[8-16-03]

A recent article by syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, posed the interesting (and currently pressing) question: "Should judges be disqualified if their religious beliefs impact their votes?" Goldberg suggests - or even asserts - that it is religious prejudice to object to Supreme Court nominees who take strong positions on the basis of their faith.

This is an issue of great concern to many conservative Presbyterians (among lots of others), as evidenced by its inclusion in the PresbyWeb listings for Thursday, August 14, 2003.

Witherspoon Issues Analyst offers some thoughts on various ways our society and our theologians have tried to define a proper - and properly limited - role for religious faith in political discourse.

We'd like to hear your thoughts on this important -- and complex -- issue.
Just send us a note, and we'll post it here.  Let's expand the conversation!

Let's consider the various issues involved.

There is no question that religion has played an important part in public life in the U.S. from abolition to civil rights to the peace movement. Charles Marsh in God's Long Summer (1997) reminds us of the "religious energy" that went into the civil rights struggle; in the spirit of full inclusiveness he discusses not only Fannie Lou Hamer and many white Jews and Christians but the Klan and the founders of the Black Power movement. Social justice can be a religious, not merely a secular, obligation and goal.

But that requires us to ask about the relationship between religious beliefs and political convictions. In part this question concerns motivations within the same person or group. But it becomes a public issue when we ask how convictions that are impelled by religious beliefs can be made convincing to those who may be outside the faith community.

One familiar metaphor for the movement from religious to political discourse is that of translation. Kent Greenawalt in Religious Convictions and Political Choice (1988) has argued in a sustained way that religious convictions can best contribute to public debate when they are translated into "publicly accessible reasons." More recently, in Private Consciences and Public Reasons (1995), he examines the issue of "self-restraint" on the part of religiously committed citizens, legislators, executives, and judges, making different recommendations in each case.  He recognizes that legislators and executives often use religious language in their public rhetoric, though he also reminds them that their duty is to act in behalf of the people as a whole.  It is different with judges, he says.  "Of all officials, judges are the most carefully disciplined in restraining their frame of reference" (Private Consciences and Public Reasons, p. 149).  They have a duty to disregard reasons that are outside the tradition of legal discourse.

Stephen Carter, who is always claiming that religion is the only thing that gets no respect, knows Greenawalt's argument -- and explicitly rejected it. Gary Dorrien, certainly a champion of progressive Christianity, also rejects the language of "translation," arguing that it constitutes a surrender to secular politics and makes religion irrelevant. Stanley Hauerwas, even before Greenawalt, stated the same objection, arguing that "translation" makes it unclear why the theological idiom is needed at all.

And yet the metaphor finds support in unexpected circles. Richard John Neuhaus championed it even as he bemoaned "the naked public square." Michael Novak was a good enough Thomist to be even more sceptical of the invasion of the public square by religious symbols; he thought it appropriate for a pluralistic society to leave at its core "an empty shrine" in order to suggest that the sources of vitality exceed any tangible expressions.

Robert Audi offers an especially subtle analysis in a book he co-edited with Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (1997). Religious reasons may be, as he says, evidentially adequate, motivationally sufficient, and psychologically primary for many persons. He does not question these persons' right to express their convictions in civic discussion. But, he goes on, coercive laws and policies, those that constrain the activities of others, must be based upon "secular" reasons (that is, reasons that are shared with others, beyond particular religious groups) that are evidentially adequate and motivationally sufficient in that sphere.

This is very similar, it should be noted, to what the Supreme Court has said over and over in First Amendment decisions: claims of religious freedom can be overridden by public authorities when, but only when, there is a "compelling public interest" in regulating or prohibiting actions that might have a harmful effect upon others.

Even those who champion the secular state acknowledge that very often a political movement, when viewed diachronically, turns out to be a secularization or political transformation of what began as a religious movement. This should not be surprising; religion can broaden our field of vision and give us a sense of new possibilities.

For that matter, it is only in the course of historical experience that we learn to differentiate between general political rights or goods and more particular religious values; then we may decide to relocate the lines of demarcation. Coalitions among specific interest groups, including religious groups, have often enlarged and re-defined our notion of rights. We need only to think of the strange alliances that led up to the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, or to the United Nations' various conventions on human rights. Sometimes these generally recognized rights were initially championed by particular racial or ethnic constituencies; sometimes by religious groups; sometimes by secularists who had good reason to oppose the political role of religion.

There will be ongoing debate, of course, as values are newly articulated and the public tests the appropriateness of making them into laws governing the whole society. We may be sure, however, that when a new idea takes hold and survives in the political sphere, it happens largely because it makes political sense and is politically viable, not because of the residual religious authority or imagery behind it. If, for example, we like to think of ourselves as a just or humane or compassionate society, the trigger for such sentiments may indeed be religious; religion may even help to keep those sentiments lively; but their political credibility and viability has to be more or less self-sustaining.

In our day we often encounter "interfaith" or "interreligious" interest in public affairs, even cooperation with nonreligious people. All the mainline religious bodies have enunciated progressive policies at the national level; at the local level, where ministers tend to fear powerful members, significant action is less likely to be carried out by congregations than by interfaith groups. Then it often happens that people, in the process of dealing with pressing human issues, discover the relevance of their religious convictions. And people with varying religious convictions may find that they are working together on the same issues because of those diverse convictions.

I hope these reflections will be helpful as we all try to negotiate the difficult waters of church-state relationships -- and especially the whitewater rapids of political debate over the role of religion.

We'd like to hear your thoughts on this important -- and complex -- issue.
Just send us a note, and we'll post it here.  Let's expand the conversation!