It is the thesis of this paper that, while the influence of religion on political behavior is widely recognized, (1) theologically-rooted norms, and the elites who hold or are influenced by them, frame and shape American policy choices to an extent that is not appreciated; (2) the country’s increasing religious diversity is affecting our ability to forge consensus or to govern; and (3) disciplinary “silos” have prevented scholars from developing a sufficiently comprehensive synthesis of existing scholarship to adequately describe the nature and effects of the religious underpinnings of contemporary political polarization. As a result, while lawyers, political scientists and others recognize the more explicitly religious components of America’s current polarization, we fail to appreciate the extent to which conflicting policy preferences are rooted in religiously-shaped normative frameworks. Much like the blind men and the elephant, we encounter different parts of the animal. We see a tree, a wall, a snake—but we fail to apprehend the size, shape and power of the whole elephant.

                                          Sources of Meaning

A “paradigm” is a pattern of received beliefs that we use to make sense of the world. Originally a linguistic term, it owes its current popularity to Thomas Kuhn, a physicist who—in the course of research for his dissertation—picked up Aristotle’s Physics and found that it made no sense to him. Since Kuhn assumed that neither he nor Aristotle was stupid, he concluded that they were operating from such different, and incommensurable, realities that communication was not possible, and he proceeded to write a book about the meaning and use of these conceptual frameworks and the way science adapts or “shifts” paradigms (Kuhn, 1962).  Paradigm theory has been applied, misapplied and criticized in a number of contexts, and there are varying claims about how paradigms operate. It has been suggested that anomalies falling outside one’s paradigm, or frame of reference, are simply unseen—that is, if a fact is encountered for which there is no place in one’s conceptual framework, that fact will not be willfully “disregarded,” its existence simply will not be recognized.  Whatever the difficulties with paradigm theory (or the blind-men-and-elephant analogy), it is one useful way of thinking about the normative belief structures that help humans make sense of the realities we encounter. Such worldviews need not be rigid (or even coherent) to perform this interpretive function; with respect to theologically-rooted worldviews, evidence suggests that the filtering effect of normative paradigms may well persist in individuals who no longer consciously embrace the theologies that originally shaped them.[1]  As Daniel Bell has written, “every theology embodies, either implicitly or explicitly, a mythos, a vision of how human communities ought to be organized.” (Bell, 2004:423).  Because this is the case, theology and theologically-based worldviews are inevitably political.

Of course, what constitutes a “religious worldview” is subject to considerable debate, and terms like “religious culture,” “theology” and “religion” are extremely difficult to define. Furthermore, worldviews incorporate numerous “received beliefs” that are not religious in origin.  When contemporary lawyers, journalists or political scientists discuss the relationship of church and state, we may differ profoundly on the contours of the relationship, yet all understand “state” to mean an institution that exercises public authority and has a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force. We forget that “the state so defined is of recent historical vintage.” (Bell, 2004: 425).  Our contemporary understanding of “religion” is equally attenuated. In medieval times, the ecclesial and civil authority was far more intertwined; had we asked a highly educated person living then about the proper relationship between religion and government, the question would simply have made no sense to him.  Bell dates our particular way of construing social space from Weber’s distinction between “life spheres” each of which possesses its own laws and ethical functions. The questions raised by our liberal democratic paradigm—a worldview that sees government and religion as different, if related, life-spheres and defines modernity in large measure by the secular nature of the state—are “what sort of moral consensus is necessary to sustain Western liberal society,” and increasingly “is such a consensus possible?”[2]

 Paradigms originally shaped in significant part by religious doctrines dictate our notions of public virtue, definitions of merit, and attitudes toward work, family, and community.  Theologically-shaped worldviews[3]—often unrecognized as such even by those who hold them—frame our communal approach to issues of race, economic behavior, poverty, social justice, education, crime and punishment, philanthropy, bioethics, and influence just about every other public policy.  Many of our most contentious public issues are rooted in differing normative concepts grounded firmly in theological beliefs into which participants in the debates have been socialized.  The religious dimensions of debates over abortion, stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and cloning are obvious, but less obvious examples include responsibility for poverty, the appropriate role of the state, the meaning of law, the nature and importance of civil society, and the role of the U.S. in international affairs.

