Religion and Public Policy: An Introduction

One way of approaching the following essays is to pause here at the beginning and consider the peculiarity of the conversation we will be overhearing. In this volume we will be listening to a group of scholars who are Catholic, Episcopal, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and secularist in their varied backgrounds. They are considering the place of religion in public policymaking. The peculiarity arises if we think about American public life historically. For one thing, we are listening to people who most likely would not have been inclined to interact with each other at the outset of the twentieth century. More than that, they are talking about something that hardly anyone a hundred years ago would have thought even needs discussing.

The subject under discussion is the relationship between religion on the one hand--in both organized and unorganized forms--and public choices made through government on the other. Put bluntly, what should concerns about God have to do with the way Americans govern themselves? To locate this conversation historically, we might imagine three snapshots, sketchy as they must be.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the widespread presumption was that God's claims had everything to do with the way Americans governed themselves. When the oldest of today's living Americans were born, which is to say in the days of Bryan, McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, the "public-ness" of religion was taken for granted in a national political culture dominated by Protestants. It was widely assumed that America was a Christian nation and should behave itself accordingly. Of course, exactly what that meant in practice aroused vigorous argument when it came to issues like alcohol control, labor legislation, child welfare, foreign colonization and the like. Then too, the nation was in the midst of a tumultuous in-migration of people who were outside the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon mainstream. (In one five-year period at the turn of the century, America received as many immigrants as in all the years from 1930 to 1960 combined.) Nevertheless, it was essentially in a self-confident Protestant party system and moralistic political culture the newcomers had to find their place. (The manager of the New York Yankees could be, and was, arrested for breaking the law and playing baseball on the Sunday Sabbath.) Likewise, despite dissents from a small number of radical non-believers, leading public thinkers of the day seemed able to reconcile a "liberal" version of Christianity with the new knowledge being produced by Darwinian science, economics, sociology, history and Bible criticism. It would be the last time that the nation's traditional pastor-theologians played an extensive role in American intellectual history. ²

We fast-forward now to the middle of the twentieth century, when the situation was more complex and changing rapidly.

The semi-official Protestant establishment of fifty years earlier was now well on its way to breaking up, and so too were strictures on Catholics and Jews in the public arena. Indeed any variant of what was now being labeled as the Judeo-Christian tradition served as a civil religion in America's Cold War struggle against godless Communism. Patriotic piety found expression as Congress enacted the National Day of Prayer in 1952, added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and adopted "In God Trust" as the country's official motto in 1956. However, at the same time, the Supreme Court had just begun applying the Constitution's First Amendment protections of religious liberty to state governments. Bans on state-mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools would soon follow. Outside government, intellectual leadership had passed to a mushrooming system of secular higher education, which was in turn one aspect of the larger "secularization" process that social scientists identified with modernization. Meanwhile, beneath the placid surface of mainstream religion, the institutional forms and doctrines of traditional Christianity came under increased criticism from Christians themselves. By the Sixties the critiques of American Christendom...