Though differing radically in methodology and theological and philosophical starting points, Rawls and Maritain end up in a similar practical place in their endorsement of the fundamental structure and practices of the liberal democratic regime. William Cavanaugh, though identical to Maritain in fundamental theological and philosophical starting points, could not be more opposed to him in practical destination, in the moral and theological assessment of the present liberal democratic regime and the historical development that brought it about. Maritain’s positive judgment regarding the “coming of age” of the modern political order derives from his judgment that it has become more fully differentiated from the spiritual order, autonomous in its own sphere, and more conscious of its purely temporal nature, end, and duties. No longer unified by religious confession, which is a unity proper only to spiritual institutions such as the Church, the temporal order can now only be properly unified upon a non-confessional foundation and end, the promotion and vindication of the dignity, rights, and overall good of the human person. Such a development was not only a boon for the state, having now been liberated from its servile status as merely the temporal, coercive arm of the spiritual power, but was also a liberating development for the Church. It served to purify Her of all purely accidental and contingent temporal and political accoutrements, thereby permitting her the exercise of her full autonomy, power, and rights in the purely spiritual order. The breakup of Christendom was evil, but insofar as it occasioned (not necessarily caused) these positive differentiations, separations, and purifications, it was a boon, leading ultimately to the desacralized democratic state’s institutionalization of these positive goods. In short, whatever the errors and evils that beset our times, only in the modern era do we now possess the possibility of full obedience to and execution of Christ’s command to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.
Cavanaugh’s main critique of Maritain’s argument that post-Reformation political history is friendly to, inspired by, and a fuller practical realization of the Gospel is not that it is merely mistaken, but that it is not even a genuine argument:
According to Maritain, it is simply “common knowledge” that the distinction of spiritual and temporal and the creation of the desacralized state is “the achievement of the Christian centuries and their glory,” an assertion he seems to offer in order to bluff his way out of presenting any evidence that such is the case. Undoubtedly the distinction gradually took form during the Christian centuries, but it would be odd to call “their glory” what in fact coincided with their demise. Maritain’s contention that the best of liberal freedoms and universal human rights is the fruit of the Gospel’s subterranean work in Western culture similarly is based on mere assertion.
What is most significant about Cavanaugh’s critique is that it begins from Maritain’s theological and philosophical premises, including the proper subordination of the temporal to the spiritual, the non-coercive character of the spiritual power of the Church, and the dignity of the human person. However, it ends in contrary evaluative judgments about the course of historical development that led to and the precise nature of the modern, liberal democratic regime:
In this work Maritain is remarkably sanguine about the desacralization of the modern state, which he sees as the honored heir of the Christian era instead of its undertaker. While rightly applauding the extrication of the Church from entanglement with coercive state power, Maritain seems unable to contemplate the possibility that the modern distinction of temporal and spiritual, body and soul, has also served to subjugate the Church by creating a sphere of purely temporal power which is by definition property of the state alone.
Instead of the potentially liberated and purified Church and state that Maritain envisions (potential, in the sense that the full liberty and purity in actuality still require the free and graced actions of Catholics in the world in cooperation with men of good will), Cavanaugh depicts a powerless church enslaved to a tyrannical state, using the historical example of the Catholic Church in Chile under the Pinochet regime.
The reason Cavanaugh gives for this deplorable state of the Church is a false interpretation of the distinction of the temporal and the spiritual planes as the separation of spirit and body. Such has produced a purely incorporeal, and thus, powerless Church, under the thumb of a purely material, and thus, amoral state. While the modern state permits the Church to exert a purely moral and spiritual influence upon the souls of individual men and society in general, it does not permit it any substantial influence over their bodies. When it comes to bodily performance, discipline, and action, the state is lord. Whether primarily the cause of the state’s assumption of the body of its citizens or the effect of it—Cavanaugh does not entirely settle this point—the modernized Church has renounced her claim on the body of citizens; she now only claims authority over their souls.