  As Perry Dane has usefully reminded us, religion and law are two of the frames through which people perceive the world. “Like other modes of thought—science and art, for example—they are frames of reference, ideational and affective approaches to subjects both in and beyond their literal domains.” (Dane, 1996:114).  Even when policy debates are couched in what John Rawls would call “public reasons,” the intractability of some perennially difficult issues comes not merely from differences about these public reasons—differences that might be compromised, or resolved by empirical investigation —but in deeper disagreements rooted in beliefs about the existence and nature of God, the role of humans in the universe, and fundamental concepts such as justice, charity, and responsibility.  Even our definitions of what beliefs should be considered “religious” are incommensurate: Winnifred Sullivan reminds us that “The traditional American evangelical Protestant definition of religion as chosen, private, individual and believed” now shares space in a pluralist culture in which many other traditions define religion as “given, public, communal and enacted.” (Sullivan, 2004: 257). Facile references to a “Judeo-Christian” Americanism ignore or trivialize those profound distinctions. People who share a political community may nevertheless inhabit different realities; as a result, they literally “talk past” each other.

Just as there are theologically-rooted differences over specific public policies, there are deeply held religious differences over the proper role of the state, the nature of law, and the primacy that should be accorded to legal structures and systems. Some religious traditions make law a “central religious category;” others have defined themselves in opposition to the worldview of law. (Dane, 1996:114) Judaism, Islam and Hinduism are among the former; Pauline Christianity and Confucianism among the latter.  Traditions differ also on the relative weight to accord civil authority. “John Calvin argued that civil government was a response to human evil, designed to protect church and society and establish general tranquility.” (Dane, ibid.) While the Kingdom of God came first, law was a necessity and a close second. Antinomians like Anne Hutchinson, on the other hand, believed that the Gospel freed Christians from required obedience to any law, even scriptural law, and that salvation was to be attained solely through faith and divine grace. Dane suggests that the contemporary disjunction between the “letter” and the “spirit” of the law grows out of that antinomian impulse, and that debates between positivists and natural law advocates raise largely religious questions about the existence of “transcendent, normative truths” and their relevance to law. 

      Religious worldviews frame legal discussion in other ways as well: questions like “what is the state, and what is its jurisdiction?” “from where does the state derive its authority?” “how far does that authority extend?” grow out of conflicting beliefs about the source of law’s authority, the nature of human community and the definition of liberty. As numerous political philosophers have noted, the fundamental challenge to liberal democratic regimes comes from those unwilling to “privatize” hegemonic religious ideologies.  If the goal of the law in liberal regimes is to achieve neutrality among differing conceptions of the good, as some assert, how should the law deal with those whose beliefs require that they be universally followed and who consequently experience equal treatment by government as discrimination?  

An honest discussion of that dilemma should begin by recognizing what our American devotion to “equality” sometimes obscures: that the achievement of strict neutrality is not what our constitutional architecture was intended to provide. The Establishment Clause—indeed, the entire Bill of Rights—clearly privileges certain concepts of the good over others. The contemporary secular state does not represent an absence of a conception of the good; it represents a choice (conscious or unconscious) of one particular conception of the good.  Arguably, the neutrality required under our system is equal treatment among those willing to accept that original choice, and operate within the confines of laws that flow from it.[4]

