Academics

Selections from American Religious Democracy: Coming to Terms with the End of Secular Politics (Praeger 2007):

            Metaphorical walls do not fall as dramatically as physical ones.  So it will be hard to name a moment of which one could say, before, the Wall of Separation between Church and State was standing; afterward, it was gone.  In popular understanding, the Wall is largely down.  In the courts, the Wall is breaking apart.  In  academia, the Wall is only starting to fall.  This book is partly a chronicle of the fall.  Mostly, it is a bridge to the post-fall world.

        Just as the Iraqi negotiators wrangled over the role of Islam under the new constitution of Iraq, so we in America have been wrangling for years over the proper role of religion in American political life. On November 3, 2004, with the reelection of President George W. Bush, the American people finally decided that government should, and would, endorse religion. The people decided in that election that some type of religion would establish a basis for American public life. And that has been the case since 2004. That religion is not exactly Christian, or even Judeo-Christian. It might be called ethical monotheism, or something close to that. But it does now form the basis of political life in America.

            Three questions emerge from this decision. First, is it legitimate for government to endorse religion? Second, assuming that it is legitimate, how far and in what forms should such endorsement go? Finally, how should secular voters and others who disagree with government endorsement of religion, come to terms with a political system in which religion is endorsed?

            The answers I give to these three questions are based on a particular view of American democratic life. This book presents a vision of organic democracy, in which these sorts of questions are decided by the people in a diffuse, evolutionary manner. The people of the United States have decided the first question in the affirmative and are in the process of answering the second one. Secular voters, who are my primary audience in this work, must decide the third matter — how to come to terms with this new political/theological reality. I hope they will see religious democracy as an opportunity for a political and religious renewal.

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        What can be done about the current political/religious divide? Secularists need to take another look at religion, not traditional religion but the promise of our religions. What is secularism after all? What does it accept and what does it deny? What does it mean not to believe in God? These deep and important questions are not being asked today among secularists. Perhaps the answers suggested in the next chapters will help some secularists rediscover religion — the transcendent realm that the Bible describes. Properly understood, most secularists would be entirely open to this realm. In the end, they must be. For without hope of the transcendent, no politics that matters is possible.