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125 6 Separating Church and State The distinguished Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs recounts the outcome of the poll of Catholic college women he remembers Will Herberg to have reported in the 1950s.1 They simply were asked whether they thought of themselves first as Americans or as Catholics. Ninety-eight percent of them thought of themselves as American first. The position I would like to advance here is no one’s but my own, for I would be counted with the two percent. Because I am an adult convert to Catholicism I have not directly participated in that deep yearning of the immigrant to be accepted at virtually any cost into the larger culture, to be thought a good American. This yearning, one form of which is caught in Frank Capra’s movies and life, seems to me central to the history of religion in America.2 I do not think America is the “best country there ever was,” and I am not particularly enamored of the Ameri1 . John Lukacs, “Bare Ruined Choirs (Ample Parking in Church Yard),” Triumph 8, no. 4 (April 1973): 22–24 at 24. Curiously, Lukacs since has written of a very similar poll, asking the same question and also set in the 1950s, but now taken by himself of his own students with all of them responding that they think of themselves as Americans who happen to be Catholics: “Christians and the Temptations of Nationalism,” in New Oxford Review 59 (Nov. 1992): 12–18, at 12. The present chapter originated in an opening statement of position in a debate, “Separating Church and State,” between myself and Kathryn D. Kendell, staff attorney of the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, given April 20, 1993, in the McDougall Lecture Series sponsored by the Cathedral of the Madeleine , Salt Lake City. 2. Luc Sante, “American Pie,” The New York Review of Books (hereafter NYRB), January 28, 1993, writes of Capra, “He had spent his life and career attempting to deny his origins and to become American in the most mainstream, unshaded way.” 126 American Political Culture can legal tradition.3 Therefore, although an American, I speak as an outsider and as someone skeptical about “the American experience.” I suspect my analysis will look as strange to many of my coreligionists as their sharing of premises with the world around them—what I would call their profound secularization—seems to me. The story is told that early in the twentieth century, George Santayana , while at Harvard, was asked about Catholicism in America. The genial nonbeliever responded that he had met no Catholics in America, only some Protestants who prayed the rosary (a dated response , that!). The position I wish to mount—this is the first step of my argument—rests on the observation that humans are by nature religious animals. I suspect that in a society in which all assimilated groups, from the framers of the Constitution to contemporary assimilated Jews, have taken into themselves the dominant Protestant world view, such an observation is, as they say, off the screen.4 Most people in our culture take for granted the classical Protestant understanding of the separation between faith and reason and assume , for instance, that both religion itself and the moral life pertain to faith and somehow are a world apart from that of science and reason, which latter are the instruments by which a neutral public and secular sphere of life may be constructed.5 Some such assump3 . George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: W. Norton, 1993), has many wise things to say in this regard: see the review by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Radical,” NYRB, February 11, 1993. Paul Kennedy, “The American Prospect,” NYRB, March 4, 1993, makes suggestions about how positions asserting America’s “specialness” bear on America’s future, and makes an argument that because America is so large and in some degree an “escapist” culture, there is much to be said for fostering policies that are “differentiated, decentralized, and individualistic, ‘muddling through’ rather than a coordinated, centralized attack upon the problems.” Kennedy notes that such a policy, which in some ways parallels that advocated in the present chapter, implies long-term decline, but perhaps underestimates the ways in which American political culture forecloses the alternative of “coordinated attack.” 4. But see Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology , with a new introduction by Martin G. Marty (Chicago: University of...

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