From left: Stephen Carter, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Sandel, Daniel Dennett, Susannah Heschel

The culture wars buffeting American politics for nearly three decades likely did not end with the November 2008 elections, but the terms of engagement shifted in significant ways, according to participants at the 2008 Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities symposium, “One Nation under God? The Role of Religion in American Public Life,” held November 22 in Robsham Theater.

The first of the day’s three panels looked at “how religion shapes American culture.” Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities and religion at Columbia University, suggested it would be more telling to consider how popular culture has shaped religious believers. Recalling a Pentecostal group he belonged to in the 1970s, Lilla described strict, hierarchical families where women didn’t hold paying jobs, no one owned a television, and the outside world received little attention. Today, by contrast, popular culture permeates evangelicals’ lives, Lilla said. “The families are less rigid, and kids look pretty much like kids everywhere. The music sounds the same [as secular pop music] except that the word ‘Jesus’ appears now and again.”

The panel’s moderator, Alan Wolfe, a Boston College political science professor, asked if this move toward worldliness means religion has lost “the capacity to be prophetic.”

Not when it comes to issues of morality, replied Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, codirector of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and former editor of Commonweal, an independent Catholic magazine of politics and culture. Citing early opposition to the Iraq war by the Catholic Church and many mainline Protestant denominations, she said, “Religion did, in some ways, function as a conscience or a call to reflection about what our country was embarking on.”

What about gay marriage, asked Lilla. Was there a contradiction in the overwhelming support by African-American churches for Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, given their strong prophetic reputation on civil rights?

The black church is a diverse institution, responded Peter J. Paris, a Princeton theology professor who is African-American. “Black churches are of one mindset in their opposition to racial injustice. But on issues pertaining to sexuality, they are to the right of Attila the Hun—both in terms of homosexuality . . . and in terms of the ordination of women.”

Attitudes toward sexual behavior also depend heavily on age, added Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek and author of American Gospel, a book on the contribution of religion to the founding of the United States. He pointed to the example of George Will, the conservative columnist, whose twenty-something daughter cannot fathom her father’s opposition to gay marriage. “This is a woman,” Meacham said, to laughter from the audience, “who grew up in George Will’s house.”

The day’s second panel considered more explicitly the interaction of religion and electoral politics. Moderator Hanna Rosin, a journalist who has covered religion for the Washington Post, began by saying that the recent election season had thrown into doubt many of her long-held assumptions—that “religion is a great predictor of voting habits, that the Democratic Party is not a home for evangelicals, that African-Americans and Democrats vote together, and that religion in the public square is a very controversial and possibly threatening idea.”

Amy Sullivan, who covers religion for Time, responded that conservative theology hasn’t always meant conservative voting. Sullivan recalled being raised in the 1970s in a house with “portraits of both Jesus and Bobby Kennedy hanging on the walls.” Such a time may be returning, she said, noting “a broadening of the agenda” among evangelicals, especially those under 35. These young evangelicals, she said, are more likely than their parents “to support diplomacy [over] military action as a way of making peace. They’re much more likely to support universal health care.” While older evangelicals consider social welfare to be the responsibility of private charities, she added, their children, many of whom have gone on overseas missions and gotten a close look at extreme poverty, “don’t see why you have to eliminate government as a potential partner in solving some of these problems.”

Self-professed conservative Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr., the senior pastor of Hope Christian Church near Washington, D.C., posited another cause for evangelical defections from the GOP. The Repub-licans have used conservative Christians as “foot soldiers in campaigns,” he claimed, but largely ignored them when it came to making policies on “ground level issues.” The conservative evangelical movement, Jackson argued, must “get relevant to the overall needs of the community or become an irrelevant voice in terms of social action.”

Steven Waldman, the editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, a website that reports religion news, gave some credit for the change in voting patterns to candidate Barack Obama, who by talking consistently, credibly, and passionately about his Christian faith and listening to concerns of conservative believers “set the Democratic Party on a different path in its approach to religion.” Most importantly, Waldman said, Obama took seriously evangelical concerns about abortion, vowing to reduce the number of abortions by “reducing unintended pregnancies.”

“The Democrats realized,” put in Sullivan, “that it isn’t a matter of how much you talk about Jesus—it’s a matter of forming relationships with constituencies who haven’t heard from the Democratic Party in maybe decades and of getting back that trust they had lost across the religious spectrum.”

The day’s final panel focused on religion and the law, particularly the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which calls for the separation of church and state. The moderator, Michael Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard University, asked if it would violate First Amendment rights “for a law to reflect or to be justified by religious convictions.”

