Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--and What We Should Do About It - Hardcover

Feldman, Noah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374281319 ISBN 13: 9780374281311

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

A brilliant and urgent appraisal of one of the most profound conflicts of our time

Even before George W. Bush gained reelection by wooing religiously devout "values voters," it was clear that church-state matters in the United States had reached a crisis. With Divided by God, Noah Feldman shows that the crisis is as old as this country--and looks to our nation's past to show how it might be resolved.

Today more than ever, ours is a religiously diverse society: Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. And yet more than ever, committed Christians are making themselves felt in politics and culture.

What are the implications of this paradox? To answer this question, Feldman makes clear that again and again in our nation's history diversity has forced us to redraw the lines in the church-state divide. In vivid, dramatic chapters, he describes how we as a people have resolved conflicts over the Bible, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the teaching of evolution through appeals to shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom of conscience. And he proposes a brilliant solution to our current crisis, one that honors our religious diversity while respecting the long-held conviction that religion and state should not mix.

Divided by God speaks to the headlines, even as it tells the story of a long-running conflict that has made the American people who we are.

About this title

About the Author

Noah Feldman, who teaches law at New York University, is the author of After Jihad and What We Owe Iraq. He lives in New York and Washington, D.C.

Reviews

So how peculiar is America's struggle over religion's public role? Just last month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued twin 5-to-4 rulings declaring it was constitutionally okay for Texas to display the Ten Commandments in a 22-acre park at the state capitol but not constitutionally okay for two county courthouses in Kentucky to display the very same commandments. Texas, the Court divined, used the commandments as part of a "historical" exhibit, whereas the Kentucky counties meant "to emphasize and celebrate the religious message" of the commandments. Got that?

And when these cases were argued, Justice Antonin Scalia couldn't resist pointing out that the very court deciding when government could legitimately invoke religion routinely begins its sessions with: "God save the United States and this honorable court." On these issues, you might add: God save us all.

The good news, as Noah Feldman argues in this indispensable book, is that the United States has struggled with the question of religious freedom in almost every generation because Americans have always believed so powerfully in "the principle of the liberty of conscience." Contrary to frequent claims by the most ardent partisans in today's debates -- Feldman labels those we consider as being on the right of this debate as "values evangelicals" and those on the left as "legal secularists" -- there is no straight line through American history on church-state questions. We have seen a good deal of incoherence and inconsistency, a fair bit of hypocrisy and a huge amount of contention. We have muddled through in a way that has allowed Americans to believe in and worship God as they choose to -- and to reject faith altogether if they are so inclined. This is a huge achievement that every generation is obligated to preserve and defend. But Feldman does an enormous service by showing that this was accomplished more by messy compromise than by metaphysical precision. And it's comforting to learn that political opportunism on religious questions is not unique to our moment.

In his brisk, balanced history of America's debates about God's public role, Feldman pokes one hole after another in the assumptions of activists on all sides of today's religious wars. Contemporary religious conservatives seem to think that Christian rules and assumptions pervaded everything about the early republic. They probably don't know (I didn't until I read Feldman) that when the Post Office was established Congress "legislated for seven-day mail delivery without anyone initially raising the problem of Sabbath violation." It was not until 1828, "with national religious consciousness growing," that religious leaders began complaining that post offices, "which doubled as gathering places in small towns, were diverting the faithful from attending church on Sunday." The debate went on for 84 years. Sunday delivery was finally stopped in 1912. And while partisans of religion like to think our founders did their work in a profoundly religious time, in their era "church attendance was low, at least by today's standards," and there "was no national movement devoted to promoting the role of religion in public life."

Secular liberals may believe that the state constitutional bans on government aid to religious schools -- the so-called Blaine Amendments, named after the 1884 Republican presidential nominee, James G. Blaine -- were motivated primarily by a concern for religious freedom. Feldman shows convincingly that these amendments were a political ploy. They were specifically directed against the schools of the Roman Catholic minority and designed to produce electoral gains in a country that was divided, as it is now, roughly 50-50 between the two major parties. Republicans were trying to put Democrats, who enjoyed broad support from Catholics, in a tough spot. If Democrats supported the amendments to appeal to the Protestant majority, they risked alienating their Catholic supporters. If they went with the Catholic minority, they risked alienating the Protestants. "The unscrupulousness of this strategy of driving a wedge between Democratic-leaning Protestants and Catholics seems not to have disturbed Republican politicians," Feldman writes.