Thus, according to Cavanaugh, Maritain’s biggest mistake was to place his ostensibly moral and Gospel-inspired democratic charter under the aegis of an amoral and spiritless state, and not the Church, where all authority, including the ultimate coercive authority over men’s bodies, has its primary origin and locus. For Maritain, however, the Church’s political role is restricted to providing the theoretical foundation for the state’s authority and end in order to secure the freedom and rights of man, leaving the practical application and enforcement of these rights and freedoms to the state. For Cavanaugh, this separation of theory and practice, of body and soul, serves not to subordinate the temporal authority of the state to the spiritual authority of the Church, as Maritain would have it, but to give the state absolute authority over both the Church and individual men:
Maritain, of course, is keen in theory to circumscribe the state’s power by limiting the state to purely temporal pretensions and subordinating the temporal to the spiritual. What he does not see is that this very distinction of planes can function to augment the power of the state by eliminating the interference of the Church. Maritain may declare that only God, and not the state, is truly sovereign, but once the Church has been individualized and eliminated as Christ’s body in the world, only the state is left to impersonate God. As the state itself becomes guarantor of rights, human rights become tied, in bitter irony, to the security of the state.
Both Maritain and Rawls would claim that the inexorable reality of religious pluralism, the moral necessity of the political provision and defense of personal rights and freedoms like freedom of conscience and the right to life, and the just equality of all citizens under the law require the state to be detached from any particular comprehensive doctrine, leaving questions of ultimate purpose and personal obligations towards the transcendent realm for citizens and private institutions to answer and act upon without state interference. Yet, what Maritain does not see, according to Cavanaugh, is that as a result of this detachment and separation, the state itself has become the sole authoritative judge of the “correct” theoretical grounding of rights, the sole publicly recognized defender of the dignity of the person, and the sole determiner of the proper area of state detachment from and noninterference with the spiritual sphere. In short, the state retains the sole authority and power to define not only its own sphere of business but also that of the Church’s. It is the state that has the final say as to the claims of Caesar and God because it alone possesses the coercive power to enforce and thus authoritatively determine the boundaries and power of each claim. Why should the state look to a less powerful body, let alone the “bodiless” institution of the Church, for guidance when the latter no longer possesses or even aspires to the public identity of a politically authoritative body?
Cavanaugh’s account of the origins and nature of the modern state is at the heart of his opposition to Maritain’s sanguine evaluation of it. The modern state was instrumental in creating the mythological identity of man as an autonomous, atomistic “individual” with no intrinsic and constitutive ties with other men; it thus served as a main catalyst for the breakup of the religious unity of Christendom. Indeed, the state itself was directly responsible for the violent religious conflicts that, according to the standard view, necessitated the centralized, “religiously neutral,” “peacemaking” power of the state:
The rise of the state was not necessitated by the “Wars of Religion”; rather, these wars were the birth pangs of the state, in which the overlapping jurisdictions, allegiances, and customs of the medieval order were flattened and circumscribed into the new creation of the sovereign state (not always yet nation-state), a centralizing power with a monopoly on violence within a defined territory.
Maritain mistakenly reads into Christ’s command to separate the things of Caesar from the things of God the modern collapse of the things of God into the merely private realm, what Rawls terms the “background culture”; and he is blind to the true import of this dynamic, the modern extension of the things of Caesar into all other realms, including the spiritual. Christ’s command was given by God himself, and since for both Maritain and Cavanaugh the Church is the directly authorized spokesman for Christ and thus for God, it should be the Church and the communities under it, not the state, that should define the precise sovereignty and distinction of planes, and that should oversee, inform, and ultimately, if necessary, coerce the activities of not only the souls of citizens but their bodies:
Although he is certainly right to endorse the disentanglement of the Church from coercive state power, we should expect Maritain at least to acknowledge that the desacralization of the state is not historically separable from the very privatization of Christianity and rising nation-state ambitions to power that Maritain himself abhors.
In short, the limitation of the state’s power must come from within the Church, not from the state, even if the state be a “gospel-inspired democratic charter” theoretically founded upon the authoritative teachings of the Church.
While Maritain gives all theoretical authority to define the limits of the state to the Church, he places all practical coercive power and control regarding the enforcement of these limits to the state; therefore, he ends up unwittingly supporting the state in its tyrannical temporal hegemony, what Cavanaugh calls the state’s “soteriology.” The latter is not a cultural pluralism of thriving religious doctrines all sharing in the political prescriptions of the democratic charter, but a tyrannical imposition of an alien religion upon deceived and unwilling subscribers forced to submit to its irrational demands. The established religion of the state is, for Cavanaugh, raw, arbitrary power, and it is this mock-church, and not Maritain’s “purified” and “properly secular” state, that is the actual culmination of political history since the Reformation:
