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Religion and Public Policy: An Introduction1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Hugh Heclo
Hugh Heclo
Affiliation:
George Mason University
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Extract

One way of approaching the following essays is to pause here at the beginning and consider the peculiarity of the conversation we will be overhearing. In this volume we will be listening to a group of scholars who are Catholic, Episcopal, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and secularist in their varied backgrounds. They are considering the place of religion in public policymaking. The peculiarity arises if we think about American public life historically. For one thing, we are listening to people who most likely would not have been inclined to interact with each other at the outset of the twentieth century. More than that, they are talking about something that hardly anyone a hundred years ago would have thought even needs discussing.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 13 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Religion, Politics, Policy , January 2001 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2001

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References

Notes

2. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 776.Google Scholar

3. Kohut, Andrew et al. , The Diminishing Divide: Religion's Changing Role in American Politics (Washington, D.C., 2000).Google Scholar

4. Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar; early findings from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' five-volume publication on worldwide fundamentalism appear in Marty, Martin E. and Appleby, R. Scott, The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World (Boston, 1992).Google Scholar

5. Marsden, George M., The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

6. Wuthnow, Robert, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Myers, David G., The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (New Haven, 2000).Google Scholar

7. The schema is adapted from Mark Noll's introduction in Noll, Mark A., ed., Religion and American Politics (New York, 1990)Google Scholar

8. Noonan, John T. Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998).Google Scholar

9. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P. and Lerner, Max (New York, 1966), 273.Google Scholar

10. Kramnick, Isaac and Moore, R. Laurence, The Godless Constitution (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. Explanations for the Constitution's godless language are examined historically by Wilson, John F., “Religion, Government, and Power in the New American Nation,” in Noll, Religion and American Politics, 77–91Google Scholar; and Dreisbach, Daniel L., “In Search of a Christian Common-wealth,” Baylor Law Review 48:4 (Fall 1996): 927–1000.Google Scholar

11. See Noonan, The Lustre of Our Country, passim.

12. Deeper interpretations of the historical transformation in these transactions cannot be dealt with here. A provocative account is Gauchet's, MarcelThe Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar. For a valuable counterpoint, see Taylor's, Charles foreword to this volume as well as his Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar and A Catholic Modernity? Marianist Award Lecture (Dayton, Ohio, 1996).

13. See Tinder, Glenn, Tolerance and Community (Columbia, Mo., 1995), chap. 3.Google Scholar

14. This is exactly the viewpoint Richard Niebuhr identified behind the Founders commitment to religious freedom. See his 1939 lecture “The Limitation of Power and Religious Liberty,” reproduced in Harvard Divinity School, Religion & Values in Public Life 3:2 (Winter 1995).

15. For an important argument about the way federal government growth helped catalyze religious conflicts, see Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar

16. Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (Boston, 1962)Google Scholar, which first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker.

17. “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,” Wired Magazine, 04 2000.Google Scholar

18. Levy, Frank, The New Dollars and Dreams (New York, 1998).Google Scholar

19. Wentz, Richard E., The Culture of Religious Pluralism (Boulder, 1997).Google Scholar

20. For a recent recognition of this danger from two leaders of America's Religious Right, see Thomas, Cal and Dobson, Ed, Blinded by Might (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999).Google Scholar

21. Casanova, , Public Religions in the Modern World, 3 and 5Google Scholar. The about-face in secularization theories is well illustrated in Berger, Peter L., ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, D.C., 1999).Google Scholar

22. As one leading scholar of religion put it, ours is a “religio-secular, operative-passional, sacro-secular life and society.” Marty, Martin E., “The Sacred and Secular in American History,” in Bradbury, M. L. and Gilbert, James B., eds., Transforming Faith (New York, 1989), 1, 8.Google Scholar

23. Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber's Life and Work: The Middle Years 1923–1945 (New York, 1983), vol. 2, 137.Google Scholar

24. Acceptance speech before the Republican Party state convention, Springfield, Illinois, 16 June 1858.