by Todd Flanders

ne of the many startling moments that make theologian Kenneth R. Craycraft Jr’s first book a captivating and unusual read is finding that George Washington was an enemy of a just political order. Another is discovering that James Madison was an “ironist” who, with a sly wink to his audience, didn’t always mean what he said. Another is learning that Madison and Thomas Jefferson intentionally planted seeds of radical autonomy, atomistic individualism, and value relativism in the U.S. Constitution.

At such moments of creative reinterpretation, Craycraft takes the reader down the rabbit hole into a theological-political Wonderland. Unmasking discourses of power through creative interpretation is a technique typical of postmodern literary and legal theory, of course, which is where this work by an orthodox Catholic oddly finds a home. The American Myth of Religious Freedom is a genealogy of American religious liberty penned with the purpose of deconstructing that liberty. Religious freedom is presented as a powerful formative myth at the opening of the book, but with the aid of literary theorist Stanley Fish (who holds that the meaning of a text is created by its reader), the concept crumbles by the end: “There’s No Such Thing as Religious Freedom,” states the last chapter title. Like a disciple of Michel Foucault, Craycraft creates an historical narrative all his own, willfully “privileging” certain voices in the story and ignoring others. Like Nietzsche showing how the decay of mankind in the West had its roots in Socrates and Christ, Craycraft sets out to show how a perceived decay of Christianity in the United States was, with very little mediation, caused by the English philosopher John Locke.

The rest of Craycraft’s genealogy follows, he believes, simply and logically. Jefferson and Madison enshrined Locke’s antireligious philosophy in the First Amendment, and since 1947 the U.S. Supreme Court has merely brought church-state jurisprudence into line with this antireligious, Lockean concept of strict separation in service to the state. “[T]he founders” writes Craycraft, “established irreligion as the official state-endorsed religious opinion.” We should not be tempted, then, to blame Justice John Paul Stevens and others for their activism in reversing long judicial traditions of religious accommodation. Locke, with the help of two trusty minions, made them do it. They could not reasonably have resisted.

What is needed instead of an American “religious liberty” that fosters and favors irreligion, suggests Craycraft, is the Catholic view of religious liberty rightly interpreted from Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. The difficulty for Catholics in America, he argues, is that there is no way to reconcile this Catholic view with the requirements of life under the First Amendment—and this despite the best efforts at reconciling the Catholic and American doctrines by John Courtney Murray, an American theologian who was himself an architect of the Vatican II document.

Craycraft contends that Catholics’ religious liberty is abridged in the United States by a regime that has codified a rival religion in the Bill of Rights, the religion of Lockean liberalism. The strong implication is that Catholics who live in America must live against America. Because of “the twin impossibilities of Catholic acceptance of the principles of the American Founding and of changing it in any fundamental way,” there is no question of Catholics being American citizens in any real sense. Of course, Craycraft roundly denies that his book amounts to a call for a new Catholic confessional state. He does not appear, however, to leave open any other political option.

The key to this paradox is that the author is not political, nor even apolitical, but radically antipolitical. Craycraft argues repeatedly that the Catholic Church must be at full liberty to act in any regime, but he also acknowledges that abridgment of some religious practices “is unavoidable in any form of government.” Thus, presumably, a regime that gave full liberty, understood as preference, to Catholic religious practice would abridge some religious practices of others. Craycraft does not deny this, but how a politically mandatory Catholic preference might be managed under contemporary conditions of pluralism he does not say. He detects ways in which the United States restricts Catholic liberties: “The Catholic . . . begins to recognize that American institutions as consistently and purely applied are dangerous to the integrity of religious faith.” Yet he offers no opinion on how Catholics might comport themselves in relation to the American regime. He contends that there should be no theologically based project “to change America into a more friendly regime. To assume this is already to have subscribed to something other than the gospel mandate which stands in judgment over all regimes.” The civic role of Catholic Christians appears to be only to judge all regimes—negatively—especially those that do not give preference to Catholicism.

Although Craycraft is particularly interested in using Catholic doctrines to condemn the American political arrangement, he grounds much of his criticism in abstract considerations of the sociology of religion. He identifies and laments a decline in devoted religious belief and practice in the U.S., for example, and considers how this decline is related to philosophic “liberalism.” Many share these concerns. Craycraft, however, radicalizes this insight. He makes sweeping claims about “the American religion” which, with literary theorist Harold Bloom, he takes to be dualistic, gnostic, and pelagian. Whereas Bloom’s The American Religion is indeed instructive in analyzing American religious movements, particularly nineteenth-century ones, Craycraft seems to view all American religious belief and practice through this single interpretive lens.

Consequently, most religiously conservative readers (and others) will be bewildered or offended by his apparent dismissal of their religious commitments. Given his disdainful telescoping of diverse denominations, it is, in fact, sometimes difficult to know if Craycraft is intending to attack liberalism or Protestantism, unless his understanding is that Protestantism is simply a product of liberal philosophy: “All the elements of the American religion that Bloom discusses—personal salvation through enlightenment, unmediated grace, autonomy of the soul . . . , and the elimination of the church as necessary for salvation—may be seen as a legacy of Locke’s philosophy and political theology.” Although Locke clearly did want to take certain Protestant tendencies in certain directions, this in itself suggests that the religious elements listed here cannot simply be construed as Locke’s legacy. Protestantism and sectarian diversity were already in place when Locke took up his pen to advocate toleration. It is particularly telling that Craycraft cites, in establishing Madison’s antireligious, Lockean pedigree, the fondness of Madison’s great Presbyterian teacher John Witherspoon for Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. Witherspoon is customarily seen as a deeply committed religious figure at America’s founding; would Craycraft be willing to claim that even Witherspoon’s religion came from Locke?

