The Economist
Lexington
One nation under gods
America resumes its endless and necessary war between church and state
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.
http://www.economist.com/node/21548964
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