Secularism’s Special Pleading

Hunter Baker

Wishing for the Naked Public Square

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008 we began to see articles and blog postings on the end of evangelicalism. Survey data suggesting the decline of that part of the American church gained big news attention, notably from Newsweek’s Jon Meacham. The president’s actions in the realm of bioethics (namely embracing greater moral laissez-faire with regard to embryonic stem cell research) earned plaudits from many commentators for properly valuing science.

A mere four years earlier, the narrative was a bit different. The re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 generated a powerful sense of despair in Garry Wills, who, writing for the New York Times, suggested that America was beginning to resemble its “fundamentalist” enemies from the Taliban. Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich pleaded with his readers to prefer science and secular reason to the mystical hopes of the next world. Time magazine wrote up a list of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals, implying that the power of the demographic was growing.

The common thread between these two narratives (of either religious ascendancy or decline) is that American Christianity is a dangerous thing and a socially retrogressive force. When Mr. Obama gained the White House the various endorsers of secularism breathed something of a sigh of relief, as though they had been rescued from some serious threat. On this reading, religion is like white phosphorus. It must be kept submerged lest it ignite. Right-thinking people, we are led to believe, should embrace the cool dispassion of secularism. Indeed, some even argue that Christians need special language rules and guides for public engagement that would instruct us to carefully form secular motives for our civic participation and to expunge all “God-talk” from our political speech.

This interpretation of events is histrionic, counterproductive, and also a bit unprincipled. In fact, such doctrines as secularism and the separation of church and state are often wielded as a screen for naked political preference or moral cowardice. The young Jerry Falwell (who apologized long before his death) and a number of other preachers worried about stirring up the flock, chose not to preach against segregation while hiding behind the separation of church and state. During the sixties, liberal activists with Christian labels agitated for praiseworthy things, like ending segregation, more ambiguous pursuits, like getting out of Vietnam, and miserable errors, like opening up the abortion license. These latter errands met with great approval from the political left and the mass media who proclaimed the great moral power of the “prophetic message” offered by the activists. Furthermore, they were “speaking truth to power.” Put the shoe on the other foot, however, and today’s Christian activists who seek to stop abortion and preserve the traditional view of marriage and family are neither prophets nor brave rebels. They are, instead, the harbingers of theocracy.

And what of the purported war between science and religion? It doesn’t take much digging through the literature of the topic to find that the “war” is largely a myth trumped up for rhetorical advantage. After all, the church was a major patron of scientific work and, coincidence or not (probably not, as sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out), modern science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else. The supposed antagonism between Christianity and science is fodder for slow news weeks and a useful evergreen topic. One suspects the editors of Time and Newsweek plan the issue and its cover image annually.

What about the supposed virtue of religious people examining their consciences to come up with for appropriately secular modes of speech and action? I find it difficult to disagree with the distinguished University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, who is baffled by the very notion of such a project. Why would we ever need to artificially prohibit people from making any argument they wish to offer? Is not persuasion itself the primary limitation on quixotic argumentation? If you cannot persuade, then you cannot have your way. The pragmatism of argumentation forces the speaker to make his words accessible to the audience rather than appealing to the arcane or exotic.

In my book, The End of Secularism, I argue that modern secularism (public life without God) is akin to cutting off your leg when icing your ankle would do. We have already solved the problem of religious differences in the United States. The solution came about organically through the religious pluralism of the American frontier and the institutional separation of church and state. In this understanding the church should not seek to rule the state nor the state the church. But the church should never cease calling the state to righteousness and serving as a hedge against totalitarianism. And yes, this vision of church-state separation implies a vigorous role for faith in the public square and in the formation of morals and culture.

Properly and modestly understood, the separation of church and state works well for us. So why do many persist in arguing for strictly secularist approaches? It seems to me the answer is to satisfy the preferences of secularists. Secularists are free to work on that project. As I have suggested, the primary limit they face is one of persuasion. But let us be honest that it is a matter of preference and not an approach needed to save scientific civilization from some imagined dark age lurking around the corner.

I hope too that secularists will think carefully about what might be lost as they proceed to offer their arguments. Some years ago I protested to a fellow student, who was a fan of secularism, that Martin Luther King, Jr. effectively employed Christian theology and appealed to Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as he argued for racial equality. My friend replied that King would not have needed to do so if he had had access to a higher Marxian critique at the time. I wonder. Do we really suppose that something like a “higher Marxian critique” would have moved America to finally reject the dehumanizing logic of segregation? As long as we talk about justice, we will also be talking about God. If we lose (or forbid) the habit of talking about the latter, do we not risk losing the habit of caring about the former?  

Hunter Baker is associate provost of Houston Baptist University and author of The End of Secularism.

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Mon 05 Oct 2009