism represents a goal for people with genuine religious yearnings. This is in a sense what hard atheism wants to stamp out of people. Such yearnings are felt to represent a sentimental unwillingness to face the emptiness and formal meaninglessness (I mean without purpose) of existence. Since yearnings are hard to combat, this attack seems to center on my claims that values are objective and that history contains a moral center.

I am not by nature a partisan. And of course I have no interest in defending error. So, I am not inclined to respond by defense. These are matters I am hoping to open up. If the claims of this kind of atheism are made explicit, I think they will be rejected as an inadequate account of human life and cosmic reality.

Let me just say here that it seems odd to me that when science investigates the physical universe, the atheist assumes that something real is being discovered. Even though knowledge is inexact and judgments and disagreements are common, no one calls the scientific quest subjective. No one says that the scientist is simply choosing among possible accounts. No one would think one account just as good as another.

But when the matter being investigated is morality, or broadly how we should live, the atheist assumes the opposite. I see no justification for this dichotomy. People do differ in their moral commitments, although not usually as much as the atheist claims. Yet over time, that is, in history, they don’t differ very much. To take one example, humanity discovered something about chattel slavery. Absent a total discontinuity in human history, we will never go back to it. This discovery seems to me pretty similar to Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion. Morality is not a matter of choice just because it is a matter of disagreement.

The other response is the claim that Hallowed Secularism is Deism, roughly the 17th Century belief in an absent Creator God whose plan for humankind unfolds without further divine intervention. While I can see why this parallel might be claimed, I never found Deism very helpful in religious matters. On one level, Deism is too rational. There is no real place for prayer or spiritual experience. Yet these experiences are common to human beings. In an opposite sense, Deism is too theistic, too wedded to the Creator God of the Bible. If there really is no being-like God with a plan, humans are stuck with the processes of the natural universe. This is the problem of the asteroid. Most Deists would claim, I think, that it could not be God’s plan that humanity be destroyed by an asteroid. But the Hallowed Secularist believes that nature follows its own course, quite without that kind of pity. Deism was always too comfortable and reassuring to be true.

Cost of Hallowed Secularism

2/24/2009--I have been asked by a reader of this blog why the price of Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice, is so high. I just want to say to people who cannot afford to buy the book that I have no say in the price, which frustrates me as much as potential readers. The price will reduce readership. I can only suggest that people urge their public libraries to buy the book and read it that way. The book is being priced as if it were a textbook, which it is not.

The Decline of Islam

2/23/2009--At the height of the Wars of Religion, in the 16th and 17th centuries, it would have been difficult to predict that these wars, in which religious belief was so important, would become the beginning of the Great Secularization of the West. But the story was not surprising in retrospect. The conflicts between Catholics and Protestants delegitimized religion. People began to feel that if this is what religion led to, it might be better not to be religious and to limit the influence of religion.

Something similar may happen in the Muslim world and more quickly than one might think. The victory of conservative Islamic forces, including the Taliban, in Pakistan’s Northwest region has led by all reports to the demolition of over one hundred schools for girls. This one symbol is likely to delegitimize Islam as a normative force among young Muslims, and not just women.

Of course, this one interpretation of Islam is by no means dominant in the world. But that is not the point. Neither was the killing in Europe normative. Rather, when injustice is perpetrated in the name of religion, the norms that become the standard for the future are no longer those of religion. They come from elsewhere.

Most people in the world will see hostility to the education of women as intolerable. This act of destroying schools is nothing like the burqa, which some women choose as an antidote to Western sexism. This act is the unmasking of religion as injustice.

Pascal on Hallowed Secularism

2/21/2009—The following selection is from Paragraph 12—in only one ordering unfortunately—of the Pensees, by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.
Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature.
Attractive because it promises true good.”

When Pascal writes the word "religion", he may mean only Christianity and only belief in God. But he may mean instead something of the core of religion that many religions share, such as the objectivity of values and the compassion of existence. If so, he describing the kind of religion that Hallowed Secularism intends to bring secularism into closer connection with.

The situation among secularists today is in part as Pascal described. Many hate religion, although increasingly they are ignorant and indifferent. (That would not have been possible in Pascal’s day, given the dominant role of religion).

As to the differences from what Pascal saw, some secularists today are afraid religion may not be true, as well as fearing that it is. That is, we don’t want to give in to the hierarchical discipline of any church, but we don’t want to live in an empty, meaningless universe either.

There is a cure today, just as Pascal suggested. Religion, in the sense of its core, is not contrary to reason, (we might say today not contrary to science) and it is worthy of reverence and respect. If reality is good for us, welcoming to us, kind to us, we should be grateful.

And pointing this out, makes the core of religion seem like something we would at least wish to be true, as Pascal says. The task then, after implanting this hope, is to show that it can be fulfilled. Or, as the book Hallowed Secularism opens, “Wouldn’t you like to live your life abundantly? …Why don’t you?”

Now the question is, who understands human nature best—the New Atheists, New Age religion, or the Bible? My money is on the Bible. In considering human beings, the Bible is just the right mix of good and evil. Materialism makes us out to be worse than we are, totally without generosity. All forms of humanism make us out to be better than we are. And there is something in reality that sometimes protects us from ourselves, just as the Bible says. It is pretty amazing that we have not yet blown ourselves up and we might still heat ourselves out of existence.

Finally, who has the best word as to true good in our lives? What guidebook is best for the general direction of your life? What model of human being would you like to adopt? For me, it is the Bible and Jesus respectively, not that I actually do this, but then neither do most Christians.

Apparently, things have not changed all that much since the 17th century.

A New Questions for the Author

2/19/2009--The online magazine Religion Dispatches has asked that I expand on the answers to ten questions that I posted earlier. So, here are the additional answers. I hope readers can infer the questions. For the reader who asked about objective values, that issue is addressed briefly. I will be returning to it in future posts. It is a crucial question.

****************
1. I have been trying to redefine the relationship between secularism and religion from one of opposition and tension to one of fruitful interaction. My first task was to try to show that America does not, probably never did, and probably never could have a secular democracy. I made that argument in my first book, American Religious Democracy in 2007. Shortly after that book came out, the Democrats fell all over themselves courting the religious vote in the 2008 campaign. So, in that sense the book was vindicated.

But it is also the case that the electorate in 2008 was the most secular in history. This was the continuation of an immense cultural change in America. During the period 2004-2007, a new phenomenon emerged in America, what The Atlantic Monthly would later call “mass-market atheism.” Beginning with, though with many precursors, Sam Harris—The End of Faith—in 2004, to Daniel Dennett—Breaking the Spell—and Richard Dawkins—The God Delusion—both in 2006, to Victor Stenger—God: The Failed Hypothesis—in 2007, to the culminating best-seller blockbuster, God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, also in 2007, this period saw the establishment of a muscular and assertively anti-religious atheism that began to reach a popular market. This new reality reached its apex of public visibility when President Barack Obama included “nonbelievers” in his list of American beliefs in his Inaugural Address.

The question I am addressing in Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice, is, what is the nature of this new secularism going to be? Hitchens and his supporters want to lead secularists, many of whom know very little about religion, into opposition to religion. Instead, I argue that for secularism to be healthy, it must learn from the wisdom of the religious traditions. Not believing in God, afterlife or miracles does not exhaust what religion can teach.

2. The most important take-home message from the book is that it is possible to believe most of the promises of the Bible without believing in God. I have to remind readers at this point that I am not a believer myself. But consider the following question—when I assert that some action is cruel, do I mean simply that I consider it to be cruel or do I mean that it is in fact cruel? Most of us, believers and nonbelievers, mean the latter. This position is called the objectivity of values and C.S. Lewis considered it, and not belief in God, to be the core of a religious orientation.

The opposite position, that people invent values—that man is the measure of all things, in other words—is scarcely imaginable. One would have to say that the holocaust was not intrinsically wrong. One would have to imagine that chattel slavery could reappear in the world. Or that the liberation of women is something other than an eventual certainty. Genuine relativism is a hard position to hold and is not a basis for a flourishing secular civilization.

I am afraid that without the influence of religion, secularism will eventually succumb to a weary relativism, or even nihilism. That is the fear as well of other secular thinkers, such as Austin Dacey, in his book, The Secular Conscience. My proposal is that secularists continue to learn from religion, especially the lesson that Martin Luther King, Jr., called, “the moral arc of the universe.” Religious symbols and language, such as redemption, salvation and forgiveness, can have real meaning for secularists.

3. No, I didn’t have to leave anything out. Hallowed Secularism is the second part of a trilogy. The first book was American Religious Democracy: Coming to Terms with the End of Secular Politics (Praeger 2007). In that book I dealt with the relationship of religion and politics. In this second book, I try to describe the life of a secularism that is open to religion. That left out changing the law of church and state to permit experimentation for religious symbols in public life, which is the subject I take up in a manuscript to be entitled, For the Establishment of Religion, which is now being looked at by publishers.

4. The biggest misconception I had to deal with in the book is the belief that the statement “I don’t believe in God” is some sort of final answer to the perennial questions of human life: who am I, why am I here, and what may I hope for? Actually, statements about belief in God tell one very little about reality, or even one’s belief about reality.

Just as one example, belief in God does not necessarily tell you anything about an afterlife or a Messiah or a plan for history. Abraham in the Book of Genesis, for example, believed in God and yet knew nothing of those things.

It may even be that the word “God” itself is a symbol for things secularists also believe, such as the power of goodness. Or the mysterious sense of oneness that often pervades our lives. Or the grace that permits us to make mistakes and receive second chances.

Atheists like Christopher Hitchens are busy trying to convince people that there is nothing to learn from our religious traditions. But those traditions are not simpleminded and they have been wrestling for centuries with questions you and I are asking right now.

5. My target audience is those people, particularly among the young, who were raised outside the religious traditions. Some of these persons know nothing of religion. Others know some things but not much. I am hoping to open these matters up. After all, we have to live; we have to raise children; we have to decide what is real and important. Rejecting religion is not exactly a life.

6. Obviously my goal is to inform. We are at a turning point in history in which secular civilization, which we have never had before, seems to be a likely future for humankind. But what will be the sources of depth in such a civilization since religion will not be its source? We secularists had better begin thinking about these matters in a way, in a hurry.

7. Originally the title of the book was to be Hallowed Secularism: A Guide for the Nonbeliever and that is still how I see the book, as a guide or starting point for people who cannot accept the stories of Our Religions but have a sense that there is more to reality than materialism and postmodern humanism can account for.

8. I like the cover a lot, but it was expensive and authors sometimes have to pay that cost. Anita Dufalla, who works here in Pittsburgh, did a wonderful job conveying the sense of different realms even in a purely natural universe.

9. No, there is no other book that says what I am trying to say. But I wish I had the scientific training of Simon Conway Morris in Life’s Solution. He is able to convey the hidden depth of reality within the confines of accepted scientific discourse. I know that science and holiness are not really in conflict, but I don’t know enough to show that.

10 My next book is For the Establishment of Religion, which argues that government should be permitted to endorse the common core of religion, just not any particular religion. That book will close a gap that my first two books have left open. If religion is to be accepted in public life, and if secularism is to be much closer to religion than it is at present, a new understanding of the separation of church and state will be necessary. That manuscript is finished and while I hope it will be published before the end of the year, it is still being considered by publishers.

Bruce Ledewitz is Professor of Law at Duquesne University School of Law. He is author of Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) and American Religious Democracy: Coming to Terms with the End of Secular Politics (Praeger 2007). He has finished a manuscript about the law of church and state, to be entitled, For the Establishment of Religion.

Peter Steinfels on the New, New Atheism

2/16/2009--On Friday, 2/13/2009, Peter Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and author of a biweekly column, called "Beliefs" in the New York Times, wrote a column on new atheist thinking. Steinfels mentioned in particular Ronald Aronson’s new book, “Living Without God” (Counterpoint, 2008), “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” (Viking, 2007), by André Comte-Sponville (which readers of this blog have already heard of) and Phil Zuckerman’s new book on Sweden and Denmark, “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment” (New York University Press, 2008).

The point of all these authors, despite their differences, seems to be “the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today’s atheism, agnosticism and secularism.” That quote is from Aronson, but Sponville would certainly agree. Aronson is much less mystical or spiritual than is Sponville but is in other ways quite religious in such themes as the meaning of death and the need for gratitude.

What we are seeing in Steinfels’ column is the birth of a new kind of secularism, one that is beginning to take seriously the responsibility of envisioning a sustainable and flourishing secular civilization. Obviously, Hallowed Secularism is another, and different, approach to that same goal. One thing is certain, the prediction in the book Hallowed Secularism that secularism is growing and would soon need to go beyond religion bashing is already coming true.

How Does An Atheist Prepare for Death?

2/14/2009--That is the question Erica Jong—remember Fear of Flying?—asks in her New York Times review of Diana Athill’s memoir, Somewhere Towards the End. As secularism grows, it is a question that more people will have to face.

Athill is described as facing death “gamely”. She knows she will not go on after death, but this is a “state of infinite possibility, stimulating and enjoyable—not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true.” In other words, one prepares for death by living life truthfully.

Actually, this answer to facing death turns out to be pretty much the same for both the nonbeliever and the believer. Aside from one petty gibe at religion: this “would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter”—as if the belief in a loving God would make the believer recruit someone for slaughter—this memoir seems to be filled with grace and wisdom, even with faith. After my own death, creativity and creation go on. The mystery of existence remains forever.

Atheists feel superior to believers but we are all mostly in the same boat. Abraham, a believer, simply dies in Genesis. There is no heaven and there is no resurrection promised to him. What is promised is faithfulness to the promise he was given in life—his descendants will be a blessing to the people of the world. Or, if you will, creativity and creation will go on. He and Athill have some things in common.

The real difference between the believer and the nonbeliever, including Erica Jong I suppose, is a lack of compassion and an amnesia about history in the nonbeliever. Diana Athill is one of these remarkable people who make me tired just hearing about them. What if my life has only been ordinary and not an adventure? What if I have betrayed all those who loved me for no particular reason? What if, in other words, I have been a human being? In that case, the Diana Athills and Erica Jongs of the world have no interest in me. But religion is different. Religion has a taste for ordinary human weakness. Secularism had better develop the same.

There is also nothing in the book, or at least in the review, about history. Athill’s life has all been about her interesting search for excellence. Her life has been all about her. But if life is not just one bit of creativity after another, if the universe has a moral order instead, then my life has to stack up in relation to something I do not choose or create. Reality, then, is not just something I contemplate, but something I serve.

As usual, the question is not secular or religious, but the kind of secularism that is developing. We need a new type of secularism to engage death fully.

