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After the Church-State Divide
By Michael Gottsegen
At its best,
politics expresses the active solidarity of the citizenry, as each citizen aspires on
behalf of a common good that is the good of all. The roots of this active solidarity are,
however, pre-political or social. In a society that is divided by great disparities of
wealth, for example, the socio-economic basis of active solidarity is likely to be
missing. But the political manifestation of active solidarity is also dependent upon the
prior orientation of the collective imagination and the quality of fellow feeling that
connects the members of the social whole. The politics of active solidarity depends, in
short, upon both a broadly diffused feeling of
solidarity and upon the idea that the aggregation of individual citizens comprises a
single and substantial whole. Today both of these preconditions of a healthy political
life are in substantial measure lacking and, consequently, our politics is in trouble.
In the context of
this analysis, the American religions become significant as potential sources of political
renewal because, even in late modernity, they continue to play the important role of
shaping their adherents’ vision of the larger social whole and of cultivating the
feelings of social solidarity that are the pre-political bases of the political life. Religions play this role for their adherents
necessarily. Whether they play it in a manner that is conducive to the good health of the
American polity is another question entirely. The
religious orientation that would be the most conducive to the health of the polity would
foster the widest social solidarity and the most expansive social vision. It would also
emphasize the religious significance of political participation on behalf of the
realization of the common good.
Presently, however,
the American religions are not generally playing this role, either because they have
defined the range of properly religious concerns too narrowly or because they have failed
to render the circle of social solidarity and fellow feeling sufficiently inclusive. This
is not entirely the fault of the religions. A long and complicated history of church-state
relations
In recent years,
however, a host of forcesCsocial, cultural,
political and economicChas conspired to
reopen the question of the proper relationship between religion and politics. For many Americans, and
for liberals especially, it is axiomatic that the erection of a high wall of separation
has been an unalloyed good. The long history of religious intolerance and persecution
amply demonstrates, in their opinion, that combining religion and politics produces a
mixture that is noxious and volatile (and too often lethal). They also avow that religion
is properly a private matter of conscience and that as such it has no proper business in
the public square. What liberals cannot imagine, however, is that the extrusion of
religion from political life has deprived political life of something that it needs for
its own health and vitality. But as we now find ourselves at a moment in which the
parameters of the relationship between religion and politics are being contested, it
behooves us to rethink the relationship in light of its conceptual foundations and the
history of its effects. It may be that by so doing we shall hit upon another way of
constructing this relationship that could enable the American religions to play an
important part in revitalizing American political life.
As alluded to above, modern living
presupposes a high degree of compartmentalization. Life’s many spheres are separated
from one another: home from work, economics from politics, public from private. It is not
only that these spheres are separated, but that they are also understood to operate
according to different rulesCaccording to rules that are unique to each sphere
and without application to any other.
In many
ways, this compartmentalization has been a boon to our collective life. The market,
unshackled by external restraints of religion and ethics, has become a powerhouse creating
economic abundance and material well-being for many.
At the same time, our unsanctified polity and secular society have been
spared the noxious effects of religious intolerance and have enjoyed the benefits that
flow from the personal freedoms of thought, association and expression that many religions
have typically been unwilling to allow.
In recent decades,
however, the downside of compartmentalization has become more manifest. Both religion and political life have been
vitiated, in large part, as a consequence of the division of labor that reigns between
them. Religion, restricted to the private domain, lacks scope and has become narcissistic
and self-absorbed. Political life, left to
its own autonomous logic of power and dominated by special interests, has ceased to
generate the social solidarity and democratic energies that the system requires if the
common good is to prevail in the long run.
The
separation of life into different spheres is itself not new. Since antiquity, we have
carved life up into different sectors. Thus Aristotle, following the distinctions commonly
accepted in Greek life, differentiated between the polis
(public square) and the oikos (household). What is new to modernity, however, is the notion
that each sphere is largely autonomous, and that there are no master rules that apply
across the board. In an earlier era, such an
assertion would have been blasphemous. The categories of good and evil, of vice and
virtue, were regarded as coextensive with the whole of life.
In the
Middle Ages, the Catholic church took the view that every sector of life fell within its
orbit of concern. This same expansive definition of the extent of religion’s proper
reach is found in the Talmud. The rabbis’ legislative competence encompassed not only
the synagogue and the social relations of the household, but extended to the marketplace,
the judge’s chambers and the King’s Council.
To argue that religion had no business speaking to such issues would have
seemed ridiculous. Does God’s concern with the goodness of human action know any
borders or limitations? Of course not! Nor then should the moral authority of the church
or synagogue. The furor that greeted the publication of Machiavelli’s Prince in 1513Cwhich
asserted that political life should be governed by its own autonomous nature and not by
Christian moralityCgives
clear evidence of just how entrenched these assumptions were at the time.
What
Machiavelli claimed for the autonomy of politics, Adam SmithCand the
champions of capitalism more generally claimed
for the autonomy of the market. Smith rejected the religiously grounded conventional
wisdom that it was proper for government and custom to regulate commodity prices, working
conditions and the market itself in order to more closely approach the Christian vision of
an equitable social order. Smith argued that the least regulated marketplace functions
best, guided, as it were, by an “invisible hand” that would lead to the common
good. The representatives of the church fought against this new approach to economics both
in England and on the Continent, and a shifting constellation of social forces has been
arrayed on the side of continued government regulation of economic life ever since. But as
compared with the Middle Ages, the ground had shifted. Until 1800, the burden was on those
who argued against regulation of the economy. Since 1800, the burden has been on the
proponents of increased regulation. Free market capitalism and its ideological proponents
have defined the autonomous market sphere as a key element of the status quo.
