America resumes its endless and necessary war between church and state
Mar 7th 2012 | from the print edition
WHEN he was campaigning to become president in 1960, John Kennedy made a
famous speech in Houston calling for the absolute separation of church and
state. That speech, Rick Santorum said last week, made him want to vomit.
"To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that
makes you throw up," said the Republican presidential candidate. "What kind
of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into
the public square and make their case?"
It seems odd that all this should come up now, more than half a century
later. Since Kennedy's speech, the notion that any American politician could
banish all but the faithless from the public square has become laughable. If
anything, piety has become a prerequisite in politics. Thomas Jefferson may
have been relaxed about such matters, but no modern candidate for the
presidency would dare to profess no faith, or to question the existence of
the Almighty. Barack Obama is a churchgoer. George Bush named Christ his
favourite philosopher and started cabinet meetings with a prayer. Jimmy
Carter prayed up to 25 times a day. Even Bill Clinton, a serial sinner,
always took care to repent.
Mr Santorum's many critics have also been quick to pounce on his misreading
of what Kennedy actually said. Kennedy did call for the separation of church
and state. So did Ronald Reagan-and, for that matter, John Locke a few
centuries earlier. But Kennedy did not say that people of faith ought to be
banished from the public square. His main point, instead, was that the state
should never favour one faith over another.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor
Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on
public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other
ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will
directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its
officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against
one church is treated as an act against all.
There was a particular reason for Kennedy's insistence. In 1960 a Catholic
running for president had to persuade the Protestant majority that he would
not take orders from the pope. In Houston he made that promise, which seems
to be why Mr Santorum, also a Catholic, says Kennedy "threw his faith under
a bus".
In this case, as in many others, Mr Santorum is guilty of shrill
exaggeration. In one respect, however, he has half a point. The separation
of church and state has never been as simple a matter as the separatists
say. The wall of separation is porous.
The first amendment forbids any law respecting an establishment of religion.
But not until 1947 did the Supreme Court construe this to mean that a wall
between church and state "must be kept high and impregnable". And that
ruling, says Denis Lacorne, a French political scientist, in "Religion in
America" (Columbia University Press, 2011), has since given rise to "a
complex and contradictory jurisprudence" in which the court has moved
sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another.
As in the case of de Tocqueville, it sometimes takes a Frenchman to explain
America to itself. Mr Lacorne identifies two warring traditions in American
thinking about the place of religion. One of them considers America the
culmination of the Enlightenment, cleaving to a rational philosophy that
would indeed exclude religion and its icons from the public square. The
other reaches back past the founders to the nation's Puritan ancestors, and
concludes that at its core America is religious. Mr Lacorne calls champions
of this second tradition the Neopuritans.
The professor's scheme may sound academic, but it offers a far more nuanced
guide to America's religious divisions than the insults politicians trade in
the election season. For example Newt Gingrich, another Catholic in the
race, portrays Mr Obama as a secular socialist, even though, in point of
fact, Mr Obama said in 2006 that America was a religious country and that
secularists were wrong when they asked believers "to leave their religion at
the door before entering into the public square".
True to his political habit, Mr Obama has tried to reconcile the opposing
traditions. In that 2006 speech he asked secularists not to dismiss religion
as inherently irrational, and believers not to think that they alone should
define the nation's morality. But-witness the recent flap over contraception
and insurance in Catholic universities and hospitals-such compromises are
tricky, and in the end there is no escaping the fact that Mr Obama stands in
the Enlightenment tradition, not with the Neopuritans. Mr Lacorne notes that
although the president's speeches refer often to religion, he seldom speaks,
as Reagan and America's Puritan forebears did, of America as a religious
Utopia. He places his own emphasis more on the pluralism and tolerance of
the founders.
Why they say the things they say
It is wise to be sceptical when politicians speechify on religion. Kennedy
emphasised the separation of church and state because in 1960 Americans
thought that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy. The Republicans
became keener on God when they saw how winning over Southern evangelicals
might lead them to power. Mr Santorum's noisy religiosity makes life harder
for his main rival, Mitt Romney, whose Mormon religion is still widely
distrusted. And in 2008 Mr Obama had to sound friendly to religion if he was
not to scare away "values voters". A faith council he set up in 2009 has
hardly been heard of since.
Behind all the self-interested tergiversations of the politicians, however,
is a genuine enigma. In America more than two centuries ago, believers in
God elected to live under the laws of man. The wars over religion show that
this great project is still a work in progress, and probably always will be.
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Received on Wed Mar 07 2012 - 14:42:22 EST