Feldman does especially well in tracing the rise of secularism at the end of the 19th century and the rise of fundamentalism at the beginning of the 20th. We easily forget the vigor of atheist agitation and the popularity in the 1870s and '80s of such anti-religious lecturers as Robert G. Ingersoll, who declared: "We are explaining more every day. We are understanding more every day; consequently your God is growing smaller every day." But pure secularism and atheism didn't sell well in America. The atheists and agnostics eventually joined forces with a larger group of liberals to create a more moderate "legal secularism." It did not deny God or religion but simply insisted that religion was a private matter that should be separated entirely from government.

We also forget that Protestant fundamentalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, less than a century old, and arose, as Feldman says, "not as a direct response to secularism itself, but as a response to liberal developments in Christian theology that were themselves influenced by the scientific worldview." In describing the Scopes "monkey" trial over whether the state of Tennessee could ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools, Feldman is admirably fair to evolution's opponents. Liberals would do well to recall that progressive impulses fed opposition to both "survival-of- the-fittest social Darwinism" and "the new 'science' of eugenics." Each, says Feldman, "could be made to reflect the dark underside of secularism's elitist character, since social Darwinism seemed to justify the accumulation of wealth by a favored few, and eugenics explicitly favored the breeding of a genetically superior master class."

Still, fundamentalism all by itself was destined to fail as a political movement. Thus the invention of the broader idea that Feldman labels "values evangelicalism." The values evangelicals conceded that the United States could not have a state religion -- to do so would violate the First Amendment. Therefore, they insisted that they were not trying to impose their faith but merely trying to promote a set of values that were good for the country.

Feldman, who describes himself as someone "raised and educated in a modern Orthodox Jewish milieu," also persuasively demonstrates that the idea of a "Judeo-Christian" America was a convenient post-World War II creation -- and an indication of how far values evangelicals would go to create broad alliances. The notion "depended on no historical reality and essentially co-opted a vague idea of Jewishness into a familiar array of symbols and ideas that had in the past been identified as unapologetically Christian." Flawed as an intellectual construct -- Rep. Barney Frank said he would understand what was meant by "Judeo-Christian" when he met one -- the idea, Feldman argues, "signaled a remarkable openness on the part of the long-established Christian majority." The "Judeo-Christian" notion may well be invoked in politics for sectarian Christian purposes, but it sure beats anti-Semitism.

For its history alone, this book should be read by all interested in today's church-state debates. But Feldman does not simply tell a compelling story. He also offers a proposal for bringing peace, or at least a truce, to the current round of religious warfare. "We want to acknowledge the centrality of religion to many citizens' values while keeping religion and government in some important sense distinct," Feldman writes. He proposes a deal between the legal secularists and the values evangelicals. He would "offer greater latitude for public religious discourse and religious symbolism, and at the same time insist on a stricter ban on state funding of religious institutions and activities." His solution, he insists, "would both recognize religious values and respect the institutional separation of religion and government as an American value in its own right." He summarizes his view as "no coercion and no money."

I admire the respectful spirit of the Feldman Compromise. Surely liberals must accept that "religious values form an important source of religious beliefs and identities for the majority of Americans." Religious people have a right to form their political conclusions on the basis of their religious values, and to voice those views in the public debate. He is also right that evangelicals "need to acknowledge that separating the institutions of government from those of religion is essential for avoiding outright political-religious conflict."

But Feldman's solution is easier said than carried out. As the Supreme Court's messy Ten Commandments decisions showed, giving broader latitude for "religious symbolism" can easily conflict with "the institutional separation of religion and government." Feldman would put roadblocks in the way of President Bush's efforts to expand federal financing of faith-based groups. But how, exactly, would the "no money" principle affect government funding for health care provided in religious hospitals or long-standing cooperative ventures between government and religious social service organizations? What does Feldman's solution have to say about the problems at the Air Force Academy, where "religious discourse" by officers higher up in the chain of command had deleterious effects on the religious liberty of cadets who did not share the faith of the brass?

Feldman needs to work out in far more detail than he has here the implications of his theory. I hope he does. In an arena so contested and contentious, it's a blessing to have an honest voice stating uncomfortable truths, to wit: "It is appealing to think that, deep down, we all agree on what really matters. Only we don't -- and we have to come to terms with that fact of disagreement while still engaging in a common national project." Amen.

