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 n the Year of Our Lord 2000, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals told the State of Ohio to drop its motto, “With God, all things are possible.” The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded the court that this line from the Bible violated the U.S. Constitution—the Constitution of a nation where the founding documents explicitly invoke the Creator. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a contest for a replacement motto. No one cited Dostoevsky, who wrote that without God, everything is permitted; but one came close: “With a lack of values, anything is probable.”
This court decision is just one among countless examples of the marginalization of religion in American public life, a process that has been accelerating for the past half-century and has come to seem to many citizens to be equivalent to the American Way. Christianity, of course, will survive in the United States; in fact, the faith has always prospered under pressure, and the mild constraints America now places upon Christianity may actually help explain the degree to which the faith is flourishing today. One can point to surging enrollments at evangelical colleges, a proliferation of religious magazines, an increasing cohort of self-confident Christian scholars and academic organizations, a wide range of thriving faith-based organizations devoted to social welfare, and much more. In addition, the New Testament promise that those who follow God will suffer persecution is a high hedge against any temptation toward Christian self-pity.
But what about America? Its public discourse is increasingly marked by an aggressive secularism. Platitudinous tolerance is applied selectively to push religious believers toward separate institutions outside of society’s mainstream. Most opinion shapers agree with sociologist Alan Wolfe that “this country remains sufficiently religious—and sufficiently Christian—that one needs to worry about the rights of nonbelievers.” America is well on its way toward a divided society in which a powerful elite, hostile toward religion and, worse yet, unable to comprehend religious motives, imposes its spiritual views on an increasingly restive majority.
Two Cultures
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb writes about this division in her recent book One Nation, Two Cultures (1999), where she identifies a dominant culture and a dissenting one. She places Christians in the latter and observes that people of faith increasingly “feel alienated from a culture that they see as inimical to both their religious and their cultural values.” The relationship between these two cultures can be described by borrowing the titles of two recent books by Stephen Carter: when we have The Culture of Disbelief (1994) on one side, we have The Dissent of the Governed (1998) on the other. Though Himmelfarb is glad that a certain national unity prevails despite the cultural conflict, how long this uneasy truce can hold is an open question.
Himmelfarb notes that the dissenting culture actually comprises a majority of the nation’s citizens. Consider a few representative statistics. A 1994 Harris poll found that 95 percent of Americans believe in God and 90 percent believe in heaven. Of the 89 percent who call themselves Christians, 89 percent believe in life after death, 87 percent in miracles, 85 percent in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. Even 52 percent of non-Christians express belief in the resurrection of Christ. A church-attendance rate that hovers in the 40 percent-plus range makes America one of the most churchgoing nations in the world.
Nevertheless, the dissenting majority loses out to the dominant minority in setting policies for that primary transmitter of the nation’s values, America’s schools. A 1994 New York Times/ CBS poll revealed that 64 percent of American adults support “organized prayer” in public schools. On another highly divisive issue, the creation/evolution controversy, a 1999 Gallup poll reported that a large majority of Americans favor teaching creation along with evolution—68 percent for it and only 29 percent against it. Ninety percent think that God created life either directly or through a gradual process, and only 10 percent think that life evolved strictly by chance and natural forces. But when Kansans recommended giving both the majority and minority opinions a hearing in the state’s public schools, national press coverage treated them as if they had blundered into the Land of Oz. The public was allowed to hear a Kansas biology teacher huff, “What else will the state board do? Will they take out verbs from English for some political or religious reason?” Not far behind was the complaint of Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, that this decision “took us back one hundred years in science teaching.”
Obviously, some self-identified Christians have merely a vestigial or nominal faith; they do not attend church and are abysmally ignorant of the Bible and theology. Nonetheless, Nobel laureate Robert Fogel finds some sixty million adherents of “enthusiastic religion” in America, a third of the electorate, enough to justify calling his book The Fourth Great Awakening (2000). The previously cited New York Times/CBS poll disclosed that Americans’ confidence in organized religion has increased since the 1980s. And Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley has said that in today’s United States “religious devotion may be higher than it has ever been in human history.”