Craycraft’s views on Locke’s hegemony lead him to strange conclusions about America’s religious situation: “If the church teaches such a liberal heresy as that some religious opinions are true and others false, it undermines the regime, violates the church’s limited charter, and thus must not be tolerated by the magistrate. . . . [T]his is precisely the view that was inherited by the principal founding fathers . . . ,” and thus became the way of things in the United States in sharp contrast to Craycraft’s claim, millions of Americans today would argue—with their churches’ blessings—that some religious opinions are true and others false. (It is almost a truism.) Certainly the Roman Catholic Church has a carefully developed version of this position, which it does not hide from its American faithful. Craycraft appears either not to know all this or not to appreciate it. The opinions of New York Times writers and liberal Supreme Court justices about the place of religion in American life prove Craycraft right, he believes, and so empirical evidence to the contrary is irrelevant.

The trouble at the core of this book is not that all its arguments are bad. It contains many good ones. The various parts of the book are better, in this respect, than the whole. Craycraft’s analysis of Locke’s religious thought and its integral relation to the Englishman’s political philosophy, for example, makes points similar to powerful ones in Leo Strauss’s 1953 classic Natural Right and History which Thomas Pangle (whom the author fails to cite) elaborated a decade ago in The Spirit of Modern Republicanism. Craycraft’s general thoughts on Jefferson’s and Madison’s religious views have long been common among students of American political thought, although Craycraft is the first Christian thinker I know of to publish politically extreme conclusions from these thoughts. Most illuminating is the author’s general analysis of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty and Murray’s reflections on it.

Unfortunately, Craycraft’s most politically and intellectually significant arguments are his weakest.

The legal argument about Supreme Court fidelity to the First Amendment since 1947 lacks a full account of original intent in constitutional jurisprudence, leading to the erroneous view that the First Amendment religion clauses mean only what two historical figures thought about religion. Actually, the original intent of a law is grounded in what may be ascertained of the understanding of the law held by those who made it. In the case of the Constitution, the law was made by the citizens who ratified the document, not the opinions of a drafter or two. The original intent of amendments is discerned similarly.

Craycraft, by contrast, suggests that Madison and Jefferson’s views overrode those of the ratifying public: “Now it is probably unarguable that the broadly popular sentiment at the time of the American Founding was that the state ought to protect religious freedom. . . . But to claim that the intention of the Constitution of the United States is to protect religion from the state rather than the state from religion is simple legal and historical fiction.” Those responsible for making the First Amendment into law, in other words, disagreed with the intent hidden in that law but were duped.

Craycraft’s argument about intellectual history proceeds as if political and social history were unimportant to theory. He condemns Locke as hellbent on destroying Christianity, but he is silent about any reasonable desire Locke may have had to ameliorate mankind’s interminable religious strife. Craycraft presents even statesmen, mirabile dictu, as unconcerned about political and social phenomena. For him, the question of religious liberty at the moment of the Founding existed only on the level of theory: “Madison’s thought had nothing to do with social or historical expediency and everything to do with a particular moral, religious, and political theory.” The author revealingly interprets an historical observation of Madison as an ironic ploy to abridge religious practice. Madison wrote, “Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinions.” Craycraft comments: “Madison not only wants to proscribe all essential differences in religious opinion, he wants a particular set of religious opinions [liberal irreligion] to be official.” Granted, Locke and Madison lacked a full theological understanding of why the Christian God might not want people who love Him to kill each other over disagreements about Him. But Craycraft cannot even acknowledge that Locke and Madison, political thinkers though they were, might have been affected by real social and political problems.

Finally, and most dangerously, the argument that Catholicism and the American arrangement of religious liberty must remain sworn enemies shows an astonishing carelessness about the historically delicate relationship between theology and political life. John Courtney Murray showed a far superior prudential understanding of this relation. For his part, Craycraft bears more resemblance to Rousseau—who argued that the Christian is unfit for citizenship in any earthly city—than to Aquinas. Craycraft quotes the latter only briefly and without any historical context. For Aquinas, man (including Christian man) is by nature a social and political animal; he cannot be otherwise.

The specifics of Craycraft’s argument about the Catholic position on religious liberty are too complicated to explore here, but it should be noted that many of the most prominent Catholic commentators on issues of Christianity and liberal democracy merit not a mention by Craycraft: Tocqueville, who argued that religion is America’s foremost political institution; Jacques Maritain, who contributed to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Yves Simon; and, most notably, John Paul II, arguably the soberest champion of authentic freedom today.

It especially strains credulity to understand how the author can fail to mention John Paul II in a discussion of the Catholic position on American religious liberty, but a look at the philosopher-pope’s position on the issue gives us a hint as to why: he disagrees with Craycraft. “The original separation of church and state in the United States,” said John Paul in 1997, “was certainly not an effort to ban all religious conviction from the public square, a kind of banishment of God from civil society. Indeed the vast majority of Americans, regardless of their religious persuasion, are convinced that religious conviction and religiously informed moral argument have a vital role in public life.”

Sometimes the keener observers of democracy in America hail from abroad.

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