A Politician Saves Us

2/11/2009--No, I am not referring to President Barack Obama, who may or may not save us, but to Abraham Lincoln, who most certainly did save our country in a crisis far worse than a financial meltdown, however severe. William Safire’s essay in the New York Time’s book review section this last Sunday, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, reminds us that Lincoln saved us using the talents and skills of a politician: vision, rhetoric, hope, manipulation, shrewdness and so forth. The whole bag of tricks, noble and otherwise.

Americans, especially young Americans, do not seem too enamored of politicians. Even Obama, who is an exception, does not seem to be inspiring people to enter government service—other kinds of public service maybe, but not government.

I suspect one reason for this is the cult of the individual. We like to think that we make our own choices. But individualism is mostly bunk. Subject to the forces of heredity, culture and history, you and I are mostly a product. We make our choices only in a very confined context. As Charles Taylor put it in his book, A Secular Age, at one point in Western history it was nearly impossible not to believe in God; then at a later time, it became quite difficult. We don’t control our context.

One way in which I hope Hallowed Secularism differs from other kinds of secularism is a greater sense of organicity and community. We are a people, in fact largely the people Lincoln made us. We are not a collection of individuals. And we are going to deal with our current crisis as a people, or not at all.

The God Fight on London Buses

2/9/2009--The Washington Post reported on Friday, 2/6, that three Christian groups are now placing ads on London buses proclaiming that God exists, in response to a “high profile atheist campaign”, now spreading around the world, casting doubt on the existence of God. This controversy illustrates both the rapid growth of secular society and the intellectual bankruptcy of a secularism that thinks denying the existence of a supernatural being is important.

In several developed countries—the United States, Canada, Britain and others—atheists have been putting ads like the following on buses: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

An ad like this is silly on a number of levels. Just for one thing, surely many secularists would not worry, but would be overjoyed, if there were a loving God who intended to save both the world and individuals and who resembled in his ways Jesus of Nazareth. It’s just that it’s not true.

Naturally, religious groups could not leave these ads alone. The Russian Orthodox response reads: “There is a God. BELIEVE. Don’t worry and enjoy your life.” Maybe this is witnessing to the Gospel, but I doubt it.

As the West becomes increasingly secular, this sort of thing is going to happen more often. So it is important to state every time it does that God is more than a claim about a supernatural being. As Jack Call entitled his new book, God is a Symbol of Something True. John Caputo, the radical, post-death-of-God theologian, certainly no orthodox believer, writes in the new book, After the Death of God, that we must “cultivate the resources in this name [God]…and…let ourselves be nourished by their force” (50) because this name safeguards “the irreducibility and unconditionality” of the event of justice to come. [quotes from Jeffrey Kosky’s book review in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion].

God means that something trustworthy in reality is beyond human control. That something might be the regularity of nature, the hospitality of this planet, the wise cunning of history, or the goodness embedded in our lives. Or it might be something else, or all, and more.

To say God does not exist is almost juvenile. I don’t want to claim the opposite—that God exists. I want to ask, what does exist? Dear atheist, What is real?

This atheist ad campaign is more posturing. I keep waiting for secularism to grow up and begin the hard work of building a sustainable human civilization.

What is History Like?

2/4/2009—One of the difficulties in developing Hallowed Secularism, both in thinking about it and in actually laying the foundation for a healthy secular civilization, is to understand the relationship of religion to history.

Many secularists can accept “spirituality” as a genuine aspect of the human condition. Hence the description often heard that a person is “spiritual, but not religious.” But history as a category is not as easily accepted.

The monotheistic religions are intensely historically oriented. Justice triumphs in the end, though as with the Hebrew slavery in Egypt, it may take longer than an individual’s lifespan for that to happen.

Here is how Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary put it this reflecting on the surprising inauguration of President Barack Obama: “History is like this, the Rabbis taught: generation after generation and event after event accumulate without apparent recompense for sacrifice. History seems to lack purpose. It appears stalled. Then, ‘all of a sudden,’ something happens: things move. Setbacks follow. There is more work to do, more suffering to bear, more wilderness to slog through; but the fact that redemption happened once gives us hope. We wake up to the blessing of a new day and, free to stretch and stand tall, we accept the privilege to open eyes and push back walls. History seems malleable once again.”

Our religions promise liberation. Some of our religions see that liberation in history. Materialism cannot make that claim. For it, history is just one thing after another. Even humanism has trouble with the category of history since everything depends on human beings.

Our religions teach that the slave will go free and that this is etched in the heart of reality. Thomas Jefferson, religious to his core in this regard, once called this the book of fate. Martin Luther King, Jr., called it the moral arc of the universe. We must be sure that our secular civilization does not lose this sense of justice in history. Religion is more than the spirituality of the individual.

Steelers Holiday

2/2/2009--No blog today in honor of the national holiday always declared when the Steelers win the Super Bowl. (Don't laugh; Pittsburgh city schools were on a two-hour delay today). But if you want to catch up on Hallowed Secularism, you may want to read my essay, Obama and the Unbelievers: The Future of Secularism, on the online magazine Religion Dispatches, today:

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religionandtheology/1028/obama_and_the_unbelievers:_the_future_of_secularism?page=entire

Einstein and Darwin

1/31/2009--Walter Isaacson's 2007 biography of Albert Einstein described Einstein’s lifelong search for a unified field theory that would meld quantum mechanics and general relativity into one theory encompassing all forces at all levels—from to largest—as follows: “he was guided by a faith, which he wore lightly and with a twinkle in his eye, in a God who would not play dice by allowing things to happen by chance.”

Now, ignore the beingness of God inherent in that formulation. Perhaps for Einstein treating God as if God were a person was just a way of talking and thinking. We might say instead that Einstein had a faith that reality itself was not a chance event, and leave it at that.

Religious people who worry about Darwin in public school are also unwilling to accept a universe that operates by chance, in this case not quantum mechanics but random mutation as the fuel for natural selection.

These opponents don't realize that evolution need not be looked at that way. Evolution does not actually appear to be a matter of chance. Mutation may be random, but the timeline of the history of the universe is so immense that all possibilities become probabilities. Again and again, what is called convergent evolution yields analogous structures—wings in bats and birds, for example. And the slow steady movement over time toward animals with purpose—ourselves—is also an evolutionary fact. Anyone wanting more thinking along these lines should look to the British paleontologist, Simon Conway Morris and his 2003 book, Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a Lonely Universe.

The point here is that the religious opponents of a certain way of looking at evolution—as a result of mere contingency—should not be thought of as anti-science. They are no more anti-science in their faith than was Albert Einstein.

A Science of Human Flourishing

1/28/2009—I have been researching State Constitutional reform for a short documentary Duquesne is making about the role of former Governor Richard Thornburgh at the 1968 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention. I was surprised to find that the effort in Pennsylvania to introduce merit selection of judges, as opposed to partisan election, was not due to some experience in our State, but was the result of a nationwide campaign conducted by the American Judicature Society. And that effort was itself reflective of the work of Roscoe Pound, who was a distinguished American legal scholar and educator.

Pound promoted efficiency in the administration of justice but also a sort of best practices approach. He was a pioneer of sociological jurisprudence and pragmatism.

What I noticed in the work of the Judicature Society, and this is based on Pound, is the sense they had in 1961 and 1962 that a merit selection process could work because one could then pick the “best” man to be a judge.

Although many people today favor merit selection over the way Pennsylvania picks judges now—partisan elections—this notion of the “best” person is not as easy to advocate. We have more of a sense today that law is highly discretionary and that the difference between a Justice Scalia and a Justice Stevens has nothing much to do with competence. Their outcomes are different and both are good judges.

Something has changed since the early 1960’s. We have lost some sense of objectivity. It is no longer obvious that one could develop a science of human flourishing that would furnish standards for an enterprise like law.

The old certainties are passing away. But it may be that new scientific understandings of the human condition, and of reality in general, may reinvigorate the notion of human needs and their satisfaction. A science of the human may yet defeat deconstructive post-modernism. Hallowed Secularism is an aspect of just such a hope.

10 Questions for the Author

1/25/2009--The daily online magazine Religion Dispatches has sent me ten questions about my new book, Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practices, which will be published in March by Palgrave Macmillan. I thought the answers might be of interest here.

10 Questions for Bruce Ledewitz, author of Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)

1 I was inspired to write the book because I was the secular parent I am writing about. I was trying to figure out how to raise children and live a life without religion, when I believed that the institutional religions were right about a lot of things (like their views of humanism and materialism).

2 The most important take-home message from the book is that it is possible to believe most of the promises of the Bible—not of course supernatural promises like an afterlife—without believing in God.

3 No, I didn’t have to leave anything out. Since this second book is part of a trilogy—the first book was American Religious Democracy (Praeger 2007) and the third book is being looked at by publishers in manuscript form right now—I had the whole series to work with.

4 The biggest misconception I am aiming to undo is one held by some secularists—those who believe this world is all there is—who tend to think that everything is obvious. Actually, much of reality is mystery. What used to be called God’s hand in history is still there and forgiveness of sin still happens. Not believing in supernatural beings is the beginning of one’s search for truth, not the end.

5 My target audience is young people who were raised outside the religious traditions.

6 My goal is to inform readers about the possibilities that familiarity with the religious traditions open up and thus change my readers’ lives. The religious/nonbeliever divide is mostly bunk.

7 Originally the title of the book was to be Hallowed Secularism: A Guide for the Nonbeliever. I still believe that title communicates the message of the book.

8 I like the cover a lot, but it was expensive and authors sometimes have to pay that cost.

9 No, there is no other book I wish I had written. No book out there says what I wish to say.

10 My next book is going to be For the Establishment of Religion, which argues that government should be permitted to endorse the common core of religion, just not any particular religion. That legal change is necessary if the kind of changes I hope to see in secularism are to happen. I hope the book will be published before the end of 2009, but it is still being considered by publishers.

Rick Warren's Prayer

1/22/2009--A Newsweek story already has noted how Reverend Warren prayed in Jesus’ name only for himself—the one who changed “my” life. But the real story of Warren’s prayer is that we have not been able to build a tradition of inclusive public prayer in part because the United States Supreme Court is so wooden in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause.

In 1992, in Lee v. Weisman, the Court had a chance to endorse inclusive prayer at a high school commencement. The Board of Education sent guidelines to the rabbi who presented the prayer—guidelines that would have limited some of what Rick Warren said at the inauguration. The prayer in the case was much more inclusive than the fairly Christian performance by Warren.

The Court held the high school graduation prayer unconstitutional anyway. No prayer of any kind, no matter how inclusive, was to be allowed. This kind of ruling seems sort of silly today in light of the clear religiosity of the inauguration.

The Court should be helping us build an acceptable sense of public prayer. By holding to the secular paradigm of the wall of separation and government neutrality toward religion, but then refusing to enforce those norms in a public setting like the inauguration, the Court is creating constant controversy, encouraging secularists it does not intend to really support and threatening believers with anti-religious precedent.

If the Establishment Clause does not require government neutrality, then we would be better off in every sense and from every point of view, if the Court would say plainly what it does require. I hope it will be held to require not government neutrality toward religion but much stricter nonsectarian expression. God by all means, but not Jesus on public occasions.

And, in the wholly inclusive words of Reverend Joseph Lowery, "Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen."

Inauguration Day

1/20/2009—Among the other firsts for President Barack Obama is that he may be the first President to have been raised in a non-religious household. [I’m not sure this is so since Americans in the early 19th century were not as clear about these things as we are today. Religion was a fact of social life and so the formally non-religious were probably rare. The actually non-religious may have been common.]

This is the tack the American Humanist Association is taking with regard to Obama. He is said to be “living proof that family values without religion build character.” This is all in support of the rather touching slogan of the Association: “being good without a god since 1941”.

The Association even reproduces texts from The Audacity of Hope to make its point. But the text really illustrates the problem, rather than celebrating irreligion: “Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, [my mother] worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. …Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature… .”

Obama understands this was harder without organized religion, a point the Humanist Association doesn’t seem to get. On the other hand, few Sunday schools instill a sense of wonder.

What you also see here is that Obama’s Christianity may not go very deep, or may be a kind of secular Christianity. Life is transitory, but there is no sense in this quote of what might come after--a key question, of course.

The Humanists also trumpet another portion of Obama’s book—his reference to pluralism. Obama clearly fears “the dangers of sectarianism”. “[W]e are no longer just a Christian nation” but a nation of many religions and nonbelievers.

In many ways, President Obama is a figure for a new America. I think of him as the first Hallowed Secularist. He is really not a humanist, for he is too close to religion for that. But he is no more a follower of organized religion than was Lincoln. I’m glad he is our new President and I wish him luck.

Steelers Win Again

No report today. The Steelers are going to the Super Bowl.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation

1/17/2009--This month’s Yale Alumni Magazine features Tony Blair and his new faith foundation. Blair is teaching at Yale and that is also where the US operations of the foundation will be headquartered.

The story states that the main project of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation will be “to foster grater understanding among people of various religions” and “to make religion a force for good as globalization mixes together people of different cultures and faiths”. Blair also states that faith should have a role in public policy.

Undoubtedly the Foundation will foster good work, like raising funds for mosquito netting in the developing world. And, undoubtedly as well, it would be best if the forces of globalization were restrained by normative principles and not just by power. As Blair says in the article, religion can be a force for such normative counter force.

The basic problem is that you cannot do work of this kind without clear theological thinking. Otherwise, you are saying that all religion is the same and that therefore people should be able to get along.

Pope Benedict has shown both the promise and the limits of genuine ecumenicism. Believers do believe certain things are necessary for salvation. Non-believers are not saved, or the equivalent, not out of ill-will, but because of the necessity of religious belief. Tolerance and salvation are not the same thing, however. Pope Benedict does not say that non-Christians are saved anyway (actually he says no human being knows who is saved) but he does affirm that God’s children should not kill each other over religious differences. Benedict’s limited approach is probably more promising than Blair’s idea that God would not exclude anybody.

Nor is it clear what Blair means by religion. Here is how the article ends: “I have a complete belief that what most people want is a sense of spirituality and a sense of purpose derived from spirituality in their lives, and they don’t want to exclude other people.” This sounds more like Hallowed Secularism than like any religion I know. It lacks any sense of doctrine or even organization.

Where this kind of formulation differs from Hallowed Secularism, however, is its lack of recognition of the power of justice in history. A feeling of spirituality is no doubt a nice thing, but as the saying goes, if you want peace, do justice. Jews and Muslims are fighting today in Gaza not because one or the other lacks spiritual feelings but because they do not agree on what is just.