Reviewed by E. J. Dionne Jr.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Feldman, a legal rising star and author of After Jihad (a look at democracy and Islam), turns his attention to America's battle over law and religious values in this lucid and careful study. Those Feldman calls "legal secularists" want the state wholly cleansed of religion, while "values evangelicals" want American government to endorse the Christianity on which they say its authority rests. Feldman thinks both positions too narrow for America's tastes and needs. Much of his volume shows how those needs have changed. James Madison and his friends, Feldman writes, hoped to "protect religion from government, not the other way round." Debates in the 19th century focused on public schools, whose culture of "nonsectarian Christianity" (really Protestantism) created dilemmas for Catholics, and in the 20th century faced challenges from secularists and evangelicals—the former won in the courts until very recently; the latter, often enough, won public opinion. Feldman proposes a compromise: that government "[allow] greater space for public manifestations of religion" while preventing government from linking itself with "religious institutions" (by funding them, for example). The "values" controversy, as Feldman shows, concerns electoral clout, not just legal reasoning. His patient historical chapters will leave readers on all sides far more informed as matters like stem-cell research and the Supreme Court's forthcoming 10 Commandments decision take the headlines.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Having examined Islam and democracy in his first book, "After Jihad," Feldman, a law professor at N.Y.U., turns his attention to America's own fraught religious-secular divide. Much of the book consists of an agile account of the evolution of church-state relations, from the creation of the First Amendment to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling against a public display of the Ten Commandments. Feldman identifies two polarized camps today: "values evangelicals," who uphold religious values as integral to political decisions, and "legal secularists," whose aim is to keep religion and government separate. He downplays the heterogeneity within these groups, perhaps in order to bolster his solution for reconciliation: sanctioning "public manifestations of religion," while withholding government funding from religious institutions.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* Madison thought that the multitude of contending Protestant denominations of his time would ensure that no one of them ever became the established national church. His Virginia constituency differed with him, however, inducing him to spearhead the drafting of the First Amendment's religion clauses that forbid Congress from establishing a national church and interfering with religious expression. They seem simple enough, and at the end of an invaluable survey of the tides of religious revival and secularism that have washed over the U.S. for 216 years, Feldman urges that they be simply enforced: that no public money be given to any church institution or auxiliary, and that religious expression not be inhibited in public places and public discourse. His advocacy comes after enthralling exposition of what the Founding Fathers thought of church-state separation (today's conservatives and liberals are both mistaken about this); how the rise of public education sharpened church-state issues; the career of early, hard-line (antispiritual) secularism and the reaction to it that arose from Protestant fundamentalism; and the histories and characteristics of legal secularism and values evangelicalism (softer, more inclusive versions of, respectively, strict secularism and fundamentalism). Intelligently respectful of both secularist and religious camps, this is the ideal book with which to ponder the Supreme Court's recent Ten Commandments decisions and to hope for balance in the future of American church-state relations. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from Divided By God by Noah Feldman. Copyright © 2005 by Noah Feldman. Published July 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

For ten days in August 2003, with an insurgency brewing and soldiers dying in newly conquered Iraq, the nation’s attention suddenly became riveted on sleepy Montgomery, Alabama. Late one night the previous winter, Judge Roy Moore, the elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, had arranged for a two-and-a-half-ton block of granite to be erected in the rotunda of his courthouse. The enormous rock, which took a team of men and machinery to move, was inscribed with the Ten Commandments. A federal district court found the monument to be an unconstitutional infringement on the separation of church and state, and ordered its removal; in late summer, a federal court of appeals agreed.1

What happened next grabbed the public eye: Moore refused. This extraordinary act of civil disobedience by a judge sworn to uphold the law brought out spokespeople and activists for both of the two most prominent schools of thought about church and state in the contemporary United States. On the front steps of the courthouse and on live television, their arguments began with the framers of the Constitution. The evangelicals declared that our entire system was built on Judeo-Christian values, and that the founding fathers, whose moral sense was based on the Bible, would have been astonished and horrified to see the Ten Commandments proscribed by court order. The secularists invoked Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to support their view that the symbols of religion ought to be kept out of the governmental sphere altogether. Both sides shared the assumption that they could win the argument if they could prove that history was on their side.

