Faith in American Public Life
Religious faith has long influenced human thought and conduct. Ideas about the holy or transcendent matters affect understandings of personal identity and interpersonal relationship, direct human emotion, habit and behavior, and motivate human action. How else can we explain why people profess belief in transcendent and improvable realities in a scientific era, why they seek supernatural answers for naturally explainable and predictable phenomena, or why they act in irrational or selfless ways (or even self-destructive ways) in a modern culture that emphasizes self-fulfillment and self-preservation? To adapt an old adage, wars have been fought, great migrations have taken place, and sacrifices and unspeakable inhumanities have occurred, not in the name of love but of faith.
Most discussions of faith lead quickly to considerations of its role in public life. While expressions of faith take place most commonly within the physical confines of a religious community (i.e., a church, temple or mosque), faith frequently has a public aspect. Absent those who belong to a hermetic or cloistered community, people live out their lives in the greater, profane world. Expectantly, many faithful apply their beliefs to their daily secular activities; in fact, the examples provided by the world’s great religious leaders — Moses, Siddhartha, Jesus, Mohammed — are of the integration of faith into public life. We should, in fact, be surprised when we encounter faith traditions that are completely privatized.
So how should we understand the role of faith in American public life? After all, the framers of our nation broke with tradition and practice in establishing a secular, democratic government. For the first time in organized human history, the spheres of church and state were separated: The government would no longer seek legitimacy from the dominant religion, and religion would operate independently from the government, receiving neither favors nor financial support for its endeavors. As a nation, we proudly profess a system of separation of church and state, one, in turn, that enhances religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all. For many, a prominent public role of faith is inconsistent with that principle.
Inconsistent Values
The issue of the public role of private faith takes many forms.
American history and culture are full of seeming inconsistencies (and Americans are legendary for professing inconsistent values). How else can we explain a nation founded on principles of liberty and equality but one that disenfranchised women and enslaved African Americans? So too, have been our perspectives about the role of faith in public life. The framers, steeped in Enlightenment thought and Whig theories, wrote a “Godless Constitution,” devoid of any acknowledgement of national fealty to God. At the same time, the deist-leaning leaders of the new nation believed strongly in the personal and societal value of religious faith. The writings of the period speak loudly about the importance of civic virtue for the survival of the nation, and of the indispensable role that religion would play in that endeavor.
Ever since that period, America has struggled with finding the right balance between church and state. Controversies over prayer and Bible reading in public schools, the public funding of religious education and of government-sponsored displays of religious symbols have frequently been the center of debate. But those controversies, many of which have embroiled courts and legislatures for 60 years, have commonly involved the government’s active participation. At this level, the framework for resolving such controversies is set, as the Constitution mandates against government actions “respecting” an establishment of religion (though people vehemently disagree over what that means). The more difficult — and more interesting — question involves those situations where government is not the promoter or regulator of religious norms, but simply the facilitator of private conduct and expression.
The issue of the public role of private faith takes many forms. Some of the issues are starkly apparent. Should the president be able to talk publicly about his own faith or invite people to join him in prayer following an incomprehensible mass shooting on a college campus? Should churches be able to receive public funds to perform faith-oriented social services for the needy? And should high school students be able to meet for prayer on public school campuses? In these instances, the public expression of faith is usually clear, although the answers to the controversies are sometimes elusive.
In other forms, the public role of faith is more subtle. Are the controversies over abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage and the right to die inherently religious issues? Should the public debate over such issues, not to mention any resulting public policy, be limited to secular arguments supporting or opposing these contentious matters? Is there something unique about a faith-based argument for policy change that renders it less approachable and less amenable to the deliberative process? Or does the exclusion of faith considerations in policy formation lead to discrimination against religious expression and the impoverishment of discourse generally? Put simply, can a government based on secular, rationalist principles adopt secular rationales over religious ones, at least as the basis for its own actions? Or does this result in a “naked public square”?
Fitting Faith in Public Discourse
We cannot decide how faith should fit within our public discourse.
Americans’ attitudes toward these questions, viewed corporately, reveal a mess of internal inconsistency. On one hand, America is the most professingly religious industrialized nation on earth: Approximately 90 percent of Americans profess a belief in a deity, and approximately 50 percent regularly attend worship services (one to two times a month). It is not surprising that we want our leaders to reflect our religious values, provided our officials are not too overt or sectarian in their religiosity. Sixty-eight percent of Americans state that it is important that the president have strong religious beliefs (a number that rises to 87 percent if you ask evangelical Christians). The paradox is that Americans readily embraced the religious sound bites of Ronald Reagan but were uncomfortable with the intensely personal faith of Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush’s apparently deep personal faith is attractive to conservative Christians, but raises suspicions of religious liberals and secularists. Still, no avowed atheist or agnostic will be elected president (or governor or senator, etc.) in our lifetime.
We also want our government and its policies to reflect our religious values, notwithstanding the acknowledged threat to religion presented by government misappropriation of things holy. Witness the furor over the removal of the word “God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or whenever the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeks to banish the Ten Commandments from public buildings.
Conversely, polling data indicates that an overwhelming majority of Americans object to excessive political activity by churches and religious leaders. It is unseemly, many people believe, for a religious leader to closely align himself with an elected official or partisan organization or seek to promote a religious agenda through public policy or law. This disdain tends to vanish — or at least lessen — when a religious leader’s political pronouncements or a politician’s “God talk” matches one’s own faith perspective. What was once a “religious-political agenda” becomes a compelling basis for policy implementation. Religious justifications and rhetoric that were once off-putting are now reaffirming. Because of the inherent myopia of faith, people tend to exaggerate the universality of their own beliefs and have a hard time seeing that their deeply felt positions could be offensive to others or perceived as a threat to domestic principles. The point is that we cannot decide how faith should fit within our public discourse.
Faith Issues in the Northwest
The Pacific Northwest is a particularly interesting place to study these issues. Oregon and Washington are reputedly the “most unchurched” states in the nation — if the South is the “Bible Belt,” we represent the heretic fringe. (At the same time, however, a surprisingly large number of our “unchurched” profess to be spiritual.) What this means is that a smaller percentage of Pacific Northwesterners attend traditional mainstream churches, thus skewing the demographics so that there is an overrepresentation of secularists and religious conservatives. Because of this faith divide, our region has often been “ground zero” in the culture wars (as facilitated by the ease of citizen initiatives) with controversies erupting over issues such as abortion, the right to die, gay marriage and environmental regulation.
Willamette University has decided to embark on an exploration of this fascinating issue. Uniquely situated across the street from the center of state government and drawing on its history as a church-related college with a tradition of academic excellence, Willamette is establishing a Center for Religion, Law and Democracy. This center, which will involve faculty and students from various departments and schools, will provide an opportunity for the study of the intersection of religious faith with our legal and policy institutions. The center will sponsor academic conferences, nationally and regionally recognized speakers, interdisciplinary course development, faculty and student research, and student internship opportunities. The center will also have an outward mission. By serving as a public forum for the discussion of these issues and, potentially, as a facilitator for greater public understanding about the role of faith in American public life, it will help the University fulfill its founding mission and credo, Not unto ourselves alone are we born.