The Problem with Today's Church-State Jurisprudence

1/15/2009—In his book, Masters of Illusion, Michigan State Law Professor Frank S. Ravitch points to the need for “pragmatic accommodation” to explain such things as the Supreme Court’s reluctance to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. He writes, “the whole notion of pragmatic accommodationism is that there are certain areas where the normal doctrines do not apply. This makes a certain amount of sense given the religious nature of much of our populace. After all, to protect religious freedom in the broad range of cases there may be some areas that must be left untouched lest public backlash lead to the destruction of Establishment Clause values through amendment or less direct (and perhaps unconstitutional) means. This reflects the pragmatic notion that it may be unwise to fight a particular battle that may be winnable, but which could weaken broader Establishment Clause concerns, and thus lose the 'war'."

This passage is symbolic of the problem with the law of church and state. Essentially, the legal establishment wants a secular public life, but knows that the great unwashed majority is too religious to stand for that. So, law professors and other legal thinkers try to get the courts go as far as they can in that direction without sparking a rebellion (as if a constitutional amendment could be destructive of constitutional values--maybe it would be reflective of proper constitutional values).

You should know that you something is wrong when you are pushing a constitutional doctrine that dare not say its own name. The Court’s job is to announce constitutional values clearly and openly. That's what the Court did when it protected flag burning. Then the people can either accept or reject the Court’s approach. That is the only kind of constitutionalism that is consonant with democracy.

It is not clear to me that pragmatic accommodating is what Professor Ravitch himself is doing in his book. It is likely instead that he is just noting what has been happening. His description is accurate. But it is a recipe for public cynicism. Somehow, we need a law of church and state we can actually live with.

The End of Market Economics

1/12/2009--In this month’s edition of Portfolio.com, Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, has written an article entitled The End, which describes the deceipt, fraud and ineptitude that contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis. Lewis describes the investment approach of Steve Eisman over the last few years. Eisman could see that these loans would default, so he shorted the market. In other words, Eisman profited from noticing what everyone else must have known but found it more profitable to ignore.

Lewis describes Eisman’s outrage at the selfish greed that motivated investment advisors and institutions to play games with the money of their clients without caring very much whether these investments would be a good idea for these people. Indeed, the money flow required that no one ask any probing questions, especially not the rating companies who acted in willful ignorance. None of these investment people will go to jail, apparently.

At the same time I was reading this article, I was in San Diego at a law professors conference listening to Richard Epstein, Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, praising the private market and offering it as a model for African economic development. The conjunction of these two events really struck me.

It occurs to me that the reason Epstein is so little shaken by the debacle of the past year—Epstein kept saying, “Don’t blame me for these policies”—is that he is very little interested in how markets actually work, and very interested instead in how markets are said to work. Epstein is committed only to ideology.

It is very hard to say that the market is efficient when it crashes so often. To be a serious market proponent these days would require some really hard thinking. And some policy innovations. But Epstein is not interested in that. We really do need a new approach to economics that does not go back to socialism.

Steelers Win

1/11/2009--In Hallowed Secularism there will still be football. I'll get back to the blog tomorrow.

So Help Me God?

1/9/2009—Yesterday, the newspapers were buzzing with two questions concerning President Obama’s inauguration: would Obama finish the oath of office with the words, “so help me God” and would Michael Newdow, late of his court challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance, be permitted to sue in federal court to bar all references to God at the inauguration?

The simple answers to the questions are yes and no. Yes, Obama will say “So help me God” because, aside from whether he seeks God’s aid, to fail to say this formula would cost him tremendous political support he has already shown he is not going to throw away. Obama did not run with God during the campaign to change course now.

As for Newdow, I presume he lacks standing to bring this challenge, whatever the merits. This seems like the classic instance of a “generalized grievance” that federal courts refuse to hear.

But there is a deeper and more troubling question: are we destined to go on in this stupid way? Are there really only two choices—either we ban all references to divinity or we endorse biblical monotheism? This is not just the woodiness of secularists. The United States Supreme Court has offered the people only three choices—mandated government neutrality toward religion, which is what Newdow is trying to enforce, “ceremonial deism”, which means the Justices do not believe references to God matter thus insulting both sides, and endorsement of monotheism, which is Justice Scalia’s position. The latter seems totally inconsistent with the constitutional prohibition against establishment of religion.

As we become more secular, these faulty formulations promise more, and more bitter, confrontation, until the secularists win, years in the future. But what will they have won? So help me God will then be replaced with a dreary materialism. It will be so help me malls.

What we need is a new understanding of what these religious formulations can mean. Not what they are meant to mean, but what they are capable of. The word God has a rich history going far beyond Scalia’s narrow monotheism. Just for example, what if the word God in the inauguration implies that history has a normative shape that we must seek to emulate—Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “arc of the moral universe”. Not only might Newdow agree that there is such a reality, he would certainly agree that it is not unconstitutional for government to assert it. Believers would agree that even non-believers should be able to see this. Thus, the beginning of the end of the culture wars.

This is what my book, For the Establishment of Religion, argues the courts should do. The courts should find an inclusive and meaningful reinterpretation of these religious symbols. By simply showing this inclusiveness, the courts would be creating inclusiveness.

Signs of the Struggle Over Secularism in Borders Bookstore

1/7/2009--I was recently browsing in a Borders Bookstore in Pittsburgh, in the religion section. To my surprise, I found a shelf labeled “Atheism” among the shelves of comparative religion, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and so forth.

Surely this is a new phenomenon. Ten years ago, would one have found “atheism” separately listed, let alone listed among the religion categories? (Not that I know where else atheism might go—philosophy? Self help? There is a very large section entitled “Metaphysical Studies”. But this section is not dedicated to philosophy or religion. Rather, it seems a sort of new age mysticism corner, with ghosts and tarot cards. Is this an indication of creeping American nuttiness?)

The atheism shelf is small. And it seems dedicated to the kind of reflexive anti-religious spirit exemplified by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Yet, in the midst of it, there was a book entitled The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by the French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville. The tone of this book is quite different. Here one finds an appreciation of the religious tradition and a willingness to explore common points of reference. This book sounds more than a little like Hallowed Secularism.

I think bookshelves like these should be called secularism, not atheism. Of course it is true that anyone who does not believe in the existence of a personal God who intervenes or at least can intervene in the universe is literally an atheist (a—not—theos—God). Yet, for the secularist who is open to spiritual reality and to the power of justice in history, the word God can function as a symbol of just such commitments. The word secularism would announce the coming contest between secularists open to the religious tradition and the atheists who simply oppose religion, usually in the name of some kind of materialism or humanism, or perhaps in the name of nothing at all.

Kentucky Legislator Tom Riner and the Wall of Separation

1/5/2009--The New York Times story yesterday about Tom Riner and his constant quest for more public expression of God is a story about an opportunity to finally lay to rest some of the culture wars. Riner wants more expressions of gratitude to “Almighty God”, including a legislated reference to God’s providence by the State Office of Homeland Security.

Some or all of this may be unconstitutional under the courts’ current interpretation of the Establishment Clause, but it will be helpful to ask just why that might be. My manuscript, For the Establishment of Religion, argues that these religious expressions are constitutional only if interpreted differently from the way that Riner understands them. Riner undoubtedly is endorsing the God of the Bible, maybe even Jesus Christ. My book argues that references to God are constitutional because they are not unequivocally sectarian endorsements of this kind, but might mean something different, such as the meaningfulness of history and the objectivity of values.

Those who favor a strict separation of church and state seriously misunderstand the kind of polity we have always been. For example, the Constitution omits the word God. So, the separationist concludes, America cannot formally endorse God. But the word God appears everywhere else, such as in the Declaration of Independence and on our money. So, a prohibition on the endorsement of God cannot possibly be the only or best constitutional interpretation of the Establishment Clause, even aside from the political fact that the people insist on such endorsements.

The point should not be that God is not named, but that God is not defined in our tradition. Riner is wrong to insist that the God that may be acknowledged must be his version of God. His actions may be constitutional in promoting the public use of the word God, but his intentions are not.

What if this were actually said to Riner? What if Riner came to see that it is unfair and unconstitutional to tell people with public money just what God means, but that it is okay to acknowledge God as long as there is absolutely no official definition. He might come to see this as a legitimate bow to pluralism.

My aim is to keep America pious in the sense of committed to something beyond materialism and relativism. God as part of the public square is crucial to this effort. But I mean to include many people who think of themselves as atheists and many more who do not endorse Riner’s version of God, including myself. I have a feeling that a grand and important compromise along these lines is possible.

The Fighting in Gaza

1/3/2009--The depressing, developing catastrophe in Gaza is a source of distrust of religion for many people. I make the point in the book, Hallowed Secularism, that the hatreds spawned by religion are one reason that secularism is growing. Jesus said, By their fruits will you know them. Well, the fruits of institutional religion have been violence all too often.

Yet, the fighting in Gaza is not about religion, at least not primarily. I read in the Jewish Chronicle in Pittsburgh that Hamas had made proposals and had premised acceptance of these proposals on a cessation of bombing Israeli towns. I don’t say this to suggest that Hamas is in the right, but to suggest that the fighting in Gaza is not directly about the ultimate existence of Israel.

There should be a rule of international relations for the United States—whoever wins a fair election is the legitimate government. When Hamas won the most recent elections, what would have happened if it had been recognized as the legitimate government? Certainly matters would be no worse than they are now.

As most Israelis certainly are aware, there is no security for Israel in continuing military confrontation. There is no future in that. There must be peace. And ultimately that means convincing average people on both sides. Democracy is the only way to do that. But that means that Hamas must be permitted to govern. As long as Hamas does not cancel future elections, the democratic experiment must be permitted to go forward. Won’t the Palestinian voters eventually vote for peace? Or, do we imagine they are different from us, from the rest of humanity?

The religious threat in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not from Islam, but from the settler movement in Israel. That is where one hears that God gave all the land to the Jews. Let the Jews of America confront this imperial tendency in Torah and not worry so much about the flaws in Islam, real though they may also be.

Ursula K. LeGuin Responds

12/31/2008--Readers of this blog are aware of the role the science fiction classic The Dispossessed plays in the book I recently finished, For the Establishment of Religion. I used one scene from that book to illustrate the relationship of institutional religion to the broader reach of religion that I argue government may establish. One of the characters in the book states that religion is the profoundest relationship a human being can have to the cosmos. My point was that government may perfectly well promote that kind of relationship, but may not promote any particular religion.

I wrote to the author, Ms. LeGuin alerting her to my borrowing and she graciously responded. She objected mildly to the use I was making of her character. She wondered why government would be involved and feared for the wall of separation. She noted that belief is often the enemy of mystery, which is perhaps why she was loose in her treatment of religion in the novel.

Let me respond to Ms. LeGuin here so as not to become tedious to her. Government in our system is a source of cultural values. That is not so true in her book, which deals with a society without formal governing structures. But even in her anarchist setting, social pressure does the same job of setting the cultural context, which is one of the points of the book.

In our society, secularism is rapidly growing. The question is, what kind of secularism will it be? I want government to promote the objectivity of values and to oppose materialism, post-modern humanism and nihilism. I believe these latter worldviews are becoming a kind of default position for many. This is not a matter of doctrine or mystery, but of approaches to reality. Government may promote a healthy culture just as it may promote a healthy physical infrastructure.

A happy and healthy new year to my readers.

Hegel on Hallowed Secularism

12/29/2008--To be anticipated by Hegel is no shame. To be anticipated by Jurgen Habermas interpreting Hegel is still okay I guess. But to be anticipated by Fred Dallmayr criticizing Habermas’ interpretation of Hegel, well, that is not much of an accomplishment.

The text in question is Fred Dallmayr, Margins of Political Discourse (State Univ. NY Press 1989). Dallmayr is discussing and critiquing Jurgen Habermas' positions in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1987). According to Dallmayr, in the chapter on Hegel Habermas begins with the young Hegel in the theological writings: “Habermas points to a certain Romantic or mythopoetic version of reconciliation which Hegel shared with Schelling and Holderlin, his friends in the Tubingen seminary. Countering both the orthodoxy of positive (or established) religion and the abstractness of Enlightenment ideas, these writings appealed to a purified public faith or civil religiosity as the bond tying together and reconciling the conflicting segments of society. Only when represented in public festivals and cults and linked with myths engaging heart and phantasy—Hegel argued at the time—could a religiously mediated reason ‘permeate the entire fabric of the state’” 42.

This sounds very much like Hallowed Secularism, which also seeks a civil religiosity that avoids every dogmatic assertion. Hegel thus anticipated the idea of something like what the upcoming book and this blog are about.

Aside from the question of whether ties of this kind could lead to social “reconciliation,” which is how Dalllmayr presents Habermas’ interpretation, the question for us today is how such a phenomenon comes about. Upon what is Hegel’s civil religiosity built?

For Hegel, the answer to that question lies in the realm of the political or social. Thus, religion there involves relationships within the state. For Hallowed Secularism today, the answer will lie in the realm of science. Religion today must be natural in the sense of scientific regularity.

Chanukah—the Victory of the Taliban

12/26/2008--Tonight is the beginning of the seixth day of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, thus six lights tonight. I learned growing up that Chanukah represented teh victory of religious liberty, that Antiochus Epiphanes, emperor of the Seleucid Empire, seized the Second Temple in 168 B.C., forbidding Jewish worship and requiring worship of the Greek gods instead. I was taught that the holiday commemorates the rededication of the holy Temple in Jerusalem after the Jews' 164 B.C. victory over the hellenists.

Here is how the story is usually told: The fighting began in Modiin, a village not far from Jerusalem. A Greed officer and soldiers assembled the villagers, asking them to bow to an idol and eat the flesh of a pig, activities fobidden to Jews. The officer asked Mattathias, a Jewish High Priest, to take part in the ceremony. He refused and another villager stepped forward and offered to do it instead. Mattathias became outraged, took out his sword and killed the man; then he killed the officer. His five sons and the othere villagers then attacked and killed the soldiers. Mattathias' family went into hiding in the nearby moutains, where many other Jews who wanted to fight the Greeks joinged them. They attacked Greek soldiers whenever possible. After three years, Mattathias' son Judah Maccabee, Judah the hammer, retook Jerusalem. But there was not enough oil to keep the ritual menorah in the Temple lit. Miraculously, the menorah burned for eight days, enough time to procure more oil.

The later rabbis had their doubts about Chanukah. For one thing, the victory of the Maccabees led to the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty that persecuted religious opponents and, if I remember correctly, introduced the practice of cruxifixion of critics. The persecuted groups included the party that later became the Pharisees, who later became the rabbinic movement that created the Talmud.

In addition, the rabbis of the Talmud did not favor armed revolt against the overwhelming power of Rome, which the earlier revolt tended to inspire. Rabbinic Judaism began its life as a separate national movement with the opposition by Yochanan ben Zakkai to the war against Rome (66-73 A.D.) that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. The legend is told that during the siege of Jerusalem Zakkai arranged to be carried out of the city in a coffin so he could negotiate with the commander of the Roman forces, Vespasian. Zakkai predicted that Vespasian would become Emperor and that the Temple would soon be destroyed. In return, Vespasian granted Zakkai three wishes, including the right to resettle in Javne and continue teaching. Javne became the founding academy of Talmudic Judaism. The rabbis were realists, not zealots.

