This article appeared in the December 2006/January
2007 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our
monthly print edition, click here.
WHEN JAMES MADISON agitated to make religious freedom fundamental
to the United States Constitution, it was not from hostility to
religion. It was from hostility to established religion,
with its presumption of an authority in worldly affairs that only
an elected government should exercise. The first freedom listed in
the Bill of Rights tells us that Congress shall “make no law
respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof” — a rule that is just as important in its second
half as in its first.
However, the free exercise of religion involves living by values
that are not always endorsed by the secular state. In the long run,
therefore, there are bound to be tensions between religious freedom
and secular power, and these periodically come to the surface,
especially in America, where the secular culture of the East Coast
cities remains profoundly suspicious toward the forms of life that
are rumored to exist beyond the Appalachians. Radical secularists
are now using the “no establishment” clause to chase religion out
of public life. In response backwoods evangelicals are using the
“free exercise” clause to invite religion in. Book upon book,
article upon article, has been thrown into the conflict between
them, and the ordinary citizen, content to live by the Ten
Commandments and expecting them to be quietly acknowledged from
time to time by those who govern him, looks with some bewilderment
on a battle that he had assumed to have ended in a compromise two
centuries ago.
Radical secularists claim Madison for their own. What he sought,
however, was not a retreat of religion from public life but a habit
of toleration. He hoped for a political order in which people could
differ in their religion but nevertheless live peacefully side by
side. Such a political order had obtained neither in Puritan
Massachusetts nor in Puritan England. But it obtains today in
America, not despite the faith of the American people but because
of it. It is the very extrovert quality of American religion that
inspires people to claim the space in which to exercise their
faith, and to fence that space with genial flower beds of goodwill
towards their skeptical neighbors.
THE CONTRAST WITH EUROPE IS TELLING. The dwindling of faith among
the Europeans has left them unprotected against the belligerent
dogmatism of Islam, which does not merely flow into every
undefended space but actively excludes its rivals, once installed.
In the face of the paranoid posture of European Muslims, the
governments and people of Europe are relinquishing one by one the
freedoms acquired over centuries, including the freedom of
conscience. Few assaults on free speech in Western democracies have
been as vehement as that now carried out in the name of Islam by
its European adherents, who often regard public criticism of their
faith as an intolerable offense, and seek by threats and
demonstrations to silence it.
In September of this past year Robert Redeker, a French
schoolteacher, published an article in Le Figaro arguing
that Christians, when incited to violence in the name of their
religion, can find no authority for this in the life and words of
Christ as recorded in the Gospel, while Muslims, incited to
violence in the name of their religion, can find plenty of
support for their belligerence in the Koran. Although manifestly
true, this statement was found to be offensive by a section of
Muslim opinion, Mr. Redeker received credible death-threats against
himself and his family, and he and they now live in hiding under
police protection.
The reaction of the French authorities typifies the European
response. Critics of Islam are not defended, but marginalized, by
removing them from society and keeping them under house arrest.
Instead of going after those who threatened Mr. Redeker with every
weapon available to the law, instead of passing legislation of
whatever severity might be required to restore the freedoms that
have been gratuitously removed by the newcomers, the European
authorities try to bluff their way to peace through appeasement,
while pushing Islam’s critics off the stage. It is now increasingly
rare for public discussion of Islam and its stance to proceed with
the open-minded concern for truth that is necessary if the
discussion is to get us anywhere.
Europe has seen private enterprise censorship of the Islamist
kind before: notably when the Fascists worked to take power in
Italy and the Nazis in Germany. But Europe has not learned the
lesson. People living under secular government, and enjoying the
comforts of a modern economy, easily become blind to the deep
religious need of our species. They readily assume that religious
passions can be quelled by a dose of Enlightenment, and that a
sprinkling of skepticism will suffice to quell those perverted
passions, like Nazism and fascism, that arise in religion’s place.
And when the truth suddenly displays itself, they stare aghast,
utter abject apologies, and quickly retreat from the field.