Maritain believes that the careful distinguishing of the spiritual and temporal planes prevents this from happening in true democracies. He does not fully appreciate to what extent many modern states have already replaced, or at least displaced, other religions, including Christianity, either through the privatization of religion or the hostility of an ever-expanding state. The task of limiting the state’s power once it has been charged with maintaining a secular faith is at least more difficult than Maritain makes it out to be.
Cavanaugh’s alternative political prescription is not a return to the medieval, theocratic Church-state union in which the Church is given a share in the coercive power of temporal authority; this would contribute, for Cavanaugh and Maritain alike, to the Church’s degradation, as it would be a corruption of her primary supernatural mission of salvation. Yet, Maritain’s solution is just as bad, since it also serves to degrade and corrupt the spiritual power of the Church, not by giving it a share in the state’s political power, but by taking away its own intrinsic political power, by disembodying, privatizing and neutering it, depriving it of its political and corporeal nature as the true “Body of Christ”:
Maritain would protect the Mystical Body from reduction to a merely natural community subject to the same laws of power as the state and other temporal bodies. Instead of challenging the autonomy of the temporal, however, his thought has the effect of promoting it, aiming at the same time to carve out an untouchable “spiritual” space for the Church which is both interior to the person and transcendent to the state. Maritain does not allow the possibility that the Gospel may have its own bodily performances, its own “politics,” its own set of social practices which are neither purely otherworldly nor reducible to some “purely temporal” discourse.
When the Church is denuded, nature recoils in horror vacui, and the state takes on the identity of a religious body with absolute claim to both the soul and the body of its devotees, willing or unwilling.
What Maritain sees as the exclusive temporal and theoretical component of gospel teaching, the “democratic philosophy” and its practical realization in the modern, secular, religiously pluralistic, rights-based regime, is actually the theoretical and practical temporal components of an alien, antichristian religion. Cavanaugh argues that the reason for Maritain’s confusion is a distorted ecclesiology, specifically, his view of the Church as politically disembodied. Such a distortion is the logical result of molding the Church on the model of the modern state, instead of vice-versa. Maritain thought that the Church in order to be as spiritually effective as possible must at all costs remain practically viable in the modern democratic regime, a regime, like it or not, having complete coercive jurisdiction over the bodies of citizens; thus, the Church must renounce a corporate body of its own, presenting itself as a purely spiritual and moral entity (though still visible, hierarchical, and juridical—Maritain had absolutely no Protestant tendencies in this regard). For Cavanaugh, however, a bodiless, apolitical Church is unnatural, and the absence of what should be visibly present inevitably makes itself felt in the societal air, as it were. The state fills up this absence, and adopts the body of the Church in a perverse parody of the mystical body of Christ.
For both Cavanaugh and Maritain, in order to know what Catholics owe Caesar and God today, and to be able to pay this debt, Catholic citizens in both the private and public dimension of their lives must listen directly to His authentic mouthpiece, the Catholic Church. But unlike Maritain, Cavanaugh urges Catholics to reject the neutered, privatized, individualized, disembodied form the Church now resembles after becoming an unwitting victim of the tyranny of the modern state. Catholics must instead have recourse to a fully embodied Church, and so must help rebuild her in the image of her Founder, Jesus Christ, not in the image of the “antichrist,” the modern state (Cavanaugh does use strong language here). What is needed is a politically powerful, robustly corporeal, mystical body of Christ with the power to tame and tutor all regimes under the easy yolk of Christ, not a democratic faith and charter that is only an inadequate substitute for the kind of political body the Church ultimately is and should become in its visible structure, appearance, and explicit public identity. The primary contradiction in Maritain’s project is that this dynamic and robust Church, the Church Christ intended, the only institutional body that can redeem both individual men and societies is not permitted to exist in this form under his “new Christendom.”
What began as liberation of the Church from alliances with the state and party entanglements ends with the privatization of the Church and its domination by the state. The promise of a “social Catholicism” did not materialize because it was misconstrued from the start. The problem with “social Catholicism” is that it was never truly social. The Church was interiorized more radically than before, relegated to a ghostly “mystical” body unable to resist the fragmenting disciplines of the state. To look for a true alternative Christian social practice – a true body – we must look elsewhere than “social Catholicism” and the New Christendom.