In this light, one can look differently at the range of opinion among the Jewish people at the time of the Hellenic Empires. Presumably, some of the Jews at the time did not want to give up Judaism but to begin an accommodation of Judaism to the then-modern world of Greek civilization. The mythical killing of the villager might then remind us not of religious liberty but of its opposite--of the tyranny of religious zealots who impose their fundamentalism by violence against their opponents who wish to live both religous and modern lives. In other words, the Maccabees could be viewed in a light similar to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and all the other religious bigots in the world who are willing to kill those who do not follow their interpretation of religious traditions. I have often wondered why liberal Jews so love Chanukah when they would have been among the first victims of the Maccabees.

The HumanLight Holiday

12/24/2008—Yesterday, Brad Linder of NPR did a story about HumanLight, the secular holiday that coincides with the winter solstice period. According to the story, a number of humanist groups celebrate the holiday in a family-friendly way, with songs, stories and even candle lighting. The story showcased one such celebration, in the Philadelphia area last weekend.

According to the story, HumanLight was founded eight years ago to highlight reason and human achievement. Clearly, however, it also is a way for non-religious families to participate in the Christmas season.

According to Joe Fox, President of the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, with whom I spoke after listening to the program, there is some controversy about HumanLight within the secular community because it is so religious in tone and feel.

HumanLight seems to perfectly represent the struggle in secularism over its connection to religion. My book Hallowed Secularism argues that secularism needs religion in order to be healthy and to serve a flourishing humanity. It is not surprising that parents would want their children to have a little magic during the holiday season. HumanLight follows the pattern that Hallowed Secularism predicts.

On the other hand, secularists here make the same mistake they are always making—over-praising human reason. Reason, after all, gave us Cold War mutually assured destruction and the calculated Vietnam War. Who would think you could separate human beings into two different parts—feeling and reasoning? Reason here really just means no supernatural world and its use that way is misleading.

Why celebrate human beings with all our faults? Better to take a leaf from Christianity and celebrate a holiday called “New Beginnings” that would emphasize the capacity of reality to allow for something new. That is the message of Christmas, perfectly captured in President Obama’s title—obviously Church inspired—The Audacity of Hope. In the darkness of human power—that of Rome—in a stable among the poor, reality responds with an event wholly unpredictable that brings a new grace to the world. Don’t praise us. Praise reality.

In the story, there was one moment that did not serve to overinflate the human. At the celebration, the children watched pictures of galaxies. The wonder of it brought them to silence. More of that. Less of us.

A New Kind of Faith

12/22/2008—I had the usual experience recently at a seasonal party of mentioning the word “truth” and hearing someone ask, “whose truth?”

As C.S. Lewis once suggested, the commitment to the objectivity of values—the belief that some things really are wrong or beautiful—is the real dividing line between religious people and nonreligious people. And, as he also knew, that dividing line does not respect churches or professions of atheism. Many people who call themselves religious are relativists and many who do not, believe passionately in the objectivity of values: think of secular human rights activists.

This observation brings forth strange bedfellows. Conservative jurisprudence is thoroughly relativistic, which is why Justice Scalia writes of history and text and never of truth. Some secularists understand how crucial the objectivity of values is. Sam Harris once proclaimed that he believed in objective right and wrong in a Newsweek interview. Austin Dacey has written a book—The Secular Conscience—defending the idea and criticizing secular relativism.

The problem for secularists is that without God, the concept of the objectivity of values requires rethinking. As Charles Taylor puts it, the phenomenology of universality is frustrated by an ontology of immanence. Or, to be blunt, who stands behind goodness as a guarantee that it is real if there is no God?

That rethinking has not yet been done. This is why “spirituality”, as in the common phrase “I am spiritual but not religious” is usually ethically and historically empty, reduced to personal experiences of transcendence. Truth is normative and operates in and through history. We have to make a public commitment, either expressly or with our lives.

It seems to me that the belief in, and commitment to, the objectivity of values, of right and wrong in this context, is a faith claim. It is a faith claim not really different from belief in God, except that the laws of science lead to skepticism here differently than they do in regard to theism. Is the secularist willing to die for truth, knowing full well that there is no heaven and no Messiah for redemption? The answer can be yes, for this is a new kind of faith.

The Hatred of Unions

12/18/2008—One cleavage that can still be seen between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants is the attitude toward unions. I don’t think hostility toward unions is pronounced among Catholics. It certainly is among certain Protestants. The difference may lie in differing understandings of solidarity. Conservative Protestantism in America is very individualistic, even heretically so. Karl Barth would not be at home in it.

American hostility to unions is a long standing tendency. It is part of why socialism did not quite catch on here. You see it in the hostility toward public education and teacher unions. And you see it in attitudes toward the automobile loans as opposed to aid to the financial industry. It did not occur to anyone to ask about compensation among ordinary workers in the financial sector, whose compensation, of course, is quite extraordinary. Somehow, that was not even on the table, whereas it is regarded as an affront that ordinary autoworkers make good money. Naturally, good money isn’t so good when your industry is asking for public money, but that was true for Wall Street brokers too.

I don’t know why many American Christians do not see the importance of unions. Our economy is foundering today in part because ordinary wages have lagged. They have lagged for many reasons, but we should not assume that pure market forces are always at work. Partly, management takes more because it can. It can because unions are weak. Stronger unions raise all wages. Ask the nonunion workers at the Nissan plant in Tennessee whether they want to see the United Auto Workers Union broken. They may not want to be unionized, but I imagine they know that potential unionization improves their situation. We need to return to an economy of widely spread wealth. It will be best for the rich too.

Is Dobby Really Free?

12/16/2008--At the end of the movie Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry tricks Lucius Malfoy into freeing his house elf, Dobby. By the rules of Harry’s universe, masters can grant manumission to what are essentially slaves by giving to the creature an article of clothing. [This is not so odd; in the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament, certain transactions are attested by giving one's shoe to the other party]

Harry secretes a sock in a book that itself is evidence of seditious activity and then accuses Malfoy of having given the book to an innocent party. The charge is a ruse designed to distract Malfoy from looking at the book before giving the book to Dobby. The ruse works.

The question is, why is this trick effective? Obviously Malfoy never intended to free Dobby. Why isn’t intention required? By the logic of Harry’s trick, any elf could easily free himself simply by secreting articles of clothing all manner of containers that would then be unknowingly passed back to the elf.

This issue of the intent required to free a slave, and other aspects of the law of manumission, was the subject of Bob Cover’s groundbreaking 1984 book, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. A trick like the one Harry pulled would probably not suffice to transfer any other kind of property, absent special circumstances. Cover examined the willingness of judges to bend the rules in favor of freedom. The book raised the question of the relationship of positive law to natural law, or transcendent norms.

The movie, and the book upon which it was based, apparently assume that Dobby is free despite the dishonesty involved. The question is, why would that be so?

The Firing of Don Guter

12/11/2008—The rest of the world is unaware that here at Duquesne University School of Law, the Dean, Don Guter, was summarily fired yesterday. No reason was given. Dean Guter did not deserve to be fired. The law school is doing very well on his watch and there is no unmentioned scandal going on. President Dougherty just wanted his own person in as dean. Guter was too independent in his judgment. This is not big news. Things like this happen all the time.

But this is a Catholic Law School. Not only that, but we hear all the time about Duquesne’s “mission”, to serve God by serving students.

I make the point in the book Hallowed Secularism that one of the reasons for rising secularism is that religious institutions do not behave as well as secular ones. That is not always true, but it is true here at Duquesne. When it happens, religion itself suffers. Religion is made to look ridiculous in the eyes of the non-religious world.

Karl Barth once said there is the church of Esau and the church of Jacob. There is the man-made church institution and then there is the representative of the holy spirit--verily God’s representative on earth. It isn’t fair to expect religious institutions to be better than human beings tend to be.

That is true but it is not the point. I would like to see the representatives of Our Religions under the weight of representing God. I would like to see them always asking themselves, what will the nonreligious think if we do a certain questionable thing? This is the way that Jews used to ask, what will the goyim think?

I wish President Dougherty had said to himself before he acted, I had better be especially sure and especially just, because not just my reputation will suffer if I am wrong. Nor just the reputation of Duquesne University. But God’s reputation will suffer. And it has.

The Future of Secularism in American Politics

12/8/2008--for the content of this post, go to The Huffington Post blog at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-ledewitz/the-future-of-secularism_b_149232.html

The Conclusion of For the Establishment of Religion

12/7/2008--I have finished the manuscript of what I hope will become the third book in my trilogy about religion in American life: For the Establishment of Religion. Here is the conclusion:

At the beginning of her classic science fiction novel, The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin describes a space flight between two worlds that had been cut off from each other. An inhabitant of one world, the physicist Shevek of Anarres, is being transported by a crew from the other world.

In one scene from the flight, Shevek asks the ship’s doctor why the Second Officer seems to be afraid of him. The Doctor tells Shevek that the Second Officer is religious and knows that “there’s no religion on Anarres.”

Shevek replies, “No religion? Are we stones on Anarres?”

The Doctor responds, “I mean established religion—churches, creeds—“

Shevek ponders this and comes to a new conclusion:

I see… . You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws. …

The vocabulary makes it difficult. [T]he word religion is…rare. Not often used. …[Y]ou could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? That we could do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship with the cosmos?

Our situation in law has not changed at all from the one LeGuin described over thirty years ago. The vocabulary makes it difficult. This book has argued that the government may not establish religion in the sense of churches and creeds, but must establish the religious capacity, or try to, or at least be allowed to try to, if society is to flourish.

This is not a matter of religion versus secularism. I am a secularist. There are many kinds of secularism. It is a matter instead of being open to the profoundest relationship with the cosmos. The New Atheists and many who favor a strict separation of church and state are not open. They are not open to mystery. They not open to the transcendent. Under their influence, and without a counterbalance in the culture, their narrowness may one day come to dominate our social climate. Then we will be stones indeed.

The United States Supreme Court has a role to play here: positive or negative; opening or closing. At the moment, the Justices seem only to have two modes. On the one hand, separation of church and state in the broad sense of opposition to any public expression that has the smell of religion about it. On the other hand, the conservatives, just waiting for their chance to enthrone the Bible as the winner of a contest to be the dominant public expression.

There need be no winners and losers. Let the Court announce that we share a religious capacity and that government, when it establishes religion, is simply trying to keep that human capacity alive in a world of deadening technology, consumption and entertainment. Even when the government uses traditional religious symbols, language and images, it is still trying to keep open a universal hope. It is not declaring winners and losers. If the Court were to announce this, law would occupy a role it has recently forgotten: peacemaker.

Of course, there will still be those who honestly contest the religious capacity, who dispute openness, who despise mystery. Perhaps they are right. And they will certainly have their say. But they have no right to government neutrality.

We are too used to thinking of established religion as a powerful force. It is not going to be so for very long. We had better begin to prepare for the day that it is not. Secularism may confidently put down its weapons. It is going to win the contest against established religion. But when it does, it is going to have to turn to its vanquished foe for help. When it does so, law should not stand in the way.

The Secularization of Islam

12/4/2008—We may look back at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai as the beginning of the secularization of Islam. That, at least, is how the Wars of Religion in Europe during the latter half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century affected religious life there. Those wars between Catholics and Protestants not only exhausted Europe, they played a part in delegitimizing Christianity among European elites. It was felt by many that any institution that could be responsible for such carnage must be bad.

In similar fashion, if Islamic leadership is unable to decouple Islam from fanatical violence, undoubtedly Islam will lose its educated youth. I do not mean to criticize Islam on these matters. That is not really for an outsider to do. But terrorism is never going to be a choice for the overwhelming majority of believers. If religion and violence are seen as partners, people will eventually turn away from religion.

I doubt that there is anything that Muslim leaders can actually do to isolate Islam’s violent minority. Monotheism of all kinds seems to have this potential for violence.

It took a hundred years in Europe for secularity to really take root. But it did. And there were many reasons for it. But religious violence clearly played a part. Perhaps in the future, Mumbai will be viewed as playing the same kind of part.

How Thankful Was Your Thanksgiving?

12/2/2008--How thankful was your Thanksgiving? Mine was not at all. I wrote in a prior post that Thanksgiving was not part of the culture wars. But, that is not really true. The context of genuine thankfulness marks the difference between a “religious” Thanksgiving and what we would now call a secular Thanksgiving.

This Thanksgiving, I was on a boat in Pittsburgh for a Thanksgiving cruise on the three rivers. It was very nice, with a large number of people. But the cruise people know better than to try to begin the festivities with a prayer. Or, maybe it was not even a prior bad experience. Maybe outside of traditional religion, we are out of the habit of prayer.

Hallowed Secularism must develop the habit thankfulness. This is as close to a healthy attitude toward reality as secularism can now get. But, of course, we need liturgy. Secularists cannot sit down to a Thanksgiving meal and say, “Heavenly Father, we give thee thanks.”

We should first be clear whether thankfulness is necessary. Should we be thankful? Or should we take the world as our right? Which of those two attitudes is healthier? Which one is closer to truth? Did we make the world, or was it a gift?

The world and all its good things can be a gift even though there is no person-like being who gave it. It could just be a gift.

I’m going to make sure next Thanksgiving to begin the meal by saying, “for what we am about to receive, we are thankful; for all the gifts of our lives, we are thankful”. And just so it does not seem awkward to a secularist, I am going to start with that prayer at every meal.

The Grace of Religious Believers

11/29/2008--Do you remember how the Amish reacted to the murder of young schoolchildren in their community? Do you remember how shocked the world was at their forgiveness and generosity? They did not give in to hate. It was quite a comparison to how we all reacted to 9/11.

Now read the reaction of a different religious community, the Lubavitch, to the murder of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife in Mumbai. Hear again the grace and care. Hear again how we are never to hate in response to evil. Hear again the promise of a better world, while we strive to improve this world every day.

Now, I ask you, fellow secularists, how are we going to live a life like this? Where will the resources and wisdom and peace come from? I don't know, but in the meantime we must draw our Religions close and learn what we can from them


Dear Friends,

Our hearts are shattered at the news from Mumbai where Rabbi Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg, emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe- Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, of righteous memory- were among those murdered in the terrorist attack on the Chabad House there. Tonight their little son Moshe'le, who was miraculously rescued, will mark his second birthday.

