RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE A Reconsideration

SOME years AGO I wrote a response to Stephen Carter's book, The Culture of Disbelief (1994). Carter had argued that it was unfair to religious believers to try to keep religious convictions out of the public square. I replied that such exclusion was part of a reasonable compromise between secular democratic governments and ecclesiastical organizations. Various forms of this traditional compromise are familiar: In the U.S. the government offers toleration, and various special privileges, for almost anything that chooses to call itself a religion. In exchange, the churches are supposed not to use the pulpit, or church funds, to support political candidates and proposals - or at least not to do so in so blatant a way as to lose their tax exemptions. The terms of this compromise are open to continual renegotiation. In my reply to Carter I urged that democratic societies should, in the manner of Jefferson, think of themselves as having exchanged toleration for an assurance that believers would leave their religion at home when discussing political questions in public. However, reading Nicholas Wolterstorff s writings on this subject, notably an essay called "Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us about Speaking and Acting for Religious Reasons" (1997a), has convinced me that my response to Carter was hasty and insufficiently thoughtful. I have been impressed by Wolterstorff s arguments, and also by some of Jeffrey Stout's criticisms (in a forthcoming book) of my response to Carter. So I shall offer a chastened, and more cautious, restatement of my anti-clerical views. I want to start back-pedaling by making a distinction between congregations of religious believers ministered to by pastors and what I shall be calling "ecclesiastical organizations" - organizations that accredit pastors and claim to offer authoritative guidance to believers. Only the latter are the target of secularists like myself. Our anti-clericalism is aimed at the Catholic bishops, the Mormon General Authorities, the televangelists, and all the other religious professionals who devote themselves not to pastoral care but to promulgating orthodoxy and acquiring economic and political clout. We think that it is mostly religion above the parish level that does the damage. For ecclesiastical organizations