Even those who operate within the secular, liberal democratic construct, however, often do so for very different reasons, reasons which in turn lead them to different conclusions about what a proper reading of those laws tells us about the intended role of the state. Howe  (1965) has reminded us that separation of church and state was the result of two “opp  osing, but complementary, traditions: rationalist anti-clericalism, which feared the divisive and tyrannical potential of religion, and radical Baptist theology, which feared the corrupting influence of the state on salvation.” Dividing jurisdiction of the church from that of the state was thus a common solution to two quite different concerns—concerns that continue to inform political discourse. Liberals, adopting variants of Enlightenment rationalism, tend to view the state as a means to civic peace and order. They believe that the threshold question about the propriety of government action is “who decides and how?”  Communitarians and other critics of the liberal democratic construct tend to argue that the state should be more concerned with ends. (These disputes about the proper role of the state are hardly new. In City of God, St. Augustine criticized Rome for its failure to create a “true” republic, on the grounds that it had not established the right sort of human community.) Communitarians insist that the real question is not the “thin” procedural inquiry “who shall decide,” but the “thick” or substantive question “what is to be decided?”  Labeling one approach as “thick” and one as “thin,” however, mischaracterizes these differences; rather, the dispute reflects different, equally “thick,” conceptions of the good.

Liberals who advocate limiting the power of the state to dictate substantive moral ends, and communitarians who favor greater state involvement in shaping a communal moral consensus can at least (usually) communicate with each other. Increasingly, inhabitants of different paradigms cannot. The most influential description of the political consequences of operating out of different realities also gave us a name for the conflict.  In 1991, James Davison Hunter published Culture Wars, in which he described the contemporary manifestations of religiously-rooted, competing world-views as follows:

“I define cultural conflict very simply as political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding. The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral ethos over all others. Let it be clear, the principles and ideals that mark these competing systems of moral understanding are by no means trifling but always have a character of ultimacy to them. They are not merely attitudes that can change on a whim, but basic commitments and beliefs that provide a source of identity, purpose and togetherness for the people who live by them….

The divisions of political consequence today are not theological and ecclesiastic in character but the result of differing worldviews. That is to say, they no longer revolve around specific doctrinal issues or styles of religious practice and organization but around our most cherished assumptions about how to order our lives—our own lives and our lives together in this society. Our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans are now at odds.” (Hunter, 1991:42)

Hunter noted that the differences are so profound that they extend to the legal processes we have established to mediate and adjudicate those differences—an observation amply supported by the escalating passions over the role of the judiciary, the appointment of judges and more recently, efforts to prevent the court-authorized removal of Terri Shaivo’s feeding tube.

These debates over the appropriate relationship between religious belief and government power are not new; they have been a feature of the American landscape since the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth Rock. However, these conflicts became considerably more acrimonious following passage of the 14^th Amendment, as the Supreme Court decided—in a series of cases stretching over a number of years—that the Amendment required the incorporation of fundamental civil liberties into state law. As scholars have amply documented (Lowi 1995; Amar 1998), the consequent nationalization of the Bill of Rights, and in particular the First Amendment’s religion clauses, meant that state and local governments were no longer free to pass laws privileging religious beliefs held by the majority of their citizens. Constitutional provisions that had hitherto been experienced as abstract principles applicable only to a distant federal government suddenly became all too real.  The ensuing struggles have involved virtually all of the institutions of American government at one time or another: even citizens far less polarized than those described by Hunter continue to debate whether behaviors deemed sinful by theologians, from gambling and prostitution to shopping on Sundays, should be prohibited by the state; they argue about the propriety of using tax dollars to support parochial schools; they demonstrate for or against the posting of religious symbols or texts on public buildings. Currently, impassioned efforts to avert legal recognition of same-sex marriages are grounded almost entirely in religious doctrine.

“American public schools have been, in many ways, where the tension between diversity and the felt need to promote shared values has played out most dramatically. This institution has, from its inception, been the principal direct public instrument for creating a shared political culture amid religious, racial ethnic and class diversity. Public schools are where what purports to be a liberal state has intervened between children and their parents and communities of birth to shape the deepest beliefs and commitments of “private’ communities and future generations.” (Macedo, 2000:39).