Gabi and Rivka uprooted themselves from a life of comfort and convenience to live thousands of miles away from the familiar surroundings of New York and Israel, and moved to India. There they inspired and cared for the local Jewish community, scores of Jewish tourists and business people who frequented their Chabad House. The Holtzberg's shared their love of Yiddishkeit and the warmth of their family with people of all backgrounds in India. And now they have made the ultimate sacrifice for our faith and community. They lived and died as exemplars of the Jewish people on the frontlines. May their souls be bound up in the eternal bonds of life and may their family be comforted among the mourners of Zion.

We have no words, we have no answers. We don't begin to understand G-d's ways, nor are we expected to. Only G-d Himself can restore the light of Moshe'le's life and comfort him and the rest of this aching world. And until He does that, we must continue their life's work. They deserve no less.

We will continue to try and emulate Gabi and Rivka, to seek out our brothers and sisters in every corner of our community, in every corner of the globe - with love and commitment - with acts of goodness and kindness, until that day when G-d Himself will wipe the tears from every face.

It's almost Shabbat. Candle lighting time tonight is 4:39. In a world that has suddenly become darker, we must bring in more light. We urge every Jewish woman to help transform that darkness with the light of Shabbat candles this Friday and every Friday. We call on every person to increase their mitzvot - acts of goodness and kindness - until the day G-d fulfills His promise to us and gives us a world transformed, perfected and redeemed.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yisroel and Chani Altein

The Habit of Hope

11/25/2008

Today is Thanksgiving. I am reminded that this is the one holiday about which religious believers and nonbelievers do not quarrel. Thanksgiving is beyond the culture wars.

This is the cultural option we need more of. At the moment, the believer and the nonbeliever see themselves as apart, really as enemies. This is not true, however. Even the Pope last week was misinterpreted. On certain matters there cannot be dialogue among the religions. On others, yes there can be, he said. But there is no threat in this. Our religions must remain as they are or they could not teach us secularists anything. Their dogmas are their own. Out of this does not come synthesis, but variety: a secularism that has learned from all the religions.

Thanksgiving is a gift to the secular world from the religious world. That is how we should think of the religions in general, as gifts.

I am finally finishing Ursula LeGuin’s book, The Dispossessed. It is remarkable and I recommend it to you. The book tries to imagine genuinely different human societies. At its center is a colony that tries to live a nonauthoritarian communism, a real anarchy. The book is not a pitch for this; it is not like Robert Heinlein’s 1966 ad for libertarianism, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. No human society avoids flaws.

What LeGuin’s book is really about is hope. In the book, humanity has ceased to hope. The physicist Shevek sees hope as somehow present in the structure of time. This is his new understanding of physics.

Hope is another gift from Our Religions, or some of them. When a politician like Barack Obama comes along and offers just a little of it, our thirst for hope comes rushing out. But hope does not come in the form a this or that person. It has to be believed in as a possibility, out of faith. Life can be really different. A secular society that thinks it is at war with religion, with the very notion of faith, is going to have a hard time sustaining hope. So we had better not become that kind of secular society.

Pleasant Grove City v. Summum

Since it now appears that the following letter to the editor will not be published by the New York Times, I can publish it here. The Pleasant Grove case, Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, was argued in the United States Supreme Court on Novemeber 12, 2008. The case arises out of a lawsuit in which a religious movement, Summum, sued a municipality to either remove a display of the Ten Commandments or allow it to put up a display on the same public land honoring its religious wisdom. The argument before the Supreme Court, however, did not involve the right of the City to display the Ten Commandments under the Establishment Clause. It only involved the right of Summum to put up its own display in the same area. The New York Times took an editorial position in favor of Summum. As the following critical letter indicates, this is a little hard to take seriously. In the case's current posture, I don’t see how Summum can possibly succeed.


To the Editor:

Your editorial position on the Pleasant Grove City case is incoherent. You suggest that the case is a matter of religious discrimination since the City elevated Christianity over another religion in allowing a Ten Commandments display but not a display by Summum. Logically, your objection should not be to any discrimination but to the elevation of Christianity in the first place. Summum originally did object to the Ten Commandments display on Establishment Clause grounds, but the case is not before the Supreme Court in that posture.

In the current posture of the case, Summum cannot possibly succeed. Either the original Ten Commandments display endorses Christianity--or Judeo-Christianity--in which case the proper relief is to remove it, not to add another religion--or the original display is speech by the government that endorses a secular ideal that the Ten Commandments merely symbolizes. If the latter is the case, the Ten Commandments display is not an endorsement of any religion, but is a kind of argument for the transcendent foundations of law similar to the commitment in the Declaration of Independence to unalienable rights. Either way, the proper answer is not to add a display by Summum.

Mike Huckabee’s Christian Party

11/22/2008--Henry Olsen, a Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal last January, after Mike Huckabee’s victory in the Iowa caucuses, that argued that Huckabee was trying to create a new kind of political movement along the lines of the Christian Democratic tradition in Europe. Huckabee’s populist economics combined with his Christian identification suggested, said Olsen, a “pro-faith” “pro-government” position that would be a challenge to the more secular, private property oriented Reagan wing of the Republican Party.

Now, while the Republicans are trying to figure out what comes next, Huckabee is back with a new book, "Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America", which judging by his appearance on NPR last week, represents his position in this Republican Party debate.

Huckabee’s position is probably out-of-touch politically at the moment, since our economic crisis is dominating everything. But that should not rule him out, since Ronald Reagan was also out of touch for awhile. The wheel may turn back to the questions that Huckabee is raising.

Undoubtedly some would say that creating a Christian Party of any kind violates constitutional principles of the separation of church and state. [Notice I don’t say it would be unconstitutional, since it plainly would not be that]. It is probably true that political division along religious lines would be anathema to the framers of our Constitution. So, let’s consider the constitutional principles that might be involved.

One fundamental constitutional principle seems to me to be that votes for a candidate should not be cast on the basis of identity. Of course voters violate this principle all the time, but just as President-elect Obama would be the first to say that African-Americans voters should not have voted for him because he is black, Huckabee would agree that voters who are Christian should only vote for him if their interpretations of the Gospel yield the same policies for public life that his interpretation does. He would agree that Christians should not vote for him just because he is a Christian. It is true that some of those policies touch on faith, such as literal expressions of faith in the public square. But, unless a display of the Ten Commandments on public property is itself ruled unconstitutional by the courts, having such displays there is just another policy. We can see plainly that Huckabee is not running on Christian identity because if offered support by “values conservatives” who are Jewish, Muslim, or secular, Huckabee would welcome them on principle—and not cynically.

This latter observation suggests that the legitimacy of voting for a substantive proposition, including Proposition 8 in California, does not usually depend on the motivation for the vote. The fact that Huckabee claims his policies are supported by the Gospel is not itself a ground to assert that his project violates constitutional principles.

Why then does Huckabee often use the visual symbols of Christianity? I suggest it is not to make a pitch to Christians. It is a different shorthand. It is a quite specific and well-understood shorthand for a collection of otherwise perfectly constitutional policies. I don’t agree with much that Huckabee proposes, but his kind of faith electioneering threatens no constitutional principle.

Ursula LeGuin on Economics

11/18/2008--In the midst of the short-term financial catastrophe that has enveloped much of the world, we must also think about the longer term. What kind of economic life should humankind have? Replying “market” to that question is not a complete answer. The question is, what assumptions about the nature of human beings are implied by the market? Perhaps we need to reject at least some of those assumptions.

Here is LeGuin’s take on economics from her novel The Dispossessed. The description is of Shevek, the anarchist physicist, trying to learn economics.

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the money-changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s act, even the terrible became banal.”

Our new economic arrangements, whatever they are to be, must begin here.

The Mormon church and Proposition 8

11/17/2008--According to the Associated Press, on Friday, November 7, protestors in Salt Lake City “marched around headquarters of the Mormon Church” chanting “Separate church and state... .” The protest was held to criticize the Church for its enthusiastic support of Proposition 8.

There has been more criticism of the Church since then. Today, a story appeared in the LA Times in which Jim Key, a spokesman for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, was quoted as follows: "We're making a statement that no one's religious beliefs should be used to deny fundamental rights to others… ." The story mentioned estimates, which could not be confirmed, that Mormons gave more than $20 to support Proposition 8.

Now, I was an opponent of Proposition 8 and I support gay marriage (I now wish I had sent some money to the effort to defeat Proposition, but I was guilty of thinking that such a thing could never pass in California). Nevertheless, I have to say that these quasi-constitutional criticisms make no sense. Obviously no one’s religious beliefs should be used to deny fundamental rights, but no one’s political beliefs should either. The question is whether gay marriage is a fundamental right. A majority of Californians does not think it is.

Do these critics really mean that our religious beliefs should not inform our voting? And that it is violation of the separation of church and state when they do? This will come as a shock to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Imagine now the opposite scenario. I go to the polls to vote against Proposition 8. Someone claims that I only support gay marriage because I learned in Hebrew School that all human beings are made in the image of God. This person then says by voting against Proposition 8 on this religious ground, I am violating neutrality toward religion. This is silly. Voters don’t need anybody’s permission to vote. And they come to their conclusion about how to vote through all kinds of considerations.

Next time, say that the Mormon leadership are bigots. Not that they mixed church and state.

Pope Benedict's Healthy Secularity

11/15/2008--According to media reports, Pope Benedict this week called for a “healthy secularity” in public life. While the Pope is particularly concerned with the role of religion in a quite secular Europe, we in America have to come to grips with precisely the same question: just what is a “healthy secularity”?

The project of Hallowed Secularism is one attempt to do exactly that for nonbelievers. But the matter can be looked at as a question of deep public policy under the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the Constitution.

A healthy secularity is one that does not choose among institutional religions or between religion and certain forms of secularism. It does, however, stand against nihilism, materialism and postmodern humanism in the name of objective meaning and justice in history. It openly encourages belief in this common core both by those persons who belong to churches and those who do not, those who believe in God and those who do not. It does not fear the use of traditional religious symbols, such as the word God, to express this common core, as long as it is clear that these symbols are not being used to prefer any one form of belief.

I hope that a call such as this for a healthy secularity might cut through the pro and anti religion debate that some secularists think is a crucial issue in the world.

The Fight Over Christmas

11/13/2008--Recently, the media have reported on the planned Washington D.C. bus advertising campaign by the American Humanist Association. The ads will proclaim, “Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness sake.” The ads contain a link to a humanist website.

The ads brought the following response from American Family Association President, Tim Wildmon, “It’s a stupid ad. …How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.” The AFA has its own “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas” campaign going.

As a nonbeliever, I think Mr. Wildmon missed a great opportunity. Forgetting the Bible for a minute—for after all, the Bible does not speak at all clearly on most issues that confront us—the humanists would probably agree with him that goodness is an objective standard not dependent on human will. Once upon a time, nonbelievers confronted the implications of relativism, but my impression is that today’s humanists do not. Even the tone of the proposed ad suggests there is such a thing as goodness.

Belief in objective right and wrong is not exactly the same as belief in God, but C.S. Lewis, for one, considered the former commitment to be the one that really defines the common core of religious belief—including forms of philosophy we do not usually consider religious.

Mr. Wildmon should have responded by asking the reporter to go back to the humanists. “Tell them I think it is right to kill people,” he should have said, and “ask them whether, if I think that is good, it is good? If the answer is no, ask them what standard other than human will could exist in a world without God?”

I think there is an answer to that question, but I’m not sure the humanists want to debate the matter.

From the Conclusion of For the Establishment of Religion

11/11/2008--In her science fiction classic, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin describes the trip of a physicist from an anarchist planet to a more Earth-like planet. On the trip, the physicist, Shevek, asks the ship’s doctor why a crew member seems to dislike him.

“[I[t’s religious bigotry”, replies the doctor. The crew member belongs to a religious group and consider Shevek a “dangerous atheist” because “there’s no religion,” that is, “established religion—churches, creeds” on Shevek’s planet.

Shevek is surprised. “No religion? Are we stones… ?”

But Shevek figures it out. “You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you accept no morality outside the laws.” Shevek says there is religion on his planet. The Fourth Mode—religion—is one of the “Categories”. Few people practice all the Modes. “But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind, you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? How could we do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship man has with the cosmos?”

In America, and indeed much of the West, we make the same mistake the crew member made. We imagine that secularists are without “religion” just because they are without churches. Our law of church and state is even based on this strange idea. That is why we say government must be neutral about “religion” when we should mean merely that government should be neutral about the different churches.

But in America, unlike Shevek, even the secularists imagine they are outside the religious sphere. There are even atheist voices that argue against “religion” and fail to distinguish good religion from bad.

One cannot be without religion—or at least a lot of suppression is needed to try. And as Shevek explains, religion as a category is not anti-science.

Who Lost California?

11/8/2008--The question is, who was at fault? Like many others, I was surprised and disappointed that Proposition 8 passed, thus amending the California Constitution and in effect overturning a State Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in the name of that same Constitution. I would now like to name the guilty party who caused that result.

Part of the blame goes to the dishonest leaders of the Christian right who convinced many ordinary people that there was more to this court decision than merely allowing gay people to marry. They claimed that preaching against homosexuality would next be criminalized. But, of course, free speech remains free, free exercise of religion remains free and overturning gay marriage does not prevent legislation against hate speech. Proposition 8 had nothing to do with religious liberty and anyone who says otherwise thinks the gospel needs lies to support it.

Part of the blame goes to the majority of voters, who simply lacked sufficient compassion to recognize justice when it was right in front of them.

Part of the blame goes to whatever moron thought that the way to gain the right of gay marriage in California was through a court decision. Just as a practical matter, such a decision inevitably would be met by a proposed constitutional amendment. Why would anyone think that such an election would be easily won? Surely in California legislation less far reaching but less likely to set off a constitutional amendment could have been passed. Now California is stuck with a Constitution that will have to be changed again later.

Much blame goes to the California Supreme Court. That court struck down a state ban on same-sex marriage in a 4-3 decision in May, spurring the Proposition 8 campaign. Why don’t State Supreme Courts notice that federal courts, already burned by Roe v. Wade, leave gay marriage alone? The State courts keep treating this issue as purely a legal one without considering what we in the law call prudential matters—are people ready for it? Will the legal arguments be persuasive? What will happen next? Even the terms of court decisions make a big difference. A court can strike down a statutory ban on gay marriage but leave the decision in abeyance until the legislature can deal with it, leaving open all kinds of compromises, such as civil unions, differing terminology etc. Justice Scalia once said that Roe did not really aid abortion rights in the long run because it nationalized what had been building state by state compromises on abortion and created the pro-life movement. Courts are better threats than actors and judges should remember that.

Okay, the actor, actually actors, who are most to blame for Proposition 8 are the naton’s law schools, for failing to teach an organic constitutionalism that recognizes that governance is never just a matter of principle. Law is not a science but an art. And a Constitution does not belong to lawyers but to the people. Its interpretation must always ultimately remain their interpretation. Courts can only lead.