It is probably not accidental that the American Christians of lowest social status—Pentecostalists and other charismatics—best exemplify this flourishing of faith. Nor should it be any surprise that the nation’s elite is reluctant to give much authority to a group, however large a majority it may comprise, that it considers to be “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command,” as the Washington Post’s infamous description of evangelicals put it.
Politics over Religion
An important reason for America’s cultural conflicts is that the nation’s largely secularized elite lacks the categories of analysis to understand religion and religious motives, so it parochially applies the categories it has at its disposal, principally politics. In just the first half of this year, countless news stories demonstrated how the elite’s political values trump the majority’s religious convictions in American society today. The school system of Santa Fe, Texas, for example, seeking some middle ground on the vexing school-prayer issue, proposed that high-school students elect representatives to solemnize football games with a few words of their choosing, with a prayer allowed but not required. After hearing “God save the United States and this Honorable Court” intoned, the Supreme Court refused the proposal. In dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist exclaimed that this decision “bristles with hostility toward all things religious in public life.” Confusingly, the United States still mandates chaplains for its legislature and military, but it now forbids Christmas carols for its schoolchildren.
In a particularly revealing case of minority elite politics trumping majority religious beliefs, Tufts University this past spring “derecognized” its chapter of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IV), an organization of Christian students with 34,000 members on more than 550 campuses, because the group refused to allow a bisexual member to hold a position of leadership. The bisexual student had tried chastity and then changed her mind about biblical requirements but nonetheless sought a leadership position in the school’s InterVarsity chapter. She was rejected on grounds of biblical interpretation, which, it should be noted, applies equally to unchaste heterosexuals. As the leader of the chapter noted, “When you ask us to give up the Bible, you’re asking us to give up the heart of our religion.” The thwarted member filed a complaint with a student tribunal, which, without a public hearing, sided with her and deemed the group an ungroup, withdrawing its funding, barring it from meeting on campus, and requiring the Tufts Christian Fellowship to drop its first name. Similarly, Grinnell College “derecognized” its IV chapter in 1997, and parallel cases are pending at Middlebury College, Whitman College, and Ball State University.
The Tufts case remains unresolved. With the support of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization without any tincture of religion and indeed without any Protestants among its staff, an appeal to a higher body of faculty and students gained the Tufts IV chapter a temporary reprieve, and the issue will be revisited soon. Reactions on the Tufts campus provide an interesting contrast. One IV student said of their wayward member, “She’s our friend, and we hope she’ll come back.” Another said, “We are so glad we can worship Jesus on campus in the fall, and we invite everyone of every sexual orientation to join us.” The director of Tufts’ Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center declared, “We will not leave this matter behind. Student groups should have to abide by the university’s nondiscrimination policy.” A university spokeswoman chimed in: “This is far from over. It’s definitely going to come up again, and the issue of discrimination is still unresolved.” Tufts’ acting dean of students observed that “funding is not the right thing to provide to a group that doesn’t make its membership totally open to everyone.” The university president has remained silent.
The Chronicle of Higher Education held an online colloquy on the Tufts case. Most contributors, largely academics, were decidedly anti-IV. One opined, “Every organization recognized by a university should be open to all students. Period. It’s not even debatable.” Another echoed, “Religious groups that teach bigotry through exclusion or other means of discrimination should not be recognized as a bona fide organization on any campus.” A third wrote, “Should private colleges deny recognition to campus religious groups that bar gay students? Absolutely, yes.” The IV position is “un-American,” declaimed another.
“Absolutely.” “Period.” “Deny.” “Un-American.” “Not even debatable.” These are the words of the New Tolerance. They are also the vocabulary of postmodernism.