“The law should reflect, ideally, the considered judgment of large numbers of people of diverse views coming together and arguing, and . . . many of those people act out of religious sentiment,” replied Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor who has written extensively on the relationship between religious faith and public life. “The separation of church and state in early American usage was never thought of as a way of separating religion from the state,” he said, “just the formal church.”

It would be “a big mistake,” agreed Jean Bethke Elshtain, a University of Chicago philosopher, “to take the logic of church-state
separation . . . and then [to impose] that on the far more fluid and complex area of religion and politics.”

Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett, also a philosopher, dissented strenuously. He proposed banning from public policy debates any religion-based arguments that take the form of “I’m a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, whatever—and we believe this, and it’s nonnegotiable because that’s what our holy book says.”

A self-described “conversational anarchist,” Carter opposed shutting anyone out of the public conversation. That leads, he said, to people thinking, “If you’re going to make up rules that exclude me in my deepest forms of concern, maybe I should make up rules that exclude you.”

Religious discourse, countered Dennett, isn’t held to the same standards of rationality as political discourse.

Elshtain disagreed, pointing out that the most powerful responses to Internet-borne rumors of Obama as the anti-Christ have “come
from . . . other Christians who have been in the forefront of attacking this kind of nonsense.” She added that the recent attempt by the French government to “scrub the public arena of religious conviction” by banning headscarves in public schools resulted in thousands of French Muslim girls enrolling in “narrow” Islamic schools, defeating the policy’s goal of assimilation. In the end, argued Elshtain, Dennett’s proposal to ban religion-based arguments wouldn’t work because “If you really think some profound moral wrong is involved . . . you’re going to want to keep arguing and change the law on that, which is, of course, what we do in a democracy.”

Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, added a personal perspective on the topic as a result of having spent the last few months of the election season in Edinburgh. For many years, U.S. political debates had been couched “in the language of ressentiment,” she said. But observing this time from her foreign perch, she noticed that the “tone of the conversation about religion and politics has . . . shifted in a very positive direction. And I found that very moving.”

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Good without God?

Can people be good without a religion to keep them honest? What, if anything, can faith contribute to conscience? In the late afternoon of November 21, a historian and a law professor from Boston College along with two speakers on campus for the next day’s Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities forum (see “State of Belief,” page 10) debated these questions before a largely student audience. Their civil but entertaining colloquy, which took place in Devlin 101, was cosponsored by the Institute for Liberal Arts and the Provost’s Planning Committee for Intellectual Traditions.

Boston College law professor Charles Baron focused on the first question. “We all know people who profess no religion yet are among the most conscientious people in our lives,” said Baron. Conversely, he said, we know people who seem deeply religious yet appear not to possess a conscience. Baron, who teaches courses on bioethics and health law, portrayed conscience as constant self-reflection and internal struggle and pointed out that atheists and agnostics choose their belief—or unbelief—reflectively. Baron had kind words for “those people disparaged as cafeteria Catholics,” explaining that for a religious believer, conscientiousness means being “continually doubtful about your allegiance to the religion.”

Jeanne Bethke Elshtain, a University of Chicago political philosopher who writes extensively on religion, addressed the afternoon’s other question: What can religion contribute to conscience? “Conscience,” Elshtain said, “is often seen as rising in importance with the advent of Protestant Christianity.” But “the interiorization of moral law” that accompanied the Reformation, she said, “can lead to a correlative diminution of the institutions, especially religions, that underlie the formation of conscience.” In addition to their role in shaping conscience, Elshtain said, religious bodies and other institutions serve as a collective megaphone for conscience.

Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, codirector of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and former editor of Commonweal, took up the formation of conscience. “The challenge many of us face in adolescence is what I call ‘the lax conscience,’” Steinfels said, drawing laughter from the audience and her fellow panelists. “‘Sure, sure,’ your conscience says. ‘Whatever.’ And eventually your conscience may fall silent.” She argued that a middle ground between inflexible rules and the silent conscience can be “fostered by our involvement in our community.” Agreeing with Elshtain on the importance of institutional support for conscience, she cited groups such as the interdenominational National Religious Campaign Against Torture. However, Steinfels criticized “the minority of bishops who [before the 2008 elections] said there was only one issue to vote on, and only one side had the right answer.”

In a rare moment of dissent on the panel, Boston College professor Paul Breines, who teaches courses on modern European intellectual history, pushed back gently against Elshtain’s wholly positive view of religion’s role in supporting conscience, noting that churches had played a leading part in banning gay marriage in California—a position Breines said he’d felt compelled to oppose in conscience. He noted that until the late 18th century, the link between religious belief and personal goodness went unquestioned. Now, he pointed out, on a panel composed of a Protestant (Elshtain), a Catholic (Steinfels), a Jew (Baron), and himself, a declared atheist, “our perspectives are not radically different. Things really have changed.”

David Reich is a Boston area writer.

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