Aurel Kolnai: synthesizing Christ and anti-Christ

Aurel Kolnai was a Hungarian-born political philosopher whose lifespan corresponds roughly with Maritain’s; indeed, he died in the same year as Maritain in 1973. Kolnai sees in Maritain’s thought a misguided attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, to synthesize modern democratic philosophy and its spirit of equality and rights, with the spirit of “conservative metaphysics,” (to use Kolnai’s peculiar phrase) and its spirit of inequality, privilege, and hierarchy. The latter cannot be reconciled with the modern “democratic metaphysics” that sees things in terms of identity, sameness, and rebellion. Maritain’s hope that “the Christian inspiration and the democratic inspiration recognize each other and be reconciled” was not merely a futile but a perverse hope, since these two inspirations are as diametrically opposed as truth and error.
Like Cavanaugh and Kraynak, Kolnai rejects outright both Maritain’s judgment of the superiority of a secular, religiously pluralistic Christendom, and his narrative regarding how this superior historical product came about:
According to Maritain, a “temporal” society “Christianly inspired” (as he puts it) is better and indeed in a sense more Christian than a “sacral” society whose fully qualified citizens are supposed to be all Christians, because it represents a more advanced stage in the evolution of Christendom, at which the Christian “leaven” has had more time to “ferment” and to Christianize implicitly the very tissue of secular social relationships as such. He only forgets that the specifically anti-Christian reaction of pagan human nature to Christ’s claim on man also had more time to unfold; to combat and to suppress (rather than merely reject) embodied Christianity proper, that is, the Church; but especially to distort the glad tidings of Christianity into a poisonous gospel of man’s prideful self-worship.
Kolnai, like Cavanaugh, interprets modern history as a process of dechristianization of the social and political order. Maritain would agree with Kolnai that evil as well as good has flourished in history, but Maritain would make a distinction between the progress of theory and practice. The modern era is replete with evil and anti-Christian ideas and motives, but what has accompanied these are not necessarily the evil, practical, political fruits that should have logically flowed from them; instead, we have witnessed, through God’s merciful providence, the happy development of good and Gospel-inspired practices and values in spite of bad ideas. Kolnai, however, would reject this distinction, seeing in it an attempt to characterize the modern political ethos and overall practical structure as neutral to ideology and theology. Like Kraynak, Kolnai denies that such neutrality is possible. Social and political practices convey and embody their own implicit spirit and theory, rendering them inseparable from the ideologies that spawned them. Maritain’s attempt to synthesize modern, secularist political practice with Christianity is the attempt to synthesize not only two contradictory systems of thought, but also two contradictory systems of practice, even two opposing religions. I quote Kolnai in full here because a paraphrase cannot capture the severity of his critique:
The author, then, aims at a compromise, not between the Christian religious position and this or that extra-religious, worldly, though naturally justifiable point of view, (for example, biological welfare, patriotism, or any reasonable demand of political expediency), but between the Christian religious position proper, which he espouses whole-heartedly and is eager to make valid, and another position “religious in nature”: that of “temporal” Christendom, Christianity made into the quasi-religion of progressive democracy, Christianity inverted and secularized into the humanistic self-worship of the “person” and the “body politic” (which he over emphatically distinguishes from the mere “state.”) What he really has in mind is not an agreement, adjusted to what is attainable according to time and place, between Christ and Caesar, but a synthesis, suffused with all the religious afflatus of the soul, between Christ and the idol of the modernity: between Christ and His modern caricature; between the true Christ of the faith and the substitute Christ of humanism; between Christ and Anti-Christ.
For Kolnai and Cavanaugh, Maritain’s project is essentially the attempt to fuse together the soul of the Church with the body of the state. Maritain mistakenly assumes that the modern state is a discrete, separable, interchangeable part, a module, to use Rawls’s term, that can fit into any comprehensive doctrinal scheme or institution, and that the soul of the Church can be separated from its body without suffering death. However, as Kolnai argues, the attempt to incorporate the body of the state into the soul of the Church, i.e., Maritain’s desire for the “recognition and reconciliation of the democratic and Christian inspiration,” serves instead to mutate the Church’s body into the soul of the state. The “soul” is the state’s antichristian doctrinal scheme, which is inseparable from its diabolical “body,” the antichristian set of practices that constitute the modern liberal democratic state in action.
Although these three critiques do not constitute a refutation of Maritain’s Christian political project, they are credible and reasonable alternatives to it that are equally Christian in content and inspiration. What they demonstrate is that the reconcilability of Catholic political theology with full practical acceptance of and participation in the modern, secular, democratic regime is not a necessary and indisputable conclusion. Premises drawn from post-reformation political history, Thomistic philosophy, and Catholic theology can lead to both the principled acceptance and outright rejection of the religiously pluralistic, democratic, and non-sacral political order. Thus, one is left with the question: Is the actualization of Maritain’s democratic charter the temporal realization of the Gospel, or does it serve instead, in the words of Kolnai, to “distort the glad tidings of Christianity into a poisonous gospel of man’s prideful self-worship”?

