The Summer 2005 Wilson Quarterly discusses the article “Church Meets State” by Mark Lilla, in The New York Times Book Review (May 15, 2005):
[T]he Founding Fathers and other Anglo-American thinkers saw religion as an important support that would help form new citizens by teaching self-reliance and good moral conduct. But they “shared the same hope as the French lumičres: that the centuries-old struggle between church and state could be brought to an end, and along with it the fanaticism, superstition, and obscurantism into which Christian culture had sunk.” The Founding Fathers gambled that the guarantee of liberty would encourage the religious sects’ attachment to liberal democracy and “liberalize them doctrinally,” fostering a “more sober and rational” outlook. The idea, says Lilla, was to “shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith.”
These hopes don’t appear to very close to reality today. Christianity appears to be more faith-based than ever before. Many of the biggest cultural issues of Christianity today have little to do with reality — consider the loudest voices on evolution, stem-cell research, and Terri Schiavo, for example.
Even worse, there are very disturbing examples of what happens when liberal religion fails:
A similar collapse of theological liberalism occurred in Weimar Germany after the devastation of World War I. Defeated Germans abandoned the liberal-democratic religious Center for a wild assortment of religious and political groups as they searched for a more authentic spiritual experience and a more judgmental God. So far, says Lilla, the most disturbing manifestations of the American turn—the belief in miracles, the rejection of basic science, the demonization of popular culture—have occurred in culture, not politics. But Americans are right to be vigilant about the intrusion of such impulses into the public square, because “if there is anything . . . John Adams understood, it is that you cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers.”
Contemporary America is not Weimar Germany, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to the mistakes of Weimar Germany in order to avoid making similar mistakes ourselves. John Adams was certainly right that liberal democracy cannot endure so long as religious believers, always the majority in America, do not practice liberal habits of mind. Ultimately, religion must promote these liberal habits because religion is such a pervasive influence on people’s lives.
Instead of that, though, many of the largest and fastest-growing religious groups in America do just the opposite. They denigrate science, ignore critical thinking, oppose skepticism, and insist that neither “True Christianity” nor “True American Patriotism” are compatible with liberal thinking. They argue that only conservatism can be allowed, but what exactly are they seeking to “conserve” in the first place? What traditions and values do they want to preserve and why?
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