The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (19 page)

In the meantime, however, a funny thing was happening on the way to the secularization of American life: traditionalist religious subcommunities were not going away, but often were growing in strength. Some, such as older ethnic urban
Roman Catholic communities, did suffer attrition as parishioners
moved to the suburbs, and many cradle Catholics, having adopted ideals of American autonomy that did not fit well with church authority, simply stopped attending. But other new Catholic immigrant groups, especially Latino Catholics, took their places. More open immigration policies fostered other varieties of ethnoreligious communities, many of which were non-Christian and non-Western. In addition, New Age sensibilities generated new kinds of spirituality and revived old ones. Perhaps most remarkably, the more conservative revivalist Protestant groups were thriving rather than diminishing.

With American religious practice not actually diminishing, and with religious diversity growing, a new challenge was emerging. Simply including progressive consensus religious voices in the mainstream on the 1950s model was not feasible. Neither was it possible to establish a consistent privatization. So here was the challenge: How, in an era when diversity was being celebrated in other respects, might it be possible to construct a mainstream discourse that recognized roles for a variety of
religious
voices? And this is still the question today.

When the religious right emerged as an organized political movement in the late 1970s, it, too, as has been recounted, lacked attention to the question of how to ensure equity for
widely diverse voices in the public domain. Even though militantly conservative Christians had not been part of the liberal Protestant establishment of the 1950s, their instinct was to propose a return to something that would look a lot like it, but with conservatives such as themselves in charge of defining the cultural consensus. The religious right could encompass some internal religious diversity, since it included culturally conservative Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and others.
Yet what it glaringly lacked, especially in the popular Protestant
zeal to return America to its alleged Christian roots, were accounts of how such a proposed restoration would deal with greater diversity, either religious or secular. Militantly conservative
Protestants, just getting over their belligerent anti-Catholicism, did not have a heritage of thinking about such
issues beyond the Baptist principle of separation of church and state. They now spoke of “secular humanists” as though they were the enemy to be excluded in a Christianized America. Conservative Roman Catholics had a religious heritage in which, until recently, it had been held that, ideally, Catholicism should be the state religion. That meant that Catholics were only just beginning to address questions of how to deal equitably with religious and cultural diversity. Some serious conservative theorists, both Catholic and Protestant, did indeed provide some valuable engagement with those issues. But in the more popular manifestations of the religious right, their nuanced voices were often drowned out by strident and simplistic calls for a return to America's original Christian consensus
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The fact was that the stridency of the religious right's demands for America to return traditionalist Christianity to the
cultural mainstream only made most other parties less inclined to address issues of religious equity. The rhetoric of
the religious right about “taking back” America and its institutions only made it easier for the more secular-minded people to
dismiss religion as simply a threat to diversity in the public sphere. Conservative Christian attacks on the feminist and gay agendas reinforced the tendency of the champions of cultural inclusivism to favor a more thoroughly secular culture. So even though the value of allowing a diversity of viewpoints to be heard was increasingly being recognized in the cultural mainstream, proponents of diversity were seldom inclined to think about how to include a diversity of religious viewpoints.

So as the era of the culture wars emerged by about 1980, none of the major parties had a well-developed heritage of thinking about how to accommodate religious diversity as it related to the public domain. Even as other sorts of multiculturalism were reaching the peak of their influence, most Americans lacked any adequate tradition for dealing with deeply held religious differences in the public sphere.

Cross-cultural comparisons
often help people see their own culture in a new light. In this case, the peculiarities of typically American ways of dealing with religious pluralism can be brought into focus by comparing them with an alternative view that arose in a slightly different cultural context. This alternative view does not resolve all the remarkably complex problems regarding religion and culture. But it does offer a starting point or framework for thinking about them that differs from the dominant American models. This outlook
was developed in the Netherlands by the Dutch theologian, churchman, political leader, and publicist Abraham Kuyper in the late nineteenth century. Not everything in Kuyper is suited to addressing twenty-first-century American issues. He was a man of his times, and his outlooks were sometimes parochial. They need to be updated if they are to be applied to contemporary settings, as indeed they have been by a number of his current admirers. For understanding the underlying fundamental issues, however, the differences between his starting point and the treatment of the issue in most of the American Protestant heritage are nonetheless instructive.
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Abraham Kuyper, who lived from 1837 to 1920, was easily one of the leading modern thinkers regarding religion and culture. He also had, not incidentally, an extraordinarily multifaceted career. Trained as a theologian, he began as pastor in the Reformed Church, which had formerly been the nation's state church. His efforts to reform that denomination led to a division and the founding of a new Reformed denomination. He was also the editor of an influential newspaper as well as a prolific writer. He helped to found a university, and he then taught there as a theologian. And in addition to these ecclesiastical, editorial, academic, and intellectual activities, he also had an impressive political career: he founded a political party that he long headed, was a member of parliament, and served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper, who was first of all a person of principles, also had the energy and force of will to create reforming institutions that would embody those principles.