“Something deep in American culture has always demanded a church—a source of morality that is not owned by the hard cash of the marketplace or the angry passions of politics. For two centuries, that role was filled by American Protestantism, but as the mainline Protestant churches have collapsed in recent decades, American culture has increasingly looked to Catholicism to provide the missing piece of the nation’s soul.

In THE CATHOLIC AWAKENING, the influential Catholic neoconservative Joseph Bottum explains how the disappearance of the Protestant churches helped join the once-marginalized Catholics and Evangelicals. For two hundred years, the antagonism between Catholics and Protestants was a consistent force in America, but it has been replaced with a growing unity that represents a new political reality. Coalitions of Catholics and Protestants now have the power to swing elections and affect the way politics is conducted in this country.”

I’m with you on having reservations about the Protestant mainline. And while I can’t speak for Jody, I think he would too. In fact, I think that article was a “not speaking evil of the dead.” I also suspect that it was simply a prefatory remark for his forthcoming book, The Catholic Awakening: How Catholicism Replaced Protestant Christianity as America’s National Church. The Amazon blurb says this about it:

I think he would see this as more of the way it should be, rather than leaving it up to the mainline church.

The Protestant mainline’s civil religion is also a problem theologically and I’m surprised evangelicals would take a positive view of it, since the sort of Christianization of America in which the Protestant mainline engaged also involved a Social Gospel that abandoned crucial components of Protestant faith.

So my concerns about civil religion and FT’s view of it remain.

Just as neocons (liberals who’ve been mugged by reality) are still liberals, pomo’s are still neocons.

I’ve never read “On Two Wings,” but have read (and reviewed for Liberty Magazine) “Washington’s God,” and have read most of Novak’s articles on the Founding and religion.

I engaged him (briefly) in an online debate for Encyclopedia Britannica; he actually was engaging Brooke Allen and I was blogging and commenting and I kept pressing the Trinity/orthodoxy issue.

He replied in an article and seemed extremely equivocal that Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement were anything central to the “civil” definition of Founding era Christianity. That is Novak seems to recognize (contra the “Christian Nation” crowd) that the God of the American Founding isn’t necessarily the God who died on the cross.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007/04/what-is-christianity/

He did misunderstand a bit my position (but I don’t care that he didn’t read me too closely as I am a nobody). He wrote:

Rowe holds that “the primary ‘end’ of religion is morality itself,” and that the three distinctive tenets “which distinguish Christianity from all the other world religions” are “things like the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement.”