God and the Election of Barack Obama

11/6/2008--Listening to comments of high school students concerning the election of Barack Obama on NPR this morning I was uplifted by their awakened hope for the future. Whatever you think of Obama, his election was something genuinely new and hopeful in the world.

When the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann described the core biblical understanding of God, he emphasized this sense of surprise: “The Old Testament insists that there is a moral shape to the public process that curbs the raw exercise of power. It equally insists that there is a hidden cunning in the historical process that is capable of surprise and that prevents the absolutizing of any program or power.” This election is the kind of surprise Brueggemann was pointing to.

I don’t mean Barack Obama was sent from God. I mean that at the heart of reality, there is grace. We don’t get what we deserve. Something wonderful and unexpected will often happen.

President Barack Obama

11/4/2008--The work of Gettysburg has now come to completion and Abraham Lincoln can rest in peace at last.

Praying for Victory in this Election

11/4/2008--I have been asked the following question: while the religious believer can pray for a good outcome today, what can the hallowed secularist pray for? This is my short answer:

Let's assume that you believe in the God of the Bible. What would you pray for in terms of this election? It would be blasphemy to pray that God intervene and give victory to your candidate. After all, you might be on the "wrong" side or there might not be a "right" side (see Lincoln: we don't hope God is on our side but that we are on God's side). So, if you are a believer, you can only pray that you have been true to God, or have tried to be true, and that God have compassion on flawed humanity so that we don't get what we deserve. I think the hallowed secularist prays in precisely this way, except substituting for "true to God," true to that which most unifies all reality and hopes for compassion for all (See the Sh'ma, God is one).

Religion and the 2008 Campaign

11/2/2008--Now that the campaign is almost over, and whoever wins, we can ask whether religion played much of a role. The obvious answer is, no. Religion, and other related issues, like gay rights, were overwhelmed by the economic catastrophe that affected almost all Americans, indeed much of the world.

The less obvious answer is, no, but because the Democrats did so much to take it out of play. All through the primaries and the election, the Democrats constantly referred to God and did everything to seem faith-friendly—except changing their positions on substantive issues, which they did not do.

The unlikely answer, though still a part of the story, is of course. The religious right ultimately got a candidate of its own after all: Governor Palin. And Senator Obama lost many votes over the religion issue, whether on substance, the Muslim rumor or Reverend Wright. And the fight within the Catholic Church over the permissibility of supporting a pro-choice candidate was truly something awesome to behold. I’m certain many votes will still be cast on religious grounds in 2008.

P.S. A recent comment asked whether I have any enthusiasm for Barack Obama. I do. Quite a lot in fact, though the task facing the next President is monumental. It’s just that I have supported and admired John McCain for a very long time. I think in 2000 he would have made a better President than Al Gore. But not a better one than Barack Obama in 2008, for reasons related both to Obama and to McCain.

John McCain versus Barack Obama

10/31/2008--The story in the New York Review of Books by Mark Danner (“Obama & Sweet Potato Pie”) reminds me just how much I admire John McCain and always have admired him. Do people remember that McCain said he would not use Reverend Wright against Senator Obama and that he has not done so? Try imagining any other politician sticking to such a pledge, including Obama, who once pledged to accept public campaign financing and then went back on it because it was no longer in his interest to keep his word.

I can only hope that Obama is a moral man, unlike Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But if John McCain were elected President, I would not have to wonder. McCain once chose torture over betraying his fellow men.

But, of course, this is not an election between McCain and Obama. Even aside from everything else, voting for McCain would mean voting for Governor Sarah Palin and I know I do not trust her.

The “everything else” is the system of governance that each candidate brings along. That system of governance under President Bush brought lies and division and disaster. That system of governance even today does not understand why invading Iraq was a mistake. It still does not see the wrong in torture. It still does not believe global warming. It still thinks government is the problem. It still does not want average wages to grow too much. And it still governs by stirring up hatred. That system has to go.

John McCain does not buy into that governing system. In some ways he has been its most effective critic. He has also been its victim.

But he never convinced me that he would be able to resist that system once he was elected. He never showed me that he could distance himself from its arrogance and aggression. I think if elected, McCain would be forced into all of that system’s assumptions and actions. I'm voting for Obama.

The Federalist Society and Free Speech

10/29/2008--The New York Times today contained an article by Charlie Savage about President George Bush’s judicial appointments to the lower federal courts. The story highlighted a decision by the Eighth Circuit that South Dakota could force doctors to tell their patients who are seeking an abortion that abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being” — using exactly that language. The doctors had argued that the law violated their right to free speech. The story then recounted how President Bush pointed to his record of appointments with pride at a conference sponsored by the Cincinnati chapter of the Federalist Society, characterized in the story as “the elite network for the conservative legal movement.”

I haven’t looked at the decision and I don’t know whether, for example, government funding is involved, but I can say that if this is an example of a decision popular with conservatives, then I have lost track of the principles of the conservative movement.

As described in the story, the government is interfering with a private relationship of doctor and patient, and forcing the doctor to say what he or she might choose not to say in the context of that relationship. This sounds like precisely the kind of government paternalism and government tyranny that I thought the Federalist Society opposed. To me the decision represents a hypocritical sop to the Republican Party courtship of the pro-life movement. The decision seems completely unprincipled.

I would have no objection if the government took out ads trumpeting exactly this message, a message incidentally that I agree with. But a doctor is not a government billboard. Whatever happened to liberty?

Religulous Again

10/27/2008--Now I have seen Religulous, Bill Maher’s jeremiad against religion, and I loved it. I’m still thinking about the movie, but here are some impressions.

First, Maher is a religious seeker, in fact he may be a hallowed secularist. For all his professed atheism, he appreciates religion. He calls his doubt a luxury. If he were in a foxhole, he would be a believer and he has called upon God in the past. Maher certainly loves Jesus, who functions for him as the gold standard of human behavior and comportment. If you were a Christian, you would want all Christians to care as much for Jesus as Maher does.

Second, the biggest threats to human welfare that Maher identifies—nuclear weapons and pollution—are in no sense products of religious conduct. They are products of the secular reason Maher champions. Maybe religious people are willing to blow humanity up and endanger the planet because they believe in a “last day”, but secularists have done, and are doing these things now, without such a justification. Americans actually dropped two atomic weapons. No one else has done so. Why blame religion?

Finally, for now, there is nothing in the movie about how to live. Why should we sacrifice our own interests for the sake of others? The most moving scene in the movie is the crucifixion show at the biblical theme park in Florida. Maher wants to make fun, but the power of seeing good debased by evil speaks to us despite the silliness of the setting. Maher feels it too. He just does not want to admit it.

I love Jim Webb

10/26/2008--I just read the June 26, 2008 New York Review of Books article by Elizabeth Drew about Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Drew was writing before Senator Obama selected Joe Biden for his running mate and she was openly rooting for Jim Webb.

Why was Webb not the choice? Lots of perfectly good reasons, including Webb’s views on women in the military. But probably more to the point, Obama wanted to reassure voters. Joe Biden is perhaps the most reassuring presence one could have. (This makes him sound like Cheney, who was selected for some of the same reasons—I hope the Biden choice turns out differently).

It is hard to share the limelight. The apparently genuine partnership between President Clinton and Vice-President Gore was the exception, and even that relationship broke down during the 2000 election campaign.

Senator Obama strikes me as much more of a loner than is the gregarious Clinton. That is not a criticism. Lincoln was a loner as well. But I don’t think there will be partners in an Obama Administration. That will be ok with Biden. Possibly not with Webb.

None of this will be of any interest, of course, if Senator McCain stages a historic comeback.

There is no pro-life vote in this election

10/24/2008--The controversy over the remarks by Duquesne Law School’s former Dean, Nicholas Cafardi, and his activities on behalf of Catholics for Obama, led me to wonder whether there is a genuine pro-life vote that one could cast in this Presidential election. I should explain that I call myself pro-life, although I don’t think the term really fits. I would like to see Roe v. Wade overruled and in theory I believe that life begins at conception, but I am completely inconsistent about these commitments. I would never want to see the law of homicide applied to pregnant women and doctors and I support exceptions to anti-abortion laws, such as the health of the mother, which make no sense if one really believes that life begins at conception. Nevertheless, I apply the term pro-life to myself because in the current political context, anyone who thinks the abortion decision is not a private one for the woman herself is obviously not pro-choice.

I concluded that there is not a pro-life vote one could realistically cast for President this November. There are only two choices possible for President. One is Senator Obama, who supports Roe. The other is Senator McCain, who does not say he wants to appoint Justices to overturn Roe, but says he will appoint “strict constructionists” and we are supposed to infer that such Justices will vote to overturn Roe. This is all bull, since the only way to overturn Roe is with a “litmus test” for Supreme Court appointments and I have no idea why the pro-life movement does not demand this pledge of McCain or any other candidate for the Presidency. The pro-life movement has never demanded any such thing.

Anyway, assuming that Roe is overturned, it is pure speculation whether even one single legal abortion would be prevented. Overturning Roe just puts the matter back on the states. Some states will support legalized regimes and others restrictive ones, but there is certain to be a constitutional right of travel and pro-choice money for anyone who needs it to get an abortion. I doubt even minors can be prevented from obtaining an abortion in such a regime. It is true that in a post-Roe world, abortion will be more inconvenient, and that might cause some women to not bother to get an abortion, but anyone that uncertain might as well have been convinced by serious pro-adoption advertising, with a lot less trouble. Even Obama might do that.

A pro-life vote would have to be for someone who would constitutionalize the right to life, either by interpreting the word “life” in the fourteenth amendment to include the unborn, which no Justice has committed to doing and which only Thomas would even consider, or federalizing the issue by constitutional amendment or a preemptive federal statute, which Senator McCain has not committed to doing.

I am not a single issue voter. Certainly, anyone who is should vote for Senator McCain over Senator Obama. Overruling Roe is not insignificant. But no one should think that a vote for McCain is really a pro-life vote.

Thinkers in the New Secularism: Chet Raymo

10/23/2008--I just received copies of two books by Chet Raymo, Professor Emeritus at Stonehill College: Honey From Stone: A Naturalist’s Search for God (1987) and When God is Gone Everything is Holy (2008). As you can see from the latter title, there is a certain affinity between Professor Raymo and Hallowed Secularism.

I learn two things right away from Raymo’s work. First, there is a great deal of new secularism that is closely connected to science and yet still has echoes, or more, of traditional religion. Raymo is in the religious mystic tradition, yet completely informed by modernity. This is one more surprising aspect of the future of secularism. That future is going to be quite from secularism’s past.

Second, Hallowed Secularism—my work—is much more biblical than I realized. Despite my own experiences, I am not a mystic. Indeed, I am close to the Old Testament. My books are searches for justice in history. Neither of those categories seems crucial to Raymo.

The Jews and the 2008 Election

10/20/2008--Mackenzie Carpenter wrote a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday with the headline, "Democrats' usually reliable Jewish vote up for grabs". The story was not about polls but was an impressionistic survey of what Jewish people in the Pittsburgh area are thinking about the election. I have seen similar stories elsewhere, in Florida for example. And I personally know Jewish voters who have usually voted for Democrats in the past but who are either undecided or considered at an earlier point voting for Senator McCain. [My sample is not large, but the people I know changed their minds about voting for McCain after he selected Governor Palin as his running mate].

These stories about the Jewish vote make another story, this one in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle on October 16, seem all the stranger. There have been complaints that the Chronicle, usually strictly nonpartisan—the paper does not endorse candidates, for example—has covered Senator Obama’s campaign more extensively than that of Senator McCain.

Last Thursday’s paper confirmed that this was in fact the case and claimed that the reason is that while the Democrats have aggressively followed up on invitations by the newspaper for interviews with national campaign representatives who have campaigned in the area, the Republicans have not done so, until very recently.

It’s an odd story. I’m sure that the Republicans will rectify this omission now in a hurry. But to a certain extent, the damage has already been done.

The Anti-Voter Conspiracy of the Republican Party

10/18/2008--Misidentification on voter applications is not voter fraud and is not a crime. The crime requires criminal intent, for example the intent to sign up someone who is not eligible or voting twice in one election.

I know nothing about ACORN but I doubt very much that the organization has engaged in any criminal activity. Why would they when there are so many eligible poor people who are not registered and do not vote? Yes, ACORN uses “felons” to sign up voters. Why not? It’s an honest job. It’s not as if people are being threatened if they don’t want to register. These investigations of Acorn are simply intended to intimidate poor people into not voting.

Over recent years, the Republican Party has apparently come to the conclusion that they cannot win elections if all Americans vote. Therefore, they have cynically engaged in a conspiracy to restrict voting by groups they consider hostile, such as young people, poor people and people of color. This is why we now hear about “voting fraud”, though in fact there isn’t much, if any. In fact, some of the Republican U.S. Attorneys were fired because they refused to go forward with voter fraud cases they considered lacked evidence of criminal activity.

Usually, I consider partisan differences to be simple disagreements among people of good faith. Not in this instance. These efforts by the Republican Party remind me of efforts in the 19th century in the Old Confederacy to purge the voting roles of black voters—efforts which succeeded. In one case I teach in Criminal Law, Alabama prosecuted a man for the felony of illegal voting in 1875 when the evidence showed he honestly believed he was of age. Fortunately the court required proof of knowledge that one was illegally voting to be guilty of the crime. [Gordon v. State]

The Post-Gazette reported today on a lawsuit by the state Republican Party against the Pennsylvania Department of State and ACORN alleging fraud. They want Acorn to pay for ads telling people they must bring identification before they vote. This is a requirement but it is often ignored. What is this except a warning not to vote?

The Republican Party is making a mistake. When you are afraid of democracy, you have no future.

The Capture of the Protestant Right by Capitalism

10/16/2008--It is no secret that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church wants pro-life candidates to win elections. But that is not entirely partisan—there are pro-life Democrats—and it is driven by an undeniably religious commitment.

But what is one to make of the pro-capitalism position of the conservative Protestant movement? I just read the October 18-25 issue of World Magazine, which is a news magazine from the Christian perspective. The issue emphasized the financial crisis.

From just reading the magazine, you would have thought our major ecoomic problem was Barnie Frank pushing Fannie Mae to help poor people get into houses they could not afford. There is nothing that I read about the deregulation philosophy of the Republican Party in general or the particular decision to exempt mortgage derivatives from the jurisdiction of the SEC. Here is a report about that action that I found on the Internet: “McCain's former economic adviser is ex-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. On Dec. 15, 2000, hours before Congress was to leave for Christmas recess, Gramm had a 262-page amendment slipped into the appropriations bill. It forbade federal agencies to regulate the financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors.”

This is not just a question of difference of opinion about politics. Why does World Magazine, and why do many conservative Christians, assume that low taxes and small government are an expression of the Gospel? These may be good policy or bad, but they are not Jesus’ policy. As Bill McKibben has pointed out, Jesus never said, “God helps those who help themselves.” It was Benjamin Franklin.