THERE IS A FURTHER DIMENSION TO ALL THIS, and it goes to the heart
of what political freedom means. A Washington-based pressure group
is currently campaigning to remove state funding from a marriage
guidance network that uses the Bible as a leading source. The group
argues that by funding this network, the state violates the “no
establishment” clause. You can see how the argument goes, and the
kind of plausibility that it might achieve. What is important,
however, is the result. If the campaign (now in the courts) is
successful, the only marriage guidance available to the poor will
be guidance that does not refer to the principal source of Jewish
and Christian wisdom — and which will therefore be committed to a
secular view of marriage and to the propagation of secular remedies
for what are, in the majority of cases, spiritual problems.
Religion will be effectively expelled from one of the areas where
it is most needed, which is the repairing of damaged human
relations.
Moreover, those who use the Bible in counseling do so for the
very good reason that it contains better advice, and a wiser
understanding of human nature, than just about any other relevant
text. Even if they don’t believe the underlying theology, they are
entitled to belief in its utility. But that may not be enough to
obtain the funding needed to practice. Hence the pursuit of an
abstract “freedom of religion,” leads to a “freedom from
religion.” This in turn leads to a narrowing of options, with the
result of promoting and privileging those which are least likely to
do any good.
OF COURSE, the withdrawal of state funding does not prevent anyone
from using the Bible in counseling. But it ensures that the Bible
won’t be used. This ideological vetting of state funds tends
exactly in the direction that the “no establishment” clause was
designed to prevent. When the Constitution was drawn up, the state
was not in the business of taking charge of civil society, or of
displacing religious and private foundations from their central
role in education, health care, and the provision of social
services. The “no establishment” clause did not forbid those
things: it committed the state to remain neutral in the face of the
existing spiritual rivalries.
Today, however, the state has intruded into civil society in a
way that the Founders would never have envisaged. It does not
merely fund the majority of schools: it controls them. It funds all
kinds of institutions, from hospitals to rehabilitation centers,
that would previously have been funded by private donations. The
“no establishment” clause, interpreted as the activists would wish,
therefore obliges the state to chase religion out of the
institutions of society. Having absorbed those institutions, the
state fumigates them against the religious bug. But it does this
religiously, seeking out all the nooks and crannies where
religion might take hold, and squirting them with ideological
disinfectant. And because the state controls the institutions where
orthodoxies arise — schools and universities — it is in effect
making an establishment of religion. The religion is atheism; but
atheism pursued with a kind of vindictive vehemence that has all
the marks of faith.
In the face of this new persecutory zeal directed at ordinary
believers, we need to remind ourselves of what Madison wished to
achieve. The important thing for Madison was not to prevent the
official endorsement of one religion, but to promote the official
permission of others. The state can make public acknowledgement of
the majority faith, while upholding the religious freedom of
minorities. All that is necessary is that the majority religion
should itself permit this. Christianity (in the form presented by
its founder) manifestly both permits religious freedom and requires
it. Islam, however, neither requires religious freedom nor really
permits it.
On the other hand, no grant of religious freedom should overlook
the deep importance of faith in the life of the believer. In
granting this freedom you are not granting a simple permission to
do some trivial thing, but the right to shape one’s life, and the
life of one’s family according to a complete and comprehensive
plan. This right cannot be granted without permitting many things
that the atheist culture finds offensive: the right to pray, to
worship, to persuade; the right to acknowledge God in one’s daily
life, and to dedicate one’s thoughts and deeds in public gestures.
Hence religious freedom, even when it can be granted, will press up
against the very limits of the space in which our freedoms are
exercised. And if it can be granted at all, it is only because a
particular religious tradition has both occupied that space, and
also relinquished it. In America, that tradition is the Christian
tradition. If we value religious freedom, therefore, we should
value the Christian faith as its guarantee. Should radical
secularism ever triumph, so that the voice of Christianity is
silenced in our public life, this would not be a gain in religious
freedom but a loss of it. For it would leave the field open to the
two contestants that are now seeking to claim it — militant
atheism and militant Islam, both of which regard their critics as
enemies.
