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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
“Pluralism must not be confused with, and is in fact endangered by, philosophical and ethical indifference. Commitment to strong, clear philosophical and ethical ideas need not imply either intolerance or opposition to democratic pluralism. On the contrary, democratic pluralism requires an agreement to be locked in public argument over disagreements of consequence within the bonds of civility.”
—The Williamsburg CharterThe question of how we contend in the American public square on the many issues involved in the question of the First Amendment's religious clauses (or “clause,” as some of us would insist) is inextricably bound up in the question of who constitutes the “we” involved in the contention. That is, how we contend must take account of who we are. Unless there is some clarity on this point, the debate over the nature of the civility to which we are called is doomed to be conducted at a perilous level of abstraction.
As I survey the terrain from my own vantage point — that of a Roman Catholic theologian engaged in a host of issues and controversies at the intersection of moral norms and American public policy — the “we” involved here is a many splendored thing indeed. For our purposes, it seems to me that the “we” has at least four salient characteristics.
This article is based on a paper read at a conference on “The First Amendment Religious Liberty Clauses and American Public Life,” at the University of Virginia, April 11-13, 1988. An earlier version of this article appeared in This World, No. 24 (Winter 1989) and is reprinted with the permission of the author and the publisher.
1. For a host of data and a thoughtful analysis of the present churnings in belief and practice on the American religious scene, see Roof, Wade C. and McKinney, William, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (Rutgers, 1987)Google Scholar.
2. See Caplow, Theodoreet al., All Faithful People (Minnesota, 1983)Google Scholar.
3. The survey data are summarized in Neuhaus, Richard John, ed, Unsecular America 115–26 (Eerdmans, 1986)Google Scholar.
4. Id at 68.
5. Quoted in Neuhaus, , What do the Fundamentalists Want? in Neuhaus, Richard John and Cromartie, Michael, eds, Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World 11 (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987)Google Scholar.
6. In Murray's formulation: “As it found place in America the problem of pluralism was unique in the modern world, chiefly because pluralism was the native condition of American society. It was not, as in Europe and in England, the result of the disruption and decay of a previously existent religious unity. This fact made possible a new project; but the new project required, as its basis, a new doctrine. This requirement was met by the First Amendment to the Constitution, in itself and in its relation to the whole theory of limited government that the Constitution incorporates.” Murray, John Courtney, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition 10 (Sheed & Ward, 1960)Google Scholar.
7. Id at 32.
8. For a careful analysis of the religious new right in its many expressions, see Neuhaus, What Do the Fundamentalists Want? (cited in note 5).
9. See, e.g., Novak, Michael, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon & Schuster, 1982)Google Scholar.
10. Id at 171-172.
11. See Hook, Sidney, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (Harper & Row, 1987)Google Scholar.
12. See Miller, William Lee, The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic (Knopf, 1986)Google Scholar.
13. Tribe, Laurence H., American Constitutional Law 823 (Foundation, 1st ed 1978)Google Scholar; in the second edition of his treatise Professor Tribe described this zone of permissible accommodation as “the zone in which the free exercise clause dominates the intersection [between the two religion clauses], permitting the accommodation of religious interests.” at 1169 (2d ed 1988).
14. See Neuhaus, Richard John, The Naked Public Square (Eerdmans, 1984)Google Scholar.
15. Two models of how to move in this desirable direction may be found in the National Association of Evangelicals' Peace, Freedom and Security Studies Program Guidelines, available from NAE's offices in Wheaton, Illinois, and Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Francis Stafford's 1987 pastoral letter to the Archdiocese of Denver, Those Home of Freedom, reprinted in its entirety in This World, No. 1, at 8 (Summer 1987)Google Scholar.
16. For a description of Madison as essentially a proceduralist, see Will, George F., Statecraft as Soulcraft 25–46 (Simon & Schuster, 1983)Google Scholar.
17. Miller, at 145-146 (cited in note 12).
18. For a survey of this trend, see Goldberg, George, Reconsecrating America (Eerdmans, 1984)Google Scholar.
19. Murray, at 35 (cited in footnote 6).