The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (20 page)

Abraham Kuyper developed his views explicitly as a critique of the enlightenment ideal of a neutral universal reason, yet he was not a postmodern relativist. Rather than holding that various claims to “truth” were artificial human constructions, he believed that God had created a reality that all people could know, in part if never completely. So he believed there was a place for shared rationality in holding a society together. Even though, as a result of human sinfulness, people were sharply divided as to their first commitments, they were still creatures of God who shared some commonalities in experiencing the same created order. So they also shared some important elements of common rationality and moral sensibilities, such as a sense of justice. Even though differing peoples need to recognize that no one stands on neutral ground,
but all are shaped by their highest commitments, they can still go on to look for shared principles on which they can agree as a basis for working together. Kuyper believed that since all people share experience in God's ordered reality, such areas of agreement among peoples of various religious or secular faiths could be considerable. Kuyper often spoke of God's “common grace,” by which he meant goods that were extended to all people, such as natural resources, in which all can share, and common institutions for ordering and keeping peace in societies.

Abraham Kuyper combined the ideal of “confessional pluralism” in the public arena with an emphasis on recognizing and respecting a multiplicity of authorities in the structures of society. He saw these structures as reflecting a God-ordained ordering of social reality that people of all sorts of faiths could recognize as beneficial. Governments are one sort of agency of authority, but churches (and other religious groups), families, schools, businesses, agencies of the arts, and so forth are institutions with their own authority, each in its own sphere. The primary function of government is to promote justice and to act as a sort of referee, patrolling the boundaries among the spheres of society, protecting the sovereignty due within each sphere, adjudicating conflicts, and ensuring equal rights and equal protections for confessional groups, so far as that is possible. In this richly pluralistic view, society thrives when it promotes the health and integrity of what more recently have often been called “mediating institutions.” Such institutions likewise should stay within their spheres of competence. So, for instance, just as the government does not have
competence to rule on confessional matters for churches, so churches and other religious groups should not be aspiring to dictate to the government and to impose their own views on the whole.
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Such a conception of pluralism, although developed in a specifically Augustinian framework, would be compatible with many other outlooks and would help provide an alternative to the culture-wars mentality that has plagued American life for the past generation. Clearly, because of its theological premises, updated versions of Kuyperian pluralism would be most useful to Christians. And various sorts of Christians would need to take the lead in providing alternatives to the populist Christian neglect of issues regarding equity and pluralism. For a better understanding of what a Kuyperian outlook might look like today, one could do no better than to start with a 2011 book by Richard Mouw,
Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction.
Or one might explore the website of the Center for Public Justice, which provides examples of “principled pluralism” and suggests readings on its various dimensions. For Christians, especially theologically traditional Christians, the resources are already there for moving beyond culture-wars thinking and the either-or simplicities favored by the American political process. At the same time, although it is unlikely that there will ever be many “atheists for Kuyper,” secularists might look at him simply in terms of comparative intellectual history as an alternative to characteristic American assumptions regarding religion and public life. Even though secularists do not share the underlying assumptions of Kuyper's outlook, they might nonetheless share his recognition
that faiths (whether secular or religious) shape understanding, his concern for equity, and hence his regard for the merits of taking religious outlooks seriously in any discussion of public diversity.

Although there may be signs
of change, American society is still caught in the polarized pattern that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. At one pole is a liberal culture that includes most of mainstream academia and entertainment and that is self-consciously pluralistic in the inclusivist sense, but is also overwhelmingly secular, so that it does not have much of a way to deal with religious diversity in public life. At the other pole is a predominantly religious, conservative, popular political culture that does not often have a well-thought-out concept of pluralism that would provide equitable roles for non-Christian and secularist viewpoints in the public domain. Partisans of each side regard the other side as essentially imperialistic. Secular liberals believe their freedoms are threatened by a conservative Christian takeover. Conservative Christians believe that secularists are excluding their Christian views and using big government to expand their own dominion. The fears of each side are exaggerated, but those fears have some basis in a society that does not have well-developed traditions or conceptions of pluralism that can embrace a wide range of both religious and nonreligious viewpoints.

Part of the problem is that Christian conservatives and secularized liberals each often act as though they see themselves as the proper heirs to the mid-twentieth-century consensus. Conservatives view that consensus as more Christian than it
was. Secular liberals today may deny that they advocate any sort of consensus outlook, since they are open to embracing ethnic and racial differences. Yet, when it comes to thinking about religiously based differences, they are likely to sound like midcentury consensus thinkers, who believed that views congenial to secular naturalism were the only ones that should be taken seriously in the public domain. To the extent that they would insist on such a rule, they are in practice asking religious people to assimilate into a melting pot defined by naturalistic intellectual and cultural norms. Each side needs to recognize that neither a religiously based nor a naturalistically based consensus could ever be adequately inclusive.

At the same time that the Kuyperian heritage provides a starting point for thinking about how to take religious differences seriously, its emphasis on common grace also provides a rationale for addressing the troubling issue of how people of fundamentally different outlooks may listen to each other and work together, rather than polarizing around their differences. Politicized American evangelicalism and fundamentalism have rarely addressed this issue well in the past generation. Despite its American enlightenment heritage, which acknowledged a common creator and some shared human common sense, politicized evangelicalism has tended to speak only in terms of dichotomies, as though the only choices were between a fully Christian society and a wholly secular one. A Kuyperian outlook provides a basis for recognizing that there can be both radical differences in fundamental outlooks and also a basis for social and political cooperation, based on the God-given principle of common grace.