Netroots Nation Comes to Pittsburgh

10/14/2008--I’ve just seen that next August the Netroots Nation Convention will be held in Pittsburgh. This is very exciting. The face of—mostly—young progressive politics.

I have looked at the Agenda and I have a suggestion. One important question for the political left is the question of religion and secularism. I don’t just mean the separation of church and state, though that is part of it. I mean, what is the role of religion among a mostly secular political group.

There will be progressive believers at the convention, of course. There is even a session entitled, “Whatever Happened to the Religious Left”. The more aptly named session would be, “Must We Continue to Pretend We Care About What Happened to the Religious Left?” [The answer to that question is yes, because otherwise word would get out.]

What, if anything does religion have to teach people who are not religious? The honest answer right now by most progressives would be nothing. But is it the correct answer?

This is the question of the future of secularism. Can a genuinely secular politics be sustainable? Marxism was not really secular. Its religious roots were just disguised. Classic liberalism was an Enlightenment philosophy and thus assumed Christianity as backdrop. We don’t actually know whether a secular politics can work.

Hallowed Secularism aims to fill the gap between religion and progressive politics. It represents religious belief without dogma and hierarchy. But it would still be too religious for many.

Governor Palin Should Resign from the Ticket

10/11/2008--Would a President John McCain order an IRS audit of your taxes if you offended a member of his family? Of course not. John McCain once chose torture over betrayal of his office.

How about a President Joe Biden? No. Biden has been purified by personal tragedy. Such an act is not in him.

What about a President Barack Obama? This question is why the Republican ad “Who is Barack Obama?” raises a legitimate question. The campaign is a smear not because it asks an unfair question but because its innuendos go beyond any facts in the record.

Would a President Sarah Palin order an IRS audit? She has already done something quite like it. According to an investigation conducted for the Alaska legislature, Governor Palin abused her office by pressuring subordinates to fire her brother-in-law because of his divorce and custody battle with her sister.

This investigation was no political hatchet job. It was set in motion by a Republican majority legislature before Governor Palin was a candidate for national office. For once, it is just the truth in the midst of a political campaign.

I don’t like enemies lists. Such a list was the worst thing about President Richard Nixon. I don’t like enemies lists on college campuses, let alone in the most powerful office in the world. Senator McCain should choose someone else.

Secularists Need Yom Kippur

10/9/2008--Since I don’t consider myself Jewish anymore, I don’t go to services. But I make two exceptions. I attend services for the High Holy Days and do something at Passover. These are two Jewish holidays Hallowed Secularism will need to reinvent.

Last night was Kol Nidre, the opening of Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance. This holiday comes at the end of a ten-day period beginning with Rosh Hashanah. During the entire period, Jews engage in intense self-questioning. On Yom Kippur, this process achieves a unique intensity as a total fast amounting to 25 hours combines with haunting melodies and an impressive atmosphere. The entire period of the High Holy Days is known in Hebrew as the Days of Awe.

I find it impossible not to be changed by this process. Without it, or something like it, any secularism is doomed to shallowness and self-satisfaction. Secularism today has a great deal of trouble with its view of the human condition. It fluctuates between accounts of pure selfishness—the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, for example or the basic model of economics—or the false human heroism of Romanticism and Existentialism.

Religion does much better. The model of people on Yom Kippur is, “we all do evil, but we can repent and do better in the future, and we will.” This is a beautiful message and strangely self-fulfilling. If you believe it and practice it, it can become true.

The Jewish practice always brings new insight. Last night I realized for the first time that not only is my sin personal—the usual litany of callousness I won’t bore you with—but also social. I live comfortably in a world in which other people suffer. Thousands starve to death every day. And this remains so no matter what I do. I can give more money to good causes, or even give up my life and work among the poor. They will still starve and I will not. And even if the world gradually improves its social and economic arrangements, as I believe we will, a similar structural evil will always remain. This is, as the Christians say, a fallen world.

I can do something. I can repent. And I can promise—to the mystery of existence—that I will do better this year. For this I can thank Yom Kippur.

Why Did Abraham Not Find Death Abhorrent and Life Meaningless?

10/6/2008--Garrison Keillor reviews Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened of in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Barnes is an atheist turned agnostic who “has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death."

It’s the usual story. Without God, there is no hope. Life is a tragedy that the Christian faith—“a beautiful lie”—gives a false happy ending. Science is no consolation because the brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely “a story the brain tells itself.”

My question is, why didn’t Abraham feel this way? My readers may not remember, but Abraham in the Bible is not promised life after death. He just dies. But because he sees himself as part of something larger—all the people of the world will be blessed by his descendants—he can feel satisfaction with his life.

It’s not clear why Barnes lacks a sense of purpose. Partly it is because his frame of reference is too broad: the sun is dying and humanity will die out.

I think Keillor has the right response to these feelings: “All true so far as it goes, perhaps, but so what?” Abraham’s God amounts to a promise that Abraham trusts will unfold. Even without God, we can approach reality in precisely the same way Abraham did, as a promise that we trust. And what is the content of this promise? Well, it’s the same promise that Abraham was given. We can be a blessing to all the people of the world. Since you and I will not father a people, we’ll just have to do it retail, one act of lovingkindness at a time.

Biden's Take on the Wall of Separation

10/4/2008--Amy Sullivan posted a comment on the Time Magazine website on Thursday discussing Senator Joe Biden’s response to Katie Couric’s question about the wall of separation between church and state. Biden told Couric that the purpose of the wall is “to keep government out of religion.” Fair enough.

But Biden said something quite different at the beginning of his answer: “The best way to look at it is to look at every state where the wall’s not built. Look at every country in the world where religion is able to impact the governance. Almost every one of those countries are in real turmoil.”

I don’t think that any American wants religion to impact “the governance,” at least not in the formal sense that clerics have governmental authority as in Iran, or that religious institutions have a formal role in the government. There have been very few cases that even raise issues like that. In Larkin v. Grendel’s Den Inc. (1982), the Supreme Court struck down a Mass. law that gave churches and schools a veto over liquor license applications within five hundred feet on the ground that religious institutions could not be given government authority. This line of cases is not very controversial today and has nothing much to do with whether the words “under God” should remain in the Pledge of Allegiance.

On the other hand, no one denies that religion can legitimately impact “the governance” in the general sense that religious beliefs influence the policies that people want to see followed. Many Catholics followed the Bishops in opposing the end of welfare, for example. Other religious believers oppose gay marriage on the ground that the Bible forbids it.

Biden’s words make me wonder just what he thinks the Establishment Clause means. And I wonder the same thing about Senator Barack Obama.

Religulous--Are People Killing Each Other Over Religon?

10/2/2008--I saw a review of the new anti-religion documentary Religulous that seemed to suggest that people kill each other over differences in religious doctrine. The movie opens tomorrow, so I have not seen it. But Bill Maher is quoted as saying that “religion is one day going to get us all killed.”

This view that conflicts in the world today are “religious” seems to me to be mistaken as to the nature of the conflicts. When a Palestinian says, for example, “the Jews stole our land,” it may sound like a theological conflict. But it is a conflict over land. Such a statement is similar to a saying by a native American that “Europeans stole our land.” Conflicts like these are not over dogmas.

As to conflicts over dogma per se, all three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—agree that coercion can never be used to promote belief. It is not the case that Muslims are willing to kill Christians because Christians believe Jesus is God. It is true that many Muslims consider this belief a profound and horrible error. But Jews also consider this belief an error. Yet no Jews are killing Christians over it.

I don’t mean that there has not been interreligious doctrinal violence in the past. There has been. For example, the Inquisition was just such coerced conversion. But this is not our problem in the world today.

There is religious violence today, but it tends to be religious oppression of members of one’s own group. For example, Muslim women are oppressed in some Muslim countries. And there is also discrimination without violence. Gays are discriminated against in America for religious reasons, for example.

But these issues are not what Maher is pointing to. He is suggesting that the great international conflicts of our time are religious in nature. About that he is simply mistaken.

Repentence

9/28/2008--As I enter on the High Holy Days this year, perhaps my first as a bona fide secularist and not a Jew, I see the importance of religion more than ever. When critics of religion, such as Christopher Hitchens and the other New Atheists, talk about it, they emphasize empty ritual, absurd beliefs and violence. But the two aspects of religion they do not mention are the shape of history and forgiveness of sin.

Every religion gives an account of what history means. What is important about this is not so much the account as the significance of the question. Religion makes it hard for us to live without thinking about what our lives mean in the larger picture.

Of course, at the season of the High Holy Days forgiveness of sin is the primary mode of thought. I know already that secularism does not even contain this category. To seek forgiveness of sin is first of all to acknowledge how far we live from holiness, or authenticity if you prefer the non-religious sounding term. John Dewey might say to remember yourself at your very best, that is, most generous, loving and brave, and then measure your meager everyday living. This is sin.

To seek forgiveness also means to seek it from outside oneself. Some people think we forgive ourselves too readily. I think, instead, we can hardly forgive ourselves at all. In either case, we cannot be the source of forgiveness.

Nor can other human beings be the source of forgiveness. The Jewish tradition requires that we seek forgiveness from those we have wronged (though I rarely see that practiced and I don’t practice it). But the focus is on forgiveness from God. Human forgiveness is treacherous. It can be just another form of violence.

The secularist does not have a God to grant forgiveness. If I could make one change in secularism it would be to convince my fellow secularists that forgiveness of sins happens. One must only ask with penitence. How this could be possible since there is no God, I do not know.

No, You Don't Live an Exemplary Life

9/26/2008--Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics who teaches at the University of Texas, recently wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books (September 25) on living without God. This is the same Steven Weinberg whom Stuart Kauffman identifies in Reinventing the Sacred as a leading apostle of reductionism. Kauffman quotes Weinberg’s “two famous dicta”: “‘The explanatory arrows always point downward [to physics]’” and “‘The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems.’” It appears that Weinberg trots out the same article every once in awhile, and he has certainly done so in the NYR.

I responded to Weinberg in a letter to the editor and if the magazine does not publish it, I will post it here. But there was an odd sideline to Weinberg’s piece that bears noting now, in the season of the Jewish High Holy Days coming next week. Weinberg wrote the following in the article: “I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes.”

Was Weinberg kidding? I hope so. Certainly it is true that religion has inspired and does inspire horrendous crimes. But who lives an exemplary moral life? Weinberg? You? Me? Exemplary means, according to my computer, “so good or admirable that others would do well to copy it.” Weinberg does not mean that. He just means, as secularists usually do when they say they do not need religion to lead a good life, that he has not killed anyone or robbed a bank. This is the dumbing down of secular morality.

Weinberg has not led an exemplary moral life. Just like the rest of us, he has lived a life of self-interest in which he has harmed many people and has almost always put himself first. I say this without knowing Weinberg, because it is true of all of us, including religious people. It is called sin, original or otherwise. If you want to see an exemplary moral life, read the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25.). When you find someone like that, call me.

Two points should be made here. First, we do need religion to live moral lives. We need the examples of saints even to live moderately well. Second, we need forgiveness. It is destructive to think of ourselves as good. It is bad for individuals and disastrous for nations. Judaism is good about these points. They are at the heart of the High Holy Days.

Excerpt from For the Establishment of Religion

9/23/2008--The growth of secularism is the final aspect of consideration of “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Religion has been dominant for a long time and continues to exert a strong political influence in American elections. Secularists may be excused therefore if they push back against religion every chance they get.

But this period of religious domination is ending. It is either already necessary to think about the needs of a secular world, or it will soon be so. My purpose in insisting on the use of the word God, and other instances of religious symbols and language, is to keep a certain kind of cultural space open. This is akin to what Judge Ferdinand Fernandez wrote in his partial dissent in the Ninth Circuit in the Elk Grove case. Removing the word God from public expression, “remove[s] a vestige of the awe all of us, including our children, must feel at the immenseness of the universe and our own small place within it, as well as the wonder we must feel at the good fortune of our country.”

This is not a concern only for religious people. Susan Neiman has written that the Enlightenment created natural religion, and used the term God, to “express[] the breath of wonder that the age of Enlightenment exhaled.”

It may be true that we do not need religion to experience reverence for existence. But if that is true, it is because we have the example of religion. I am afraid that prematurely jettisoning religious language, including the word God, might expose humankind to profound demoralization.

I have seen suggestions of such demoralization. In September 2008, the American physicist Steven Weinberg wrote in The New York Review of Books about “the question of how it will be possible to live without God”[3] He admitted that living without God is not easy. He offered humor and the ordinary pleasures of life. But Weinberg acknowledged that “the worldview of science is rather chilling.”

"Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. "

Other scientists do not agree with Weinberg about the implications of the scientific worldview. I am quoting him not because I think he is right about that, but merely to demonstrate the stakes that he acknowledges in living without God. Living without God is no doubt the direction in which we are headed. But we should not rush ahead without careful preparation. We may eventually have adequate substitutes for expressions like “one nation under God.” But we do not have them yet. Until we do, we are better off reinterpreting the language we have to offer the deepest and most inclusive reality we can yet express.

The Bailout is Socialism

9/21/2008--Last spring, when Democratic candidates for President could still propose universal healthcare, I kept reading that such proposals were “socialism”. Well, now we have a proposal for the nationalization of the housing market and I am not hearing a thing.

The bailout is a terrible policy that may well not work. If it is necessary because of an emergency that requires that something be done, it just shows that the people who were running the show, from Greenspan to President Bush, did a terrible job of policing the market.

The bailout is a terrible policy for all the usual reasons. First, the collapse of housing prices is a capitalist necessity since there had been a bubble in prices. The bailout may just prolong the economic downturn since owners may now wait to sell rather than taking their loses and reorienting the market. Second, the bailout is aimed at companies that either made a lot of money inflating housing prices or at least tried to. So, why should they not take their loses? It’s socialism when you want national healthcare, but it’s a necessity when they don’t want the consequences of their actions. Finally, the bailout is being financed by more borrowing. There will be no surcharge on the wealthy to pay for it. Your grandchildren will pay for our errors.

The economics of Hallowed Secularism will undoubtedly be market oriented. The market works well as a general matter. But, the market must always be regulated. And it cannot run on debt. The best thing Bill Clinton did was balance the budget. The real necessity is that we begin to pay our own way again.

Who Lost Ukraine?

9/19/2008--Lost amid the catastrophic economic news is some potentially far worse news: according to a Washington Post story I read in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday, 9/17, the pro-western coalition in Ukraine has collapsed and may be replaced at least in part by a more pro-Russian government.