The Montgomery controversy mattered for reasons greater than the specter of a politically ambitious Alabama judge refusing to follow a federal court’s order, or the constitutional question of whether the Ten Commandments may lawfully be displayed in public places, which the Supreme Court had yet to resolve. With a presidential election looming, the evangelicals and the secularists were enacting in microcosm the national debate about the right relationship between religion and government in the United States. The stakes of that debate extend beyond statues to billions of dollars in government funding, basic moral questions of life, death, and family, and the recurrent challenge of what it means for Americans to belong to a nation. The Ten Commandments were just a symbolic stand-in. Judge Moore had struck a vein of division that runs deep in America’s and its psyche.

1. Glassroth v. Moore, 242 F. Supp. 2d 1067 (M.D. Ala. 2002), aff’d, 335 F.3d 1282 (11th Cir. July 1, 2003), cert den., 124 S. Ct. 497 (Nov. 3, 2003).

INTRODUCTION

In the darkest days of the Civil War, the absolute low point of division in American history, Abraham Lincoln could still imagine religion as a potentially unifying force. North and South, he observed in his second inaugural address, prayed to the same God and read the same Bible, even if they interpreted it differently. Through a shared faith, the American people could someday bind up the nation’s wounds, inflicted by a just God as punishment for the original sin of slavery.

Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans still say they believe in God, but a common understanding of how faith should inform nationhood can no longer bring Americans together. To the contrary, no question divides Americans more fundamentally than that of the relation between religion and government. For many, moral values derived from religion are the oldestar of political judgment. Almost a quarter of the electorate in the 2004 presidential election described values as the most important issue to them, and of these, some four-fifths voted for President George W. Bush.1 Yet many Americans believe with equal commitment that religion is a private matter that should not figure in the sphere of politics—a view expressly adopted by Senator John Kerry in the presidential debates, where he explained his pro-choice stance by asserting that his personal beliefs as a Catholic must not be imposed on women who held different beliefs about abortion.2 Although church membership did not predict which candidate a voter would choose, one statistic stood out sharply: the more often you attended church, the more likely you were to vote for President Bush.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

The deep divide in American life, then, is not primarily over religious belief or affiliation—it is over the role that belief should play in the business of politics and government. Consider same-sex marriage, which appeared on ballots in eleven states in 2004 and shows no sign of disappearing from public debate. Many Americans insist that marriage is “between one man and one woman” but say they have no objection to civil unions that give gay couples the same rights as married people. If there is no legal difference between civil union and marriage, why object to the word “marriage”? What’s in a name? The obvious answer is that even though marriage is a state institution, it has a traditional religious definition, which opponents of same-sex marriage do not want to change. The reason so many people oppose same-sex “marriage” is that they believe the state’s sanction of marriage should take account of a moral value derived from religion.

Religious values also figure prominently in the debates about stem-cell research, abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty. On each of these life-and-death issues, one school of thought insists that citizens’ private religious values should not decide government policy, while an equally vociferous alternative view maintains that the right answers to such ultimate questions must come from the wisdom of religious tradition. In each case, the debate is as much about whether faith should inform political debate as about the rights or wrongs of the issue. “We are a religious people,” the Supreme Court said in 1952, “whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Clearly, not everyone agrees. Is the Court’s dictum true today? Was it ever true in our history?

The essential question of how religion and government should interact becomes most salient when we confront the controversial constitutional problems that arise under the heading of church and state: Should the government be able to fund religious schools or social programs through the model of charitable choice? May courthouses display the Ten Commandments? Do the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance amount to an establishment of religion? No one lives or dies as the result of our resolution of these hard questions on which the Supreme Court inevitably opines, but they are nevertheless lightning rods for debate, because they go to the very heart of who we are as a nation. They raise the central challenges of citizenship and peoplehood: who belongs here? To what kind of nation do we belong?

This book sets out to address these crucial questions, turning to our history to understand the origins of today’s controversies and exploring how we might chart a course for the future. Two sides dominate the church-state debate in contemporary American life, corresponding to what today are the two most prominent approaches to the proper relation of religion and government. In this book, I call those who insist on the direct relevance of religious values to political life “values evangelicals

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374281319
• ISBN 13: 9780374281311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320