Postmodern Dogmatism
It is a commonplace now to say that we have reached the end of the modern era, which commenced with the Enlightenment two hundred years ago. It is also true that many leading concepts of the Enlightenment now lie discredited. We no longer believe that human progress is inevitable, and many among us doubt that reason and science can yield objective knowledge in the search for truth. Among the multitudinous killings in history’s most brutal and dehumanizing period, the twentieth century has finished off the Enlightenment project itself. Princeton theologian Diogenes Allen espies “a massive intellectual revolution . . . perhaps as great as that which marked off the modern world from the Middle Ages.” Whereas the Enlightenment and the Christian centuries that preceded it embraced competing grand narratives of history, postmodernism is a worldview that rejects all worldviews. In lieu of a worldview, it brings Nietzsche’s seeds of nihilism to flower in real life. It specializes in rejections rather than affirmations, and hence is inherently inchoate and undefinable.
Some Christians logically conclude that postmodernism grants them a place at the table, too, but they misunderstand the logic of radical relativism. As the Tufts case shows, tolerance is to be extended to all, but only on the condition that they themselves be tolerant as defined by their postmodernist overlords. To these latter, Christians committed to absolute truth are inherently intolerant and thus cannot be endured. Thus, postmodernists offer only a sham tolerance because they absolutize relativism: everything is relative, and that is the one thing we can be absolutely sure of. This one absolute is enforced with no tolerance for dissent. Postmodernism restricts religious faith to a private indulgence, a lifestyle, a hobby. Christianity is not to be tolerated on its own terms.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, an indispensable cultural critic, captured perfectly the “tacit bargain” that postmodern America offers: “If I am quiet about what I believe and everybody else is quiet about what he or she believes, then nobody will interfere with the right of anybody else.” This don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, Elshtain explains, “is exactly what real believers . . . cannot do: keep quiet. . . . It is, in effect, to tell folks that they cannot really believe what they believe or be who they are.” She adds that “a private religion is no religion at all. One must have the public expression of faith for it to be faith. And public expression isn’t forcing anything on anybody.” The tacit bargain, Elshtain notes, is both “an intolerant idea” and “quite absolutist—about everybody shutting up.”
When members of America’s great majority refuse to shut up, we see how readily those who assume a secular hegemony issue threats against believers. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s latest bulldog, warns, “You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. . . . Those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we shall be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm.” We must “quarantine as best we can” those who prove that “they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of us.” As we “save the elephants” by putting them in zoos, he asserts, so we may “save the Baptists,” but “not by all means. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world.” This is exactly the freedom of religion once allowed by the Soviet constitution: you may believe whatever you wish, but you may not tell others about it, not even your own children.
Dennett himself has plenty of faith. He believes that life “created itself” through “that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels.” And “it just happened to happen.” This faith is based, as Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin explains, on “a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism,” which, in his blatantly circular argument, forces us “to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations.” According to this faith, which need not be kept private, “materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” Thus the need for absolute rejection of religious faith. That is exactly what America’s secular elite has gone about doing in the past half-century, and their efforts have borne much fruit, as the examples noted earlier make quite evident. A nation that once comfortably accommodated public expressions of religion now imposes escalating prohibitions upon them, and in America today, religion is widely described as the leading inhibitor of freedom and Christianity caricatured as the story of religious wars, the Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials. (See Marvin Olasky, “Christophobia,” American Outlook, Summer 2000.)
An Enlightenment slogan ran, “No God, no master,” and the animus toward God and religion is one modern plank that postmodernism embraces with a vengeance. Czech President Václav Havel, one of our most astute cultural analysts and a literary man who chooses his words carefully, describes our age not merely as secular but as “the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.” It is clear that if America’s cultural pacesetters have their way, the nation’s mainstream institutions will be governed completely by the canons not of secularism but of atheism. What will life be like in such a country? As Dimitri Karamazov says in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “If [God] doesn’t exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God? . . . You, without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat if it suits you, and make a ruble on every kopeck,” America’s secular elites have made it quite clear how relentlessly they will pursue their own interests. In such a world, however, as St. Paul said, “Everything is permissible—but not everything is beneficial.”
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