I actually argued that the FFs’ civil religion held the primary “end” of religion is morality itself but Christianity was distinguished by Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement. That is the FFs’ unitarian civil religion flipped the traditional Christian doctrine of works and grace on its head.

Novak also wrote:

Meanwhile, most of the American Founding Fathers would have recited the Nicene Creed with some regularity at Anglican services. The tenets of that creed include many more items than Mr. Rowe’s three. Such abstract terms as “Trinity” and “Atonement” do not appear in it.

The three most distinctive features of Christianity (in a political context) include constant emphasis upon the axial role of human freedom. For Christians and Jews, freedom is at the heart of the matter.

These three distinctive marks of Christianity are cited frequently by the Founders. Alexander Hamilton in 1802:…

You got that, in defining civil “Judeo-Christianity” Novak sidesteps issues of orthodoxy and posits 1) Freedom, 2) institutional separation of church and state, and 3) man’s sinful nature.

I’ll let the readers decide on the “authenticity” of the theological system Novak seems to be cheering.

If Christians by definition worship a “Triune God,” you just can’t get a “Christian” Founding civil religion; you just can’t. So instead the term “Judeo-Christian” is offered and questions like original sin, the Trinity (and cognate orthodox doctrines) are taken off the table.

“Judeo-Christian,” though, as a vague term has its own problems (it’s one I don’t endorse to describe the civil religion of the American Founding).

That said, I continue to believe the distinction…institutionally…is an important one with both benefiting by the distinction and both suffering by blurring the lines. Many of those conservatives who fell for the breezy and calculated use of God as Campaign Slogan have seen their support re-paid with an erosion of both the larger society and a complete bungling of their political agency.

We are seeng a continuing homogenization and commodification of the citizenry and the “separate but equal”…to use another loaded historic term….relationship of organized religion and the State is one of the things that puts the breaks on the mongrelization of the culture. It falls neatly into the “Separation of Powers” doctrine that is continuing to be eroded at our ongoing peril.

Ah, I see what you’re saying now. You’re right, that’s a very important distinction and one that hadn’t occurred to me. I may have been reading something into Novak’s summary of Meachem’s remark that wasn’t there (agreeing with a concept that I received as if it were transmitted like a game of Telephone is always dangerous).

I was reading it as more of our collective civil response to God’s expectations rather than the political structures that God prefers. In other words, I saw it as our republican and democratic virtues flowing from our attempts to treat all people as equal in worth and dignity, rather than as being forms of governance that God prefers. My friend John Mark Reynolds once said that “God is not a Republican or a Democrat, he’s probably a monarchist.” I think the same holds true for small “r” republicans and small “d” democrats.

I also believe that God is a “localist.” After all, as Abraham Kuyper once said, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’”

Thanks for the comment. A couple of responses:

You have a very judicious and careful reading of Novak, which I respect, as you’re certainly more familiar with the man than I. I only know what I observed and heard when he was at Catholic University in 2000, working on and presenting the research he was doing for On Two Wings. I thought then–and still think today–it was a baldly (and highly flawed) attribution of a sectarian Christian “civil religion” perspective to the American Founders.

I could certainly see our friends here at FPR thinking that [a limited expression of civil piety] when they say the Pledge. But I would still hold that their neighbors view it quite differently. The Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, is to a national symbol, not to a specific location (that’s why in Texas we have the Pledge of Allegiance to the Texas flag, so we can cover all our bases). It’s okay to substitute in one’s head “one state of Kansas” when saying “one nation under God.” But we shouldn’t assume that this what our neighbors are thinking.