Since the 1980s
, there has been increasing awareness that religion is not going to go away as a major factor in public life. That reality became widely apparent soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when religion, especially Islam, emerged as a leading force in world politics. For Americans, there was no ignoring that reality after the events of 9/11. In the meantime, both Christianity and Islam were growing at remarkable rates in many parts of the world. In the United States, conservative Christianity, rather than fading away, became a major long-term feature of American politics. Some scholars even declared that in the twenty-first century we had entered a “post-secular age.”
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That assessment may prove to be an overstatement—it is hard to tell. One thing is clear, though. It no longer makes sense to maintain, as many of the best observers assumed at midcentury, that secularization is steadily and inevitably advancing, and that religion is receding as the world modernizes. By now there is no denying that the interrelationships among modernity, secularity, and religion are far more complex than that. All three of these may be advancing at the same time.

If we are in an era that can plausibly be called “post-secular,” then it is all the more urgent to be thinking carefully about the role of deeply held religious beliefs in the public domain, and about how order and civility can be maintained in society when people of many different “faiths,” both religious and secular, are striving to be heard and to have an influence. There is no going back to the 1950s, when a widely shared inclusivist faith was supposed to be a contributing factor in supporting a cultural consensus. Nor does it make sense to go back to, or
perhaps perpetuate, the mainstream approach of the 1980s, when many in the liberal cultural establishment viewed varieties of secularism as the only intellectually viable options.

One ideal for a healthy society would be that it sustained diverse, flourishing subcommunities that both retained their own identities and yet also participated in the mainstream public culture. Throughout its history, the United States has had many thriving subcommunities, especially ethnoreligious ones, which have produced citizens who have had the moral and personal qualities to become leading contributors to society. African American churches, nonethnic churches, and many other religious groups have often played similar roles. Yet, although the value of such communities has often been recognized historically, and such communities have often been seen as contributing to the health of the nation, the mainstream culture has at the same time come to be defined in a way that would undermine such communities and minimize their public roles. That was certainly true of the 1950s, even though it was an era when the public consensus culture was reputed to be much more friendly to religious outlooks than it is today.

During the past two decades, there has been increasing recognition of the need to address the problem of religious pluralism in relation to the public domain. The message here, in the light of looking at some of the roots of the problem, is simply that such discussions need to continue, especially in the nation's shared intellectual life. It is true that when it comes to strongly held religious differences, there may be some insoluble problems. Some religious discourse allows no room
for discussion with people of other outlooks. One irony in the present account is that, although it shows the long-term inadequacies of the American enlightenment's methods of dealing with religious difference, a pluralistic society still needs something like the enlightenment recognition that humans, despite their differences, share some beliefs in common. The enlightenment heritage, whatever its shortcomings, includes much that we all should value. A healthy society needs to be built on the basis of finding and cultivating those shared principles, even while honoring principled differences.

The most immediate practical application of what is here proposed would be that in public discussions there would not be prejudice against religiously based views simply because of their religious nature. People whose outlooks are shaped by religious perspectives might be expected to present their views through reasoned arguments that look for a common ground of widely shared concerns (such as the concern for equity in the present account). Yet there should be no assumption that outlooks reflecting trust in religious authority are second-class outlooks compared to those based on secular, naturalistic principles alone. Mid-twentieth-century outlooks still often assumed that there was a universal “objective reason” that
self-evidently ought to trump viewpoints that involved religious authority. Secular viewpoints therefore became the gold
standard for public discourse. That remained the case in the
next generations, and the practice was reinforced by the ideal
of the privatization of religion, as mainline Protestantism and
expressions of civil religion receded. Yet there should be no prima
facie assumption that purely naturalistic views
are superior to religiously based views. Each sort of view, naturalistic or religious, should have equal opportunity to be heard and evaluated on its own merits by others in the public domain.

One place where such issues might be fruitfully addressed would be in mainstream academia. Ideally, the diverse academy should provide a model and a training ground for learning how people of various faiths, secular or religious, might work together in a public setting while taking their differences seriously. University administrators and academic departments might see one of their roles as being referees ensuring that all responsible voices, including explicitly religious voices, get a hearing on equitable terms appropriate to a public setting. To some extent that is already happening, and by many measures diverse religious outlooks seem to be taken more seriously in mainline academia than was true a quarter-century ago.
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Furthermore, in recent decades both Roman Catholic and evangelical intellectual communities have been providing valuable insights on these issues, and hence rich resources from which persons of other outlooks might learn. Just to speak of my own Protestant side, it is important to underscore that evangelicalism is far more complex than the present account of the populist religious right might suggest. The populist side of the movement thrives on polarizing dichotomies and for the past generation has cultivated polarized approaches to
politics. But there has long been an evangelical left and also a
wide variety of politically moderate evangelicals who do not fit the culture-wars stereotype. Among the most important evangelical resources that have been developing in recent
years are its colleges, universities, and intellectual life. Due to its populist revivalist heritage, American evangelicalism often has been anti-intellectual or suspicious of any nuanced life of the mind. Yet, in the past generation, evangelicalism has been experiencing an intellectual renaissance notable especially for the cohort of excellent younger scholars. Evangelical colleges and universities have been thriving and have built outstanding faculties. These schools play important roles in strengthening
evangelical subcommunities while preparing their graduates
to participate in mainstream culture with understanding and with respect for views different from their own. Much of the thought at such schools is shaped, broadly speaking, by the Kuyperian tradition and its widely used motto, “the integration of faith and learning.” One area where evangelical scholars in such schools and at other universities have been providing intellectual leadership has been in exploring how their particular religious faiths might be related to a genuine
pluralism in the public sphere. Some of the best resources for addressing such issues may come from within the many-faceted
evangelical community itself.
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