Why is this so bad? In part this collapse was caused by the mounting anti-Russia enthusiasm among Senator McCain and his team, including elements in the Bush Administration. After the invasion of Georgia by Russia, McCain talked tough. Governor Palin talked even tougher, not shying away from the suggestion in an interview that the US might respond militarily to further adventures by Moscow. Vice President Cheney traveled to Kiev, the capital, a few weeks ago and urged a united response to the Georgia invasion.

I was assuming that no one was taking any of this talk seriously. We are not going to war with Russia because Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at us and it would be suicide for humanity. We did not go to war with the Soviet Union when our two nations genuinely threatened each other’s existence. Ronald Reagan did not openly fight the Soviets in Afghanistan for this reason. He armed the mujahidin with Stinger antiaircraft missiles, instead. We are not going to war with Russia over Georgia or Ukraine.

Now I am beginning to wonder. Is the Republican brain trust so used to attacking nations like Iraq that cannot directly hit back that they have forgotten what real war is like? Even bombing Iran is a choice we can make if we want. But we cannot fight Russia. Even thinking along this line is madness.

Apparently the Ukrainians are not as nuts as we may be. Faced with pressure from the US to resist Russia, but without any practical military support being offered (we are bogged down in Iraq even if we wanted to respond), the people of Ukraine may have decided to make their peace with Moscow.

The invasion of Georgia was certainly a violation of international law and a horrendous precedent. But as the world learned from our invasion of Iraq, great powers can do such things. The response to restrain Russia has to be more subtle, like that of Ronald Reagan in Afghanistan, not saber-rattling we could never back up.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday

9/17/2008--According to the AP, there is currently a controversy in which the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal organization based in Arizona, is signing up churches to give expressly political sermons on September 28, dubbed “Pulpit Freedom Sunday”, in order to challenge as unconstitutional the current ban on tax exempt organizations endorsing candidates for public office. In response, the Rev. Eric Williams, a minister with the liberal United Church of Christ is planning to file a complaint with the IRS against Alliance, claiming that endorsement of candidates would violate the separation of church and state.

Actually, the ban on expressly political tax exempt organizations is plainly constitutional, but this issue has nothing to do with the separation of church and state. Churches obviously have the same constitutional right to endorse political candidates as any other organization or citizen. On the other hand, churches do not enjoy tax exempt status because of the Constitution. It would be perfectly constitutional to tax churches and to deny charitable deduction status to contributions made to them. They get their tax exempt status only because they qualify under federal statutory law. In return for this benefit, they give up the same constitutional right to endorse political candidates that every non-religious tax exempt organization does. The challenge to the politics ban is the same whether brought by a church or by the Red Cross. Either way, the challenge loses.

Since this is purely a statutory matter and not a constitutional one, you and I are free to reconsider the policy at any time. Would it be a better world if tax exempt organizations could endorse political candidates? I doubt it. Would churches be more honest if they gave up their tax exempt status and engaged in politics expressly? Maybe. But I don’t see many religious organizations making that decision.

Secular Hostility to Religion

9/15/2008--Two recent stories highlight the reflexive opposition by some secularists against any public appearance of religion. One story is the continuing fallout over the recent decision by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to distribute New Testaments in its Sunday advertising section based on a contract with a Christian group. The 9/14/2008 letters to the editor included one letter cancelling a subscription to the paper, calling the decision “appalling”.

I can understand a religious person objecting to this Bible delivery. What does the religious believer do with the holy book of another religion? How can you respectfully get rid of it? Or, who wants a book of idolatry? All of this is presumably why the paper allowed people to opt out of the delivery with a phone call.

But why would a secularist care about receiving a New Testament, especially in a tone that suggests that a newspaper should have known better? What is the problem? Specifically, why is receiving a Bible offensive, or at least more offensive than getting an unwanted bottle of shampoo? Why not just throw it away?

I think the underlying problem is secular hostility against religion and an insistence that religion should be kept private, maybe even secret, like a vice.

We see a similar kind of secular hostility in a story reported in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle on September 11, 2008 about the eruv confrontation in Westhampton Beach on Long Island. A small group of Orthodox Jews asked Village authorities for permission to erect an eruv around all or part of the town. (An eruv is a symbolic suggestion of a fence, usually placed on telephone polls, always more or less invisible to the casual observer, which under Jewish law allows some carrying of objects on Shabbat, specifically allowing the carrying of children to synagogue). Secularists, many of them Jews, have objected to the eruv on two grounds: first that providing such an aid to Orthodox Jews is a violation of the separation of church and state, which is clearly mistaken at least in terms of the caselaw (a number of municipalities, including Pittsburgh provide aid in erecting eruvs), and the fear that once the eruv is erected, many Orthodox Jews will move in and change the tone of Westhampton.

This secular response seems mean. But it is all part of the seeming fear that religion is gaining strength. Secularists should relax. They are in fact the inevitable future.

Governor Palin and Abraham Lincoln

9/12/2008--This has been a religion saturated Presidential campaign so far, as predicted by my book, American Religious Democracy. Unfortunately, as it has unfolded it has only hardened the secularist view that such mixing of church and state is a mistake. Governor Palin’s brand of Christianity plays in a very partisan way in this context, obscuring both the easy-going religion of Senator McCain and the inclusive approach of Senator Obama. (I don’t even know anything about Senator Biden’s faith. Has anyone heard from him recently, by the way?)

The religious edge to the campaign ramped up a little over the “Is God with Us or are We with Him?” controversy. Governor Palin earlier had seemed earlier to say that God is on our side in the Iraq War. In her first national television interview she said that that had not been her intention. She had meant what Lincoln had once said, “'Let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.' "

Probably Lincoln’s most concentrated reference to the purposes of God, and certainly his last, occurred in the Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865—a little over a month before his death. In the Address, Lincoln began by comparing the two sides in the Civil War:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

We should notice that Lincoln’s God does not seem to have a side. The most one can intuit is that perhaps both sides in the war are suffering because of a great national injustice. Would we dare to say today that though our enemies are acting immorally, as Lincoln certainly was suggesting about slavery and the South, yet the judgments that come, including the terrible attacks of 9/11, are judgments for our injustice as well? Have we as a nation done enough to bring peace in the Middle East or have we instead contributed actively or by indifference to the continuation there of violence? That is the kind of question Abraham Lincoln would ask.

I doubt anybody in our current political context is really ready for Abraham Lincoln.

Jeffrey Stout: The Folly of Secularism

9/9/2008--The most recent issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion—September, 2008—brings a short piece by Jeffrey Stout titled in part “Presidential Address”. So, I guess he is the current or past President of the organization. The rest of the title is “The Folly of Secularism” and in it Stout criticizes secularists for trying to exclude religion from the public square. Stout treats Richard Rorty, Mark Lilla, Sam Harris and people like that as representative of the views of secularists about religion. Stout even states baldly that “[s]ecularism comes in many forms, but what they all have in common is the aim of minimizing the influence of religion as such.”

Stout’s perspective seems remarkably out-of-date for so influential and accomplished an academic. As readers of this blog know well, there is a renaissance of religiously tinged secularism going on. What about Jurgen Habermas (Between Naturalism and Religion), Susan Neiman (Moral Clarity) and James C. Edwards (The Plain Sense of Things), who are describing a secularism open to religious insights? What about scientists like Simon Conway Morris (Life’s Solution) and Stuart Kauffman (Reinventing the Sacred) who are expressing openness to the transcendent?

I intend to contact Stout and try to enter into dialogue with him about Hallowed Secularism. It would be helpful if the people with the most to gain from rapprochement between religion and secularism, like Stout, would recognize the beginnings of new trends in secularism. It is by no means the case that all secularism aims to minimize the influence of religion.

Victory in Iraq

9/7/2008--Hallowed Secularism is strictly non-partisan. But, of course, I am not. I am a liberal Democrat. My post today is not meant to be partisan, but its implications clearly are.

We are hearing about victory in Iraq. Certainly the surge worked and the security situation in Iraq is greatly improved. But whose victory is this? The answer is first the Iraqi people. They are rid of Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, the next winner is not the United States or Israel. The winner is Iran. What is emerging in Iraq is a stable pro-Iranian Shiite government. This is "victory". But it is a victory that harms U.S. interests and weakens Israel. We did Tehran’s dirty work in ridding Iran of a Sunni enemy in their backyard. A strengthened Iran now supports Hezbollah and Hamas and threatens to build a nuclear weapon.

That is why this war was such a terrible mistake. The Bush Administration expected something else. They expected a secular liberal Iraq that would make peace with Israel, be friendly to the West and demonstrate a tame form of Islam. They failed, and they did so at great cost. And the fact that John McCain cannot see this, the same John McCain I have always so admired, shows why fighter pilots don’t always make good Generals.

The irony of all this is that the kind of Iraq the Bush Administration hoped for could still one day happen. What Iran lacks is real democracy. That is why the wishes of the people there are only imperfectly reflected in their government’s policies. But, in contrast, Iraq probably will evolve a real form of democratic life. In the short run, as with the election of Hamas, the result may harm the U.S. and its friends. But, in the longer run, something new may emerge. The Iraq war will still have been a terrible mistake. But even mistakes can have unpredictable consequences.

Thinkers in the New Secularism: Stuart Kauffman

9/5/2008--One of the most exciting developments in the New Secularism, which is the term I use for the growth of a religiously hungry secularism in the world and in which Hallowed Secularism will play a role, is the growing connection between science and religion. One of the best voices in this area is Stuart Kauffman, whose 2008 book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, I have finally received (it had been lost in the mail by Amazon).

Kauffman’s major points seem to be to describe the universe—reality—as “ceaselessly creative”. Creativity here means that the goal of a certain kind of scientific viewpoint to reduce all phenomena to matter in motion is in principle unattainable. In other words, physics cannot predict biology.

Kauffman conceives of this change in scientific understanding in quasi-religious terms: “One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.”

There is much more to say about Kauffman, and I will return to him in latter posts, but for now his significance is that he bridges the gap between the science-oriented secularist and religion. I mentioned in a post back in June that Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, has written about Kauffman’s book in respectful tones and has considered the possibility that secularists who have closed off religious vocabulary may have lost something crucial.

Science is where it is at in this culture and increasingly in the world. When religion has a problem with science, religion suffers. But when science begins to sound in a religious key, there is the potential for important cultural change.

Politicized Religion

9/3/2008--The reactions to the announced pregnancy of Governor Palin’s daughter, Bristol, shows the danger of politicized religion and justifies the secular critics of religion in the public square. Speaking about the left, I have criticized this kind of religion as the Democratic Party Platform at prayer. Now we see the same thing on the right.

James Dobson, Chairman of Focus on the Family, reportedly said something like, “Being a Christian doesn’t make you perfect” in instant justification of Governor Palin and her daughter. Nice sentiment, but he did not say this about John Edwards’ adultery, as far as I know, nor would he and his ilk say the same thing about the pregnancy of an Obama daughter out-of-wedlock.

The difference for him, of course, is that Palin is a Republican and thus on his “side”. This makes the Gospel, which has no sides of this kind, into a laughingstock. It allows the world to laugh at the hypocrisy of the followers of Jesus.

This applies as well to Ms. Palin’s decision to keep the baby and marry. Seventeen-year-old kids should not be raising babies. It’s no good for them or for the baby. And there are many thousands of loving couples in this country who would be happy to adopt this child. This marriage is a terrible example and is going to inspire a lot of broken lives.

The Future of Secularism

8/27/2008--There is a new openness on the part of secularism to religion. Secularism is growing in importance in the world. Despite the hopes of some religious figures, the current worldwide upsurge in religious fundamentalism no more spells the end of secularization than did the earlier wars of religion in Europe forecast a more religious civilization. Studies among the young show increasing rejection of organized religion. The question is not whether we are continuing to become more secular—we are—but what kind of secular society we are going to be. Our secularism may turn out to be religiously-oriented.

Beneath the noise of Christopher Hitchens and the other New Atheists, a variety of secular thinkers are proposing a new, and friendlier, relationship between religion and secularism. In philosophy, Jurgen Habermas (Between Naturalism and Religion), Susan Neiman (Moral Clarity) and James C. Edwards (The Plain Sense of Things) are describing a secularism open to religious insights. In science, Simon Conway Morris (Life’s Solution) and Stuart Kauffman (Reinventing the Sacred) are expressing openness to the transcendent. Even in religion itself, a kind of secularism is emerging in the work of Michael Hampson (God Without God) and John Shelby Spong (Jesus for the Non-Religious). There are many other examples of this trend.

In politics too, the old lines of secular/religious hostility are blurring. The Democratic Party is determined to gain some lasting support among religious voters. Its candidates are speaking the language of faith and are eschewing strict separation of church and state. The Democratic Convention in Denver is clear evidence of this.

Obviously, my contribution to this trend is the book Hallowed Secularism, which will be published in March. And, of course, this blog.

What surprises me is that a tendency I thought was unnoticed has, in the short time in which I was writing the book, become a clear trend. As with American Religious Democracy, my earlier book, my thinking seems to go almost instantaneously from outrageous speculation to obvious cliché.

More on Michael Hampson

8/24/2008--I was re-reading yesterday’s post and felt I had to add a short note. The book, God Without God, is as good as I wrote. But the question is, for all its accomplishment, can the book work? That is, can monotheism as we know it in the Bible and the Qur’an, really survive the loss of the supernatural?

C.S. Lewis thought the answer to that question was, no. I’m inclined to agree. And even Michael Hampson seems to stumble over the resurrection.

I don’t want to prejudge the matter. Maybe in fifty years, long after I’m gone, secularism will be a thing of the past and people will be flocking back to church, synagogue, mosque and other places of worship.

Hallowed Secularism answers my need today and, I assume, the needs of others now and in the future. If it does not work out that way, if institutional religion can really adapt, great. I just can’t see it happening. Even the tradition teaches that you cannot put new wine in old skins.

Thinkers in the New Secularism: Michael Hampson

8/23/2008--Of course, not all the reaction to the New Secularism will come from secular writers. Religious writers have responded, and will continue to do so, to secularism. This process has been going on a long time, certainly since Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Some of this reaction comes from religious conservatives who basically condemn secularism. But some of it comes from religious liberals.

I have been accused of not taking liberal religion seriously. It is true that I have found liberal religion passionless, vague, politicized and without transformative hope. That is why I am delighted to have finally read Michael Hampson’s book, God Without God. I strongly recommend it to those Christians who have despaired of their tradition.

The book begins with a chapter on God that establishes Hampson as metaphysically modern. Secularists who read him will find no defense of the impossible or improbable. But they will find mystery.

The rest of the book is a serious, but accessible, study of Christian thought: Ethics, Bible, Creed, Prayer, Community and Eros. Hampson is both more radical than almost anyone else and at the same time curiously traditional. In his hands, the revolution that Jesus represented comes to life again. And it happens at the level of thought, not feeling. For those looking for intelligence in religion, this is the book.