Hunter, Macedo and others make valid and important contributions to our understanding of these conflicts. But there is a larger aspect to the dilemma they describe. These disputes do not just involve “religious beliefs” –difficult as those are to define. They involve religiously-rooted ways of seeing the world that, as Hunter recognizes, are often no longer experienced as religious or theological in nature. As a result, these conflicts no longer fit into the (not-so) neat categories we have created for questions of church and state.  Martin Marty has described ours as a polity in which “citizens in their various competitive groups do inhabit incommensurable universes of discourse,” and to illustrate, he quotes the following passage from Alisdair MacIntyre’s “Short History of Ethics.”

“It follows that we are liable to find two kinds of people in our society: those who speak from within one of these surviving moralities, and those who stand outside all of them. Between the adherents of rival moralities and between the adherents of one morality and the adherents of none there exists no court of appeal, no impersonal neutral standard. For those who speak from within a given morality, the connection between fact and valuation is established in virtue of the meanings of the words they use. To those who speak from without, those who speak from within appear merely to be uttering imperatives which express their own liking and their private choices.” (Marty, 1997:72).

  

A brief illustration may suggest how worldviews based on different theological conceptions of the good currently manifest themselves in ostensibly secular policy contexts. In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, reforming welfare “as we know it.” Among the provisions of that bill was a provision later dubbed “Charitable Choice,” requiring that states contract with “faith-based” social service providers on the same basis as they contract with other nonprofit providers. The bill specified that such organizations were not to be discriminated against; they were to be allowed to maintain hiring policies based upon their religious dictates and could not be required to divest the premises where services were delivered of religious iconography. (Similar provisions have since been attached to Welfare-to-Work (1997), Community Services Block Grant (1998), and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration legislation (2000)), and President Bush has subsequently made his “Faith-Based Initiative” a cornerstone of his domestic agenda.

Proponents and opponents of these measures have consistently “talked past” each other. Proponents clearly used the term “faith-based” to mean “religious,” in what was probably an effort to be inclusive, although the notion that “faith” is the central defining feature of religiosity betrays a narrowly Protestant conception of religion. Opponents—noting that there was no new money for social services, and that organizations like Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Service, Lutheran Social Services and the Salvation Army have partnered with government for decades—assumed that Faith-Based Initiatives were really efforts to privilege certain (more evangelical) religious providers over others (Chaves, 2001) and to erode the legal doctrine of separation of church and state. Proponents responded dismissively to evidence that religious providers had been participating as contractors in government programs for decades on the grounds that those providers had become “secularized”—defined as the adoption of professional norms, and programs providing services in which “faith” was not a central element. Opponents criticized the legislation for incorporating assumptions that were unsupported by any evidence; supporters responded with anecdotes and religious “success stories” or found such criticisms irrelevant.     

A primary purpose of Charitable Choice, according to its sponsors, was the need to ensure a level playing field.  They charged that government’s contracting processes had discriminated against religious organizations, a charge that appears to rest (at least in part) on the belief that holding faith-based organizations to the same standards as secular ones is discriminatory. Several Charitable Choice supporters have thus been critical of contracting agencies’ insistence upon professional credentials and norms, arguing for “elimination of arbitrary rules that allow, for example, the use of professional therapy but not pastoral counseling.” (Lenkowsky 2001:23) If an agency is putting together a Request For Proposals for counseling services, and requires that successful bidders employ licensed social workers, or certified drug counselors, they believe the state has discriminated against religious organizations offering unlicensed “pastoral counseling.” Critics respond that the only “discrimination” is based on the capacity of a bidder to perform; they point out that states are accountable for the quality of the services they provide, and have a legal obligation to evaluate the ability of bidders to provide those services. If the bidder offers “pastoral counseling,” in lieu of professional certification, how is the probable efficacy of that counseling—and thus the responsiveness of the bidder—to be assessed? Furthermore, if the state appears to relax or discard professional standards when the bidder is religious, secular nonprofits may justifiably object that an unconstitutional preference is being shown to religious organizations. Clearly, what looks “level” from the perspective of supporters looks decidedly “tilted” from the perspective of opponents.