But I, at least, am not supposing that the FPR approach is to do something different than what our (non-elite? populist?) “neighbors” do. I agree that the flag is a national symbol, and that the Pledge of Allegiance is an expression of devotion to, and faith in, that land which the flag symbolizes. Isn’t that land–namely, the United States of America, the “republic” which the Pledge mentions–also a “specific location”? I mean, it’s here; it’s not Argentina or Chad. Granted, the Pledge and so much else which travels under the name of patriotism in America can and often does mean a devotion to something abstract and ideological: the ideas in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps. All sorts of people will claim that the “meaning of America” is something purely civic, untied to anything spatial or historical or ethnic. And who knows–maybe you’re right, maybe that is what our local neighbors are thinking. In my experience, though, most American localists really love (or at least have an intense relationship with), in addition to their own particular American places, America, the country, the republic, the place. A civil religion that leads people to feel piously about their country is not something to be discounted, I think, nor is it something that I think any proper Front Porcher should or would have a problem with.

The difference that I alluded to in my closing lines–and I freely admit that I may be an outlier here at FPR in this regard–is that I see a difference between a civil religion that grants citizens a spiritual understanding of the general relationship they have with the people they are part of (this, I think, is perfectly compatible with localism), and a “public religion” that postulates that what God really loves is not particular places, but particular (republican or democratic) principles. I’ve no doubt that God, in His wisdom, has preferences for how His children ought to organize themselves and live together. (Of course I do; I’m a Mormon, and we’ve got a history of collective projects galore.) But that kind of piety I think is politically dangerous, much more dangerous than a belief that God loves our places and our ways of living in those places, because He loves us as His children, and therefore can’t not love the places we choose to be.

Having worked for World magazine, Family Research Council (a close associate of FotF), and for Bill Bennett, I have to say that I don’t think that is completely truth. The audience of each of these is no doubt largely comprised of the Christian Nation-types. But for the most part the people that work there are more skeptical of that sort of thing than you’d imagine.

Plus, I wonder what you make of Jody’s article on the Protestant mainline from a year ago. It strikes this historian who has some familiarity with anti-Catholicism a tad strange that a Roman Catholic would ever long for a return to the days of the Protestant mainline for whom civil religion was synonymous with Rome as un-American.

I thought Jody’s article was much more nuanced than that. He simply takes Prostantism as a historical fact that, when it passed, took with it something important. The key graf is this one:

. . . Protestantism nonetheless gave America something vital: a social unity and cultural definition that did not derive entirely from political arrangements and economic relations. And America gave Protestantism something in return: a chance to flourish without state interference, a freedom to fulfill the human desire for what lies beyond the material world.

It seems this would be a theme that would resonate with FPRers.

But such respect for religions that prop up the nation is evident among the various faiths of neo-cons, hence the Salem Radio network’s ability to patch together Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant talk show hosts for a largely evangelical audience.

I think there is a much simpler explanation for Salem recruiting Catholics, Jews, and Mainliners: We evangelicals have so few people that have the talent for such political discourse that we can’t even staff our own radio stations.

I’m betting also that Bennett and company find more to agree with in Jody’s article on the mainline than in Stegall’s or Deneen’s localism.

I suspect that Bennett would like both. He probably doesn’t see a necessary tension between localism and a shared sense of Americanism.
Russel Arben Fox . . . In any case, though, if there is some overlap, then I have to view Joe’s disavowel of civil religion, particularly sectarian civil religion, . . .

I may have caused some confusion about what I think civil religion is. In my estimation, it is not merely the mixing of religon and the state, but the use of religion tropes and sentiments to further the agenda of the state. While this is still done, of course, I don’t think you’ll find anyone at FT that advocates for that type of thing. Also, what I have been calling the Christian Nation variety of civil religion probably isn’t civil religion at all, but its reverse (religious civilness?) since it uses the tropes and sentiments of the state to further the agenda of a religious perspective.

Especially, I’m somewhat disconserted by Joe’s enlistment of Michael Novak for the separationist crowd, since Michael wrote On Two Wings, one of the more explicit attempts to demonstrate that the God which America’s founders assumed would form the basis of the nation’s moral sensibility and infrastructure really was “the God who died on the Cross.”

I can’t speak for Novak or—despite the puffery of my original post—much of anyone else at FT. I’m made a lot of assumptions about where I believe they stand, though I could certainly be wrong.