Kuyper's principles are illuminating especially because of how they contrast with the dominant American models. His most helpful insights reflect in part the differences between the cultural and intellectual settings of the Netherlands and the United States. Late nineteenth-century America had been
indelibly shaped by the Civil War. Because that war had been
about preserving the Union, national unification was a dominant theme in the social thought of the era. The two political parties that emerged from the war were “liberal” fraternal twins, both essentially nonideological. Faced with a flood of immigration after the war, the great social challenge was to assimilate peoples with all sorts of differences into this cultural-political mainstream. The Netherlands also was dealing with issues of rising liberalism and national consolidation. It had some heritage of religious diversity, but was relatively stable in its religious and ethnic makeup. In 1848 the Dutch state gave up efforts to regulate religious groups, and the central question for the next generation, as Kuyper saw it, was how to preserve distinctive subcommunities, especially religious subcommunities, in the face of growing secular trends and modern pressures toward uniformity. Owing in no small part to Kuyper's own efforts, the Netherlands, which had a parliamentary system, developed multiple ideologically and religiously defined parties. So, in the Netherlands, unlike in the American two-party setting, enlightenment-based liberalism was only one option among many. Another difference from the typical
American outlooks was that Americans tended to think about things
in practical ways, from the bottom up, rather than from
the top down; Kuyper, by contrast, was working in an intellectual
setting dominated by European idealism, in which it was characteristic to look at things holistically from the top down. Kuyper himself adopted a holistic stance, but with principles derived not from modern idealism, but from his Augustinian Reformed heritage, in which God, the creator of all reality, must be the starting point for all understanding.

One especially important feature of Kuyper's outlook is that it illustrates how epistemology, or the study of the nature of knowledge, can help shape social policy. Kuyper's approach literally provides a place to start
in rethinking these issues. Most American Protestants regarded science and reason as ideologically neutral, and presented faith as something that went beyond the kind of objective but limited knowledge that science and reason could produce. Kuyper, by way of contrast, worked from a principle enunciated by St. Augustine: “I believe in order to understand.” Faith preceded understanding, and so faith informed and shaped understanding. Working from this principle, Kuyper insisted that reason, natural science, and methodological naturalism were not ideologically neutral. Even the most technical of natural sciences, he observed, operated within the framework of the faith, or higher commitments, of the practitioner.
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At the purely technical level, people of various faiths (either religious or secular higher commitments) might work side by side and get the same technical results. But as soon as they reflected on the larger implications of their science or their reasoning, they would begin to understand those results in radically different contexts. As an Augustinian Christian, Kuyper developed this principle as it related to differences
in the thinking of Christians and non-Christians—that is, of those who by God's grace understood reality through the lens of Christian faith as revealed in Scripture, on the one hand, and of those, on the other hand, who viewed reality through other lenses. Regarding that division, which for Christians is the most fundamental one, Kuyper could say, “there are two kinds of people and two kinds of science.” Kuyper used “science” here in the broad sense of any intellectual inquiry.
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The significance of things, he insisted, depended on their relationships, and so Christians perceived everything (trees, birds, humans, and even social institutions, the arts, labor, capital, and so on) in relation to their creator, the triune God. Those who did their science and reasoning in the context of recognizing those relationships saw dimensions and implications of things that other people did not apprehend. Reflecting on the relationship of reality to its loving creator would reshape the meaning of even the humblest enterprises. Even though from an Augustinian Christian perspective, the greatest divide was between those who recognized and trusted the triune God of Scripture and those who did not, in fact the human race was divided among peoples of many different highest commitments. So one could say, following Kuyper, that there were many highest commitments that provided frameworks within which differing peoples did their science and other reasoning.
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These views are closely related to a conception of pluralism in the public arena that has been characterized as “confessional pluralism” or “principled pluralism.” Such pluralism would attempt to take the differences among varieties of both
religious
and nonreligious perspectives seriously. By way of contrast, in the dominant midcentury American liberal-moderate
view of building toward consensus, scientific outlooks were often presented as ideologically neutral. For instance, when the US Supreme Court in the 1960s was ruling against prayer and the promotion of particular religious viewpoints in public schools, it suggested that an impartial alternative would be to teach “objectively”
about
religion. In the Kuyperian approach to pluralism, there is no conceding that modern scientific methods are objective so far as they go and hence could serve as neutral ways to view religious faiths. Rather, the outlook recognizes from the outset that the modern world is divided by fundamental differences in underlying faiths and commitments, some of which have nontheistic naturalism as their starting points and some of which have various forms of theism and openness to the supernatural as their starting points. Hence, societies, especially in their schooling and intellectual lives, but also in their public conversations and debates about morality, justice, and the like, should be built around the recognition that varieties of viewpoints, including varieties of both religious and secular viewpoints, exist and ought to be included in a genuine pluralism. There would be no illusion, as developed in the American case, that a national consensus might be built on an ideologically neutral basis, and that therefore neutral scientific models provided the best hope for
finding objective foundations for such a public consensus.
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In contrast to Kuyper, the mainstreams of American Protestantism from the eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth
century shared a tradition of having reconciled their faith to the
moderate American enlightenment, so that they rarely offered any critique of the idea that science and reason were, in principle, ideologically neutral. That was true of both theological liberals and conservatives. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, was characteristic of the liberal outlook in conceding autonomy to scientific inquiry, so long as it kept to its proper domain of nature and did not intrude into the areas of human freedom. American theological conservatives, in the meantime, had been shaped by enlightenment commonsense philosophy and typically insisted that objective science and reason would support biblical faith. Even when they viewed Darwinian evolution as hostile to Christianity, they typically insisted that they were not against objective natural science, but that truly objective science would support the biblical account.
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