            Even the definition of “effectiveness” depends upon the paradigm being employed. Those who believe that the poor “need the internal pressure to [as Booker T. Washington said], live honored and useful lives modeled after our perfect leader, Christ’” (Chernus, 2001, quoting Marvin Olasky), seek an end to poverty through individual transformation. Poverty, in their worldview, is a result of individual moral inadequacy, the lack of proper values and internalized norms. Organizations like Catholic Charities, on the other hand, argue that “the poor are no more in need of religious instruction and worship than the rest of society” (Daly 2001). They believe that poverty is predominately a social justice issue to be addressed by job creation programs, educational reform or similar structural approaches.  Those who hold to the necessity of personal transformation believe that organizations that don't equate poverty with a failure of values are neither authentically "faith-based" nor effective. They believe that “effective’ programs address spiritual needs and transform the values of the client (or, more bluntly, bring the client to Jesus). Empirical studies comparing job placement rates of secular and faith-based organizations may be beside the point to those who approach poverty issues through this paradigm.

 These debates about the nature of poverty and our communal obligation to the needy are not new; they can be traced at least to 1349, when England enacted the Statute of Laborers, prohibiting citizens from giving alms, or charity, to those who had the ability to work—that is, to “sturdy beggars” (Handler and Hasenfeld 1997). The English law thus incorporated then-dominant religious distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The belief that poverty is evidence of divine disapproval—that virtue is rewarded by material success—was held in one form or another by a number of the early Protestants who settled the colonies; it is a theological perspective that has continued to influence American law and culture. In the nineteenth century, Catholics and Protestants who may all have agreed with the abstract proposition that “true Christian stewards” would share their talents and material resources with others to benefit society, nevertheless had quite different perspectives on the reasons for stewardship, and significantly different beliefs about what such stewardship entailed. Those Protestants generally believed that they would be saved through faith, not works; they saw acts of benevolence not as a way to earn salvation, but as a way to manifest the depth of their faith. (Oates 2003)  Catholicism, on the other hand, taught that salvation rested on good works as well as faith, and that charity was a religious duty incumbent on all believers. In the 1900’s, Protestant moral opprobrium directed at the poor found an ally in science, and poverty issues were caught up in the national debate between Social Darwinists like William Graham Summer and their equally religious critics—notably, William Jennings Bryan (Walsh 2000).

As with so many other issues in a diverse polity, there is no one “religious” or “faith-based” approach to social welfare issues. Social Darwinists and proponents of the Social Gospel both justify their policy preferences as expressions of “true” Christian theology. One of the least edifying aspects of public debates over the Faith-Based Initiative has been the virtually unquestioned assumption by people on all sides of the issue that “religion” is a distinct and undifferentiated “faith-based” commodity.

None of the foregoing discussion constitutes a new insight. We know a great deal about religious history and conflict, about religion’s role in shaping culture, and the tensions and dynamics of pluralist societies. What we lack is a “whole elephant,” a cross-disciplinary synthesis of what we already know that will allow us to understand the full extent and operation of these fundamental disagreements, to pinpoint what we must still learn, and to construct—if and where possible—an honest and respectful conversation that will neither denigrate profound religious beliefs nor grant them hegemony.

What areas of inquiry should be included in such a theoretical framework? The following is a partial list:

Before we can synthesize insights from different disciplines and construct that necessary, overarching conceptual framework, we also need to acknowledge that liberal democratic values reflect a worldview—one that accords primacy to values of individuality, authenticity, personal autonomy and limited state power. If liberal democracy is to survive, it must find a way to respect belief systems that elevate values inimical to those core principles without granting them the hegemony they demand. Such a resolution may not be satisfactory to those holding certain religious beliefs, but as Stephen Macedo has written, “Hobbesian justification may be the best we can do.” (Macedo, 2000:167)

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, are red states from Mercury and blue states from Pluto? If it is not possible to bridge the chasm between our increasingly divergent worldviews, if members of the American polity are not willing to abide by the “Hobbesian bargain,” the culture wars will escalate until one side or the other overpowers the other. It is not an encouraging prospect.