As for Novak, I see three possible interpretations (based on your summary since I haven’t read that particular book). One is that he is simply wrong, as I think he is in his claim in Washington’s God that George Washington was a somewhat orthodox Christian. The second is that he could be saying that the Founders were referring to the Trinitarian God even if they didn’t know it. This is much the same thing that goes on when Christians say that we worship the same God as the Jewish people. If it really is the “same” God then they are worshiping Jesus and just don’t know it. I think this is even more rude and insulting than saying that we don’t, in fact, actually worship the same God. But that is the game we play to maintain civility.

The third possibility is similar to the second. Novak could be saying that when the Founders talked about God they were actually talking about God. Too often we treat the deity as if he were an abstract concept in which other alternatives were possible. There is, however, only one actual God. Everything else is just a false idea that has no actual existence, and therefore no real role except as a useful fiction. Novak could be saying that by basing our moral sensibility on the Being Who Actually Exist, the Founders were doing something wholly different than simply propping up a noble lie to get the unwashed masses to act right.

Joe’s main point seems to be basically an anti-populist or anti-majoritarian one:. . .

Whoa, hold up a second: I certainly don’t intend to come off as anti-populist (though anti-majoritarian I can live with). While I think the elites (represented here by the folks at FT and FPR) are right, that doesn’t mean I am bashing the people who hold this view.
. . .but I would note that it is, by definition, also a limited expression of civil piety: God is here, with these people, in this place, at this time.

I could certainly see our friends here at FPR thinking that when they say the Pledge. But I would still hold that their neighbors view it quite differently. The Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, is to a national symbol, not to a specific location (that’s why in Texas we have the Pledge of Allegiance to the Texas flag, so we can cover all our bases). It’s okay to substitute in one’s head “one state of Kansas” when saying “one nation under God.” But we shouldn’t assume that this what our neighbors are thinking.

Also, I always assumed that God is here, in America, with these people, at this time. I never thought to assume he was only with us Texans. (I suspect that God loves even those parts of America that I don’t care for.)

. . . than a belief that God loves Kansas or Utah or Montana or upper-state New York

But doesn’t God love the Republic? If not, then does he not love the Front Porch Republic? ; )

Albert: My sense is that the contributors to FPR (more of less) reject modernity, and in so far as they do, they may have problems with the very concept of “civil religion” itself that are more profound than mere acceptance or rejection of it.

I’ve never really understood what that means? How can anyone live in America and “reject modernity?” It would be easier—though still well nigh impossible—to reject capitalism, democracy, reality TV and the other fruits of modernity than it would be reject modernity itself.

The best that could be done, in my estimation, is what the PomoCons try to do: try to run to the end of modernity and see what is worth salvaging.

Albert, as always, is dead on.

I cannot wait to read this long awaited and much needed book by Cavanaugh: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Religious-Violence-Ideology-Conflict/dp/0195385047/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1250107216&sr=8-2

Although he never says so directly, Hart hints that the Front Porchers reject civil religion while the PomoCons (and others at First Things) would embrace it. To me, this seems exactly backwards.

The reason for the lack of consensus at FPR, in my opinion, is that the very concept of “civil religion” presupposes both modernity’s flawed conceptions of “religion” and of “politics” as entities that can be adequately separated at a fundamental level, and modernity’s totalitarian stance of elites managing all of society from a distance atop a tower of Babel.

My sense is that the contributors to FPR (more of less) reject modernity, and in so far as they do, they may have problems with the very concept of “civil religion” itself that are more profound than mere acceptance or rejection of it. And yet, given the theological differences represented here, FPRs are nonetheless able to achieve consensus on certain matters because the rejection of modernity entails a rejection of the divisive, abstract quarrels divorced from particular local realities in favor of real, local participation in community that softens the edges of debates through small-scale relations.

Reading William Cavanaugh’s “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State” will provide a glimpse as to what I mean by “more profound problems than mere acceptance or rejection of ‘civil religion.’” His article gets to the heart of how even the framework of our language concerning “religion” and “politics” is not without question.