Divided, We Stand
America's long struggle to balance church and state isn't getting any easier
But such secularist triumphs are only one side of a larger story. Even before those two cases had made their way through the courts, American politicians, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had succeeded in bringing even more religion into the public realm, justifying their efforts as part of the struggle against "godless" communism. It was during the Eisenhower era that "Congress opened a prayer room in the Capitol, made 'In God We Trust' the official national motto and required its inclusion on all currency, and added 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance," explains legal scholar and writer Stephen Bates.
Those contrary tendencies--the challenging of all religious influence in the public realm and the effort to reassert religious values there--have played a defining role in national domestic politics over the past 40 years. And while most Americans are less extreme than their activist leaders, they tend to be pulled in a more radical direction in political elections. During the modern era, of course, the strong secularists have become more firmly allied with liberalism and the Democratic Party, while the strong religionists--first the fundamentalists of the Moral Majority and then a much broader evangelical movement--shifted decisively into the Republican camp (with the exception of most African-American evangelicals). Battling over such issues as abortion or same-sex marriages, secularists tell religious folks not to impose their faith-based views and morality on other Americans, whether through laws or education or public symbolic expressions of religious beliefs. The religious counter that Roe v. Wade and the Massachusetts high court's decision permitting same-sex unions are themselves efforts to impose another sort of moral reasoning on the American people.
Unfortunately, the legal arena is not well suited to resolving these fraught cultural and moral issues, says Wilfred McClay, a professor of humanities at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga who has written extensively about American secularism. Law is a particularly blunt instrument, he explains, when it comes to dealing with factors like customary usage and tradition, though it is precisely those sorts of considerations that the Supreme Court had to rely on in its Ten Commandments decisions.
So how to reconcile the two factions warring for America's public space? Feldman believes that there need to be more concessions from both sides, with religionists surrendering things like government funding for faith-based initiatives and secularists allowing religious symbolism in the public realm. But his solution may require both too little and too much. After all, argues Perkins of the Family Research Council, "giving up faith-based initiatives wouldn't be as big a loss to faith communities as to the underserved." And as McClay points out, "Christian believers must share the public sphere with other kinds of believers as well as nonbelievers." That means accepting a more representative sampling of the symbolic expressions of those other beliefs.
For the time being, people will have to continue exploring the limits of how much, or how little, religion is permissible in the public square. "Where you draw the line is the question," says Richard Cizik, chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals. While he approves evangelicals' current assertiveness, Cizik, a self-described "prudentialist," warns that people could hurt their own cause by pushing the line too far. Folks on both sides of the divide might profitably take a cue from that caution.
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