The Culture of Disbelief
Carter, Stephen L.
the Native American Church for taking peyote as part of a church ritual. The law in question, Justice Scalia reasoned, was not an act of anti-religious discrimination; it was merely intended to curb...
...Laws that require the teaching of "scientific creationism" alongside evolution are unconstitutional, he believes—not because those laws are religiously motivated, but because creationism is "at heart, an explanation for the origin of life that is dictated solely by religion...
...it was merely intended to curb drug use...
...Personhood, it turns out, is not the decisive issue, no matter what the Court conceded in Roe v. Wade (1973...
...He takes it as yet another piece of evidence that the dialogue between those with different ways of knowing can be morally fruitful: Because of this ability of the religions to fire the human imagination, and often the conscience, even of nonbelievers—as, for instance, the civil rights movement did—the religions should not be forced to disguise or remake themselves before they can legitimately be involved in secular political argument...
...And Carter, while he stops short of endorsing private school vouchers, insists that, if a voucher plan is enacted, it must not exclude religious schools...
...B ut that dispute is truly trivial compared to the one over abortion...
...Before the state can enforce any law inhibiting free exercise, Carter says, it should be made to show a "compelling interest"—a much higher standard than usually required to sustain regulation...
...His last chapter, called "Religious Fascism," is largely an attack on Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, which he calls "an un-Christian effort to use religion as a force for fostering division and hatred rather than one for fostering brotherhood and healing...
...CI The American Spectator February 1994 91...
...Patrick's Day parade included gay groups...
...A majority also favor the continued legality of abortion, and Carter is one of them...
...That does not make the explanation irrational...
...The premise of neutrality that underlies this reasoning is one Carter finds specious: / n The Culture of Disbelief, Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter argues that American "legal and political culture" is hostile to religion...
...In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the court affirmed sanctions against members of The ideal of neutrality might provide useful protection for religious freedom in a society of relatively few laws, one in which most of the social order is privately determined...
...The Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee a right to life—it guaranteesonly that life cannot be taken by the state without due process of law...
...Sexual abstinence for children is one moral rule Carter figures most of us can agree on...
...to public schools whose curricula contradict basic tenets of their students' faiths...
...What troubles Carter most about this particular controversy is the rhetoric of the creationists' opponents: words such as "deranged," "stupid," and "pea-brained...
...between the individual and the state, bulwarks against tyranny because they compete with the government for the citizen's allegiance...
...The Supreme Court has weakened the Free Exercise Clause in recent decisions, by affirming the rights it bestows only to the extent provided by other constitutional guarantees—of free speech, assembly, or equal protection of the laws...
...there are those for whom preaching abstinence amounts to preaching intolerance...
...That was the society the Founders knew...
...A sigh of relief goes up from reasonable people across the land, and the debate on where human life begins can continue in more polite tones, now that the point is moot...
...Theprospects for consensus on the matter are dim...
...Yet what are the consequences of argument in this case...
...It is to religious activism that we owe abolitionism and the civil rights movement, something liberals now conveniently forget when they decry the Religious Right's involvement in politics...
...In such a society, it is enough to say that the law leaves religion alone...
...Carter's is a Tocquevillean idea of sects as "independent mediating institutions" Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...He points to recent Supreme Court decisions that violate the spirit of the First Amendment religion clauses...
...To those who scoff that children won't listen to such preachment, he counters that children are no more likely to listen to the lessons in multicultural tolerance which liberals favor...
...If the public schools want to prevent an exodus in that event, they might consider making themselves more congenial to religious families...
...Carter notes that a majority of Americans believe a fetus is a human being, a belief he traces ultimately to religion...
...Yet Carter insists that it is liberals who should be alarmed...
...Carter, who is a scholar of constitutional law, locates one great threat to religious freedom in the judiciary's misinterpretation of the First Amendment...
...Creationists refuse to make a distinction that much of the post-Enlightenment world takes for granted: between knowledge, the realm of science...
...Religion has been trivialized by the combined forces of an ever-expanding welfare state, jealous of any institution that challenges its influence on citizens' lives, and a philosophy of rationalism that denies divine authority as a source of factual or moral knowledge—in a word (Carter's word), by liberalism...
...This leaves the religious individual free to communicate his beliefs, but does not necessarily protect religious communities in the practice of those beliefs, including worship...
...25 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA 90 The American Spectator February 1994 murder could be motivated by a desire to observe the Fifth Commandment...
...Carter apparently believes there are no questions on which well-meaning dialogue will not bring compromise...
...and belief, the realm of religion...
...He points out that "the creationist rejection of evolution theory rests on a nontrivial hermeneutic and a rational application of it to the evidence...
...The court forgot this when it ruled in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) that any statute for which a religious motivation can be inferred amounts to government sponsorship of religion...
...Carter emphatically rejects such a test...
...Permitting parents to pull their kids out of sex education and science instruction points logically to letting them out of public education altogether...
...Most importantly, they serve as "autonomous sources of moral understanding," often in defiance of prevailing values...
...He sees a harbinger of such meddling in New York City's unsuccessful attempt to withhold a permit from the Ancient Order of Hibernians unless their St...
...At root, the dispute is a clash of epistemologies...
...and to a mainstream press that treats religiosity as at best a harmless "hobby" and at worst a dangerous aberration...
...Yet along with this accommodation by the government—"a form of affirmative action" for religion—Carter calls for sacrifice from the religious groups themselves...
...Can Carter really believe that it is only extremists who will not be satisfied by abstract talk about "epistemic diversity...
...Secular liberals, Carter admits, share the blame for Robertson's success because they have dismissed the fears of religious people about the state of our society, and he calls on liberals to practice a true "politics of inclusion...
...Here I think he seriously underestimates the determination of the opposition...
...To preserve their autonomy, they must back out of the "Faustian bargain" of privileged tax status, lest the government use it to influence their theology and practices...
...The hermeneutic happens to be that of Biblical inerrancy, a principle of fundamentalism...
...Classroom prayer is constitutionally out of the question, Carter thinks, since it is by nature coercive, but what most religious parents really want from the schools is not proselytizing but values education...
...if they are not, it is because they fail to understand religion's vital function in a democracy...
...This is the standard codified in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (a response to the Smith decision), which the author endorses and which President Clinton signed into law last November...
...Those who disagree are increasingly forced—not by any "demagogue" but by the nature of the questions themselves—to choose one side or the other...
...After all, a law against THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF: HOW AMERICAN LAW AND POLITICS TRIVIALIZE RELIGIOUS DEVOTION Stephen L. Carter Basic Books /328 pages...
...It is difficult, however, to see how the law can protect religious freedom in the welfare state if it does not offer exemptions and special protection for religious devotion...
...Carter's solution is that parents who believe their children are being taught untruths by the public schools should be free to withdraw their children from parts of the curriculum—not merely on factual grounds but on moral ones...
...The Establishment Clause, Carter reminds us, was written to protect church from state, not vice versa...
...nterpretation of the First Amendment is also at issue in the many battles over public school curricula...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