Modernity, then, brought into being the autonomy of life’s
various spheres. This process was multifaceted. It was driven by economic, social,
political and ideological elements, in configurations that varied from one country to
another. In the course of this process, the “sacred canopy” that religion had
once cast over the whole of life shrank. The church, no longer regarded as having a role
to play in shaping society’s moral order as a whole, saw its proper sphere of
influence restricted to the hearth and the home. There alone were the religious virtues
accorded any significance.
In the
West, the forced retreat of Christian religion into an increasingly circumscribed realm
occurred only gradually over the course of several hundred years. For the Jews of the
West, however, the contraction of the religious realm came with startling suddenness and
swiftness in the first quarter of the 19th century when the Jews were granted
civil and political rights. For many of those who mourn the loss of the “sacred
canopy” that Judaism had cast over the whole of life before the hour of
“Emancipation,” this shrinkage of the religious realm is perceived as the
“high price of admission” that an anti-Semitic Christian society levied upon the
Jews. But, as we have noted, this contraction of the religious sphere was imposed upon
Christianity as wellCalbeit
more graduallyCin its
passage to modernity.
However,
as Stephen Carter points out in his most recent book, God’s Name in Vain, the religions were not
always content to accept the reduced position modernity assigned them.[i]
Nor have the religions been willing to accept without question the notion that economics
and politics fall outside the domain of their proper concern. Time and again, in fact, the religions have broken
free from their narrow confines to launch crusades on behalf of economic and political
justice. In effect, they were calling into
question the autonomy of these spheres and insisting that the forms of injustice being
perpetrated within them were issues of the greatest moral and religious importance. The
Abolitionist Movement, for example, was a religious movement that unfolded in the
political domain and challenged the economic definition of black men and women as
property. The Prohibition Movement was also
largely religious in its inspiration, as was the movement for civil rights. In more recent
years, we have witnessed the incursion into politics of the Moral Majority and the
Christian Coalition. In each case, the autonomy of the political and economic realms was
called into question by a religious movement that insisted on the rightful supremacy of
the ethical dimension.
During
the period of high modernity, these passing moments of religious engagement in the world
beyond religion’s “proper” domain of home and hearth have been important
not only in themselves, but for their impact upon the quality of our public life. They have also been important for calling into
question the very compartmentalization of domainsCand of
the norms appropriate to themCthat has
become synonymous with modernity.
In
recent years, this compartmentalization has also been undermined by the dynamism of a
global market that increasingly has undercut the autonomy of state and religion, and
called into question whether they continue to be masters of their own domains. Machiavelli, even as he argued for the autonomy of
politics, worried that the purity of political life might be corrupted by concentrations
of private economic power that used politics to pursue their own particular good rather
than the common weal. The growing influence of economic special interests in political
life illustrates how justified this anxiety has proven to be.
When
religion was first expelled from the public square, some hoped that religion would be
strengthened in the process and, in effect, purified of the “contamination”
brought on by its “unholy” involvement in the mundane business of political
life. What few foresaw at the time was
that once religion was consigned to the private sphere, it would cease to perform the
important social function of conveying to individuals a sense of their place in the social
and cosmic whole. Since 1800, a succession of political and social movements and
ideologies have arisenCincluding
various nationalisms and the workers’ movements that have performed this
“religious” function for their adherents, providing the social glue and sense of
larger purpose that Christianity or Judaism once provided.
Today, however, neither religion
nor politics (nor nationalisms, nor workers’ movements) performs this function.
Religion has become increasingly sectarian and the churches have become increasingly
self-absorbed. While the intimate face-to-face community of the congregation remains
important for individuals as a site for fellow-feeling and solidarity, religious
communities are increasingly likely to draw the circle of their neighborly concern rather
narrowly, encompassing only the immediate fellowship group while excluding the wider civic
community. Were another social institution performing this function of conveying a vivid
conception of the social whole to every member of the community and of imparting to the
citizen an activist commitment to community service, then the fact that religion is not
doing this would be of far less significance. But when neither the political process nor
religious institutions can impart this sense, the community is at risk, for surely this
communitarian spirit will not come from a marketplace that imparts an ethos that is
essentially antithetical to this spirit.
The market is a harsh taskmaster,
but it need not call the tune forever. But
from what quarter might a social force arise that is powerful enough to counter the
coercive logic of economic necessity? The
political sphere has no resources of its own that it can muster on behalf of the common
good. Politics reflects the matrix of interests (mostly economic) that are arrayed in
society as a whole, but seems incapable of summoning the citizens to pursue a common good
that transcends these interests. Civic virtue, if it is to arise at all, must come from
elsewhere. Might it come from the religious
sphere?
What
we do know is that at their best the churches,
synagogues and mosques nurture the fellow-feeling, the solicitude for the other and the
basic solidarity that are the elementary building blocks from which a more encompassing
civic community and politics can be constructed. What we do not know is whether these nuclei of community,
which are at once attracted and repelled by politics and by one another, have the capacity
and the will to do for America today what they have done for America at critical moments
in the past: to go beyond the limits of their particularity to frame, and to act on behalf
of, a wider conception of the civic community and of the common good. If lowering the wall
between religion and politics (without lowering the constitutional wall between church and
state) could help to revitalize the pre-political foundations of a healthy political life,
then it would seem to be a step worth taking.
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