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Friday, July 01, 2005
Evangelicals, Secularists, and Status-Wars: A Reply to Balkin
Ten Commandments | Posted by Noah Feldman at 12:46 AM
I’m grateful to my teacher and friend Jack Balkin for his illuminating response to my forthcoming N.Y. Times magazine article and book, which he posted this morning on Balkinization. I’m especially interested in his characteristically creative hypothesis about public religious symbolism, which he says is about the battle for social status – because if it is correct, it proves my point better than I did myself.
I’m not certain that I agree with Balkin that seeking government validation for religious symbols amounts to an attempt by those I have called values evangelicals to win a zero sum fight for social status against legal secularists. But assume for the moment that this is so. That would mean that the secularists’ attempt to keep those same symbols out of the public sphere is also an attempt to win a social status fight. Since Lemon, and indeed even a bit before, secularists have been on top, and Balkin says they will be loath to give ground now, when evangelicals are rising. But if this is a fight about social status, why in the world should the Constitution of the United States adjudicate it in favor of the secularists? If class wars must inevitably be fought, as Balkin implies, the place to fight them out is electoral politics, not the courts.
Unless, that is, you are a law professor, a secularist, and thus a member of an elite which has enormous social status and a disproportionate influence on just one branch of government, namely the judiciary. In essence, Balkin is implying that secularists will (and perhaps should) resist the temptation to give away the judicial veto that has enabled them to stay on top in the status wars. Notice that I never urged the government to go out and put up religious symbols; I just argued that the Constitution should not be read to prohibit them when democratic politics have generated such symbols. I don’t much care for wars in which one group tries to elevate itself over others; but I am a lot more troubled by one group claiming that egalitarianism just so happens to mandate the elevation of its own symbolic preferences. It is more than likely that some values evangelicals understand the judicial prohibition on religious symbols in just the terms that Balkin proposes. No wonder, then, that they think secularists are denigrating them and their faith.
In my own view, most secularists are nowhere near so cynical. Most, I think, sincerely feel that religious symbols exclude them, and oppose such symbols out of the (mistaken) belief that if they are eliminated, all Americans will feel included. Those secularists, I hope, will see from my argument that their wholly admirable goal of inclusion in fact is not satisfied by a ban on public religious symbols, because values evangelicals end up feeling excluded. And of course what is really at stake is not the symbols themselves, but what they stand for. The reason people on both sides get so riled up about religious symbolism is that it is a stand-in for the deeper question of whether religious values should or may determine political choices. Here, too, I want secularists to acknowledge that asking people of faith to keep their religious commitments out of public discourse is not a neutral or inclusive or “liberal” as that term was classically understood, but actually exclusionary.
Finally a quick reply to some of Balkin’s other thoughts. Fights over money really are zero-sum in the real world where you can’t just get more money out of thin air, but must raise taxes or cut somewhere else. That’s why the professional politicians – as well as the political scientists – generally think that if you want to know what’s really going on in politics, you should follow the money. As for solving the details of what counts as government funding or what kinds of activities performed by religious institutions should be denied funding, I entirely agree that much more detail would be needed to make out a full jurisprudence. That’s not what I’m doing in this article, though, or indeed in the book from which it is loosely excerpted. Instead I am trying to change the entire framework in which these admittedly difficult decisions will be made. In the book, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem – and What We Should Do About It, I offer a new interpretation of the history of church-state relation in the U.S., one focused on successive waves of newly developed religious diversity as the drivers of our ideas on religion and government. I hope readers of this posting will have a look at the full argument, and let me know what they think.
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Comments
Just a quick reply to the argument in the fourth paragraph--that while secularists feel excluded when there are governmental displays of religion, evangelicals feel excluded when there are not.
Mr. Feldman misses an important point there, I believe, by not questioning this "equivalence." A lack of goverment achnowledgement of religion is NOT the same as government saying "There is no god." If the government affirmatively said "there is no god," then religious people would be right to feel excluded. BUT, no one has ever proposed that. What is proposed is that government not talk about god at all. This is neutrality, this is staying out of the religious sphere and religious disputes, this is NOT taking a side in them. For those that Mr. Feldman labels as evangelicals to feel slighted is therefore unfair--he is saying (possibly correctly, I don't know and can't speak for those people) that they feel excluded unless government enters the religious sphere and takes their side.
Neutrality is not the same as asserting atheism or taking the secularist side of a religious debate. Pretending that it is stacks the deck and precludes the possibility of true reilgious freedom, which can only exist if the government stays completely out of any and all religious debate.
Posted by: anon. at July 2, 2005 03:08 PM
"This is neutrality, this is staying out of the religious sphere and religious disputes, this is NOT taking a side in them."
This is no such thing as a "religious sphere", as much as the secular crowd would like to believe. It is impossible for the government to be neutral, when the most basic decisions about who to vote for are inormed by (often solely) the religious beliefs of large portions of the electorate. Most public policy is created to satisfy the moral aims of the people. Government neutrality toward religion is an unworkable myth. The Consitution was never designed with "neutrality" in mind - if you believe this, then you must oppose the use of "God" in every single location it is found connected to the government, includign currency, swearing in ceremonies, etc
Posted by: Ben Kennedy at July 4, 2005 11:36 AM
Ben, it is far from a myth. The myth is that government cannot act as an ethical governmenty without religious entanglement. Whether there are moral underpinnings to some policy decisions made by individual officials is a different question from the neutrality of the government qua government towards religion.
The government was meant to be neutral. When the British crown was not neutral, we see a history of oppression and coercion based on "moral" teachings. The concept of an individual being left to worship as he or she wished was one of the major reasons that so many colonists risked their lives to cross the Atlantic ocean. Both government and religion are sullied by the intermingling of the two.
You are creating a straw man in trying to equate the question of government neutrality towards religion with the personal choices of individuals. They are different. Furthermore, your final conclusion is not warranted under legal precedent. If you want people to support activist judges and a proactive legislating judiciary, we can follow this line of thought. However, precedent establishes standards for determining when there are improper endorsements and we know that some of what you reference ahs been upheld by the USSC.
Personally, I would support removing "In God We Trust" from currency and coin as well as the position of legislative chaplain. I do not, however, have a legal basis to support that.Posted by: Joel at July 7, 2005 12:05 PM