The Christian as citizen:

...The marginal note reads, "Religion creates a barrier, it is a brake...

...He knew that in modern societies whatever the theological claims of any of the churches, from the point of view of the wider society a church could only constitute one among many groups...

...It can prepare free citizens who will resist the servitude of mass democratic despotism...

...Secondly, political action, characterized by a plurality of actors, is unpredictable...

...Eternal vigilance of citizens vis a vis the state is a necessary means to protect themselves against abuses by their protectors...

...There are dangers lurking in democratic capitalism, dangers, I would note, that Tocqueville thought not merely remotely possible but more likely to prevail...

...Its grand achievement is to have formed a human community beyond national societies...

...This latter founds a solidarity in faith and love with brothers and sisters not of our native blood, culture, economic or political system...

...Yet in two long correspondences, one with Arthur de Gobineau, his former research assistant and chef de cabinet when Tocqueville was foreign minister of France, the other with Mme...

...Sophie Swetchine, a presider over a leading Paris salon, Tocqueville lays bare his complaint against Christianity for neglecting attention to the moral duty of citizenship...

...Reeves paints a disquieting picture of where we have come as a nation since the 1830s...

...My first proposition is that Christianity has not adequately adumbrated or embodied the moral ideal of the citizen in its social ethics or popular preaching...

...Thus in his Memoirs of the 1848 Revolution, he disdainfully describes his fellow cabinet member, Falloux, as one who "was only seeking a road through all our revolutions by which he could bring the Catholic religion back to power...

...It is my conviction that we need a revived sense of the public church, neither narrowly and divisively sectarian nor established...

...I fear that unless the churches are concerned for the common weal of and in concert with all citizens of this republic, we will not be saved as Americans from eventually having to make our own an epitaph for the Ancient Regime which Tocqueville quotes in his classic on that topic: "Our government (and our society) resembles the mass for the dead: there is no gloria (since there is nothing to sing about), no credo (since there is absolutely nothing that we believe in common), a long offertory (where much money is collected) and in the end no benediction...

...No reader of Reeves's thoughtful commentary could avoid asking with the senator: who speaks now in America for the public interest...

...Swetchine, he specifies what he wanted preached: "I want them to impress upon men's minds that each owes himself first of all to this collective being [in the context of Tocqueville's thought this means society and not primarily the government or the state...

...As Arendt puts it, "What was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it," a fellow human endowed with dignity...

...the breakdown of old values and habits of the heart and their replacement by laws, rules and guards...

...On the other, the state is meant to be subordinate to society...

...It is possible to see Tocqueville as a great nineteenth century exponent of what has been recently called, "democratic capitalism" - what he himself referred to as a commercial or trading democracy, just as his great contemporary Karl Marx was the master expositor of the socialist idea...

...Far from advocating a servile obedience, the French statesman came perilously close to encouraging civil disobedience to the regime of Napoleon III on explicitly religious grounds...

...It will entail as well acceptance of civility, pluralism, freedom, and respect for those who dissent from our particularist confessional views...

...In them, rather than directly in and through the churches, they make available the presence of Christian citizenship to the polity...

...One clear implication of Walzer's Tocquevillian argument here is that, were Christianity to take seriously the duty of active citizenship as part of the Christian moral ideal, it would urge on all church members and not just its spiritual elites what it used to enjoin through its former specialized Catholic action strategy for influencing the public order...

...One grounding for a mediated use of "secular warrant" when the Christian and the churches participate and make their case in public life will be rooted in this sense of citizenship and the civility appropriate to it as autonomous moral ideals...

...On their part, the Old and New Testament ideals of the Covenant can serve as public, if secularized, models in political life and citizenship of making and keeping promises...

...To Mme...

...Morever, Tocqueville could face with some equanimity, if also with trepidation, the emergence and eventual expansion of this form of modern commercial democracy only if religion existed as a public force to counteract and neutralize the institutional logic ingredient in this form of polity...

...She notes that in this condition of plurality, entering into and acting in public life has about it a quality that is inevitably irreversible...

...If forgiveness as a public act, as in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address or acts of amnesty, does not entirely erase past action, it promises new possibility to a polity beyond mere conflictual recrimination...

...The first mitigates, to some extent, the sorrow of the irreversibility of action, the second lessens unpredictability...

...If, as Richard Reeves suggests, we have become a nation which no longer shares the view that a public religion is necessary for the survival of republican institutions, it may be already too late in the day...

...THESIS #1: Christianity lacks an adequate moral ideal of citizenship...

...Finally, Christianity can contribute through its foundational symbols of a people gathered together in justice vivid symbols of community so that the classic modern triad of liberty, equality, and community not remain skewed by futile attempts to understand liberty and equality in purely procedural terms without any regard to the quality of vision and life in the community grounded in some commonly embodied habits of the heart...

...Alexis de Tocqueville might be the most helpful of such critics because he was so clear about what he had in mind when he accused Christianity of neglecting to delineate the moral ideal of citizenship...

...On the one hand, this way of grounding citizenship provides no protection against a despotic majority...

...They are committed to 'business of a public character' but not always to the same piece of business or kind of business as are the authorities...

...That this was neither a call to servile obedience nor a falsely political religion should be clear from the remarks of disdain against the petty bourgeois Christianity - a marriage of hypocrisy and comfort - that began to flourish under Louis Napoleon: "I am always tempted to shout at them: rather than be Christians of this kind, be pagans with pure conduct, proud of your souls and with clean hands...

...Religion is a brake precisely by being counter-cultural to the institutional thrust and logic of commercial democracy, a barrier to the dehumanizing and anti-libertarian tendencies ingredient in modern democratic capitalism...

...For some of these critics, Christians are suspect on issues relating to the temporal order because of their other-worldliness...

...Their complaint has been that Christianity has not been conducive to good citizenship...

...He frequently objected, in his classic, LAncien Regime, and elsewhere, that the French clergy fell back on an emphasis on purely private morality, the virtues of private honesty and decorum in everyday life and family, as its main moral message...

...At times he came close to despairing of the church taking its citizen's role seriously...

...Arendt suggests, in this context, that Christianity can contribute to the ideal of citizenship both the possibility of forgiveness and of making and keeping promises...

...When these fail they sing the Te Deum for the new victors...

...In a ringing speech to the Chamber of Deputies in France in 1844 Tocqueville warned his compatriots of "the most detestable of all human institutions, a political religion, serving the government and helping to oppress men instead of preparing them for freedom...

...It is undeniable that there is a possible and perennial tension between Christianity and citizenship...

...However real the dangers of an overly and uncritically enthusiastic citizenship might be, I want to attend, in a her-meneutic of suspicion of our own behavior, primarily to that persistent litany of criticism voiced by critics of Christianity from Roman times, through its classic statement by Machiavelli and Jean Jacques Rousseau down to more recent critics such as Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt...

...Arendt notes two qualities of public action in a situation characterized by a plurality of actors in interaction, none of them totally authors of the consequences, often unforeseen and unintended, of public policy...

...As Tocqueville put it in Ancien Regime: "So wrong is it to confound independence with liberty, there is nothing less independent than a free citizen...

...He despised the self-seeking opportunism of so many of the French Catholic party who used the public order to further their own narrow religious interests at the expense of the public good...

...Finally, with its fine intuition of all of humanity as, in some implicit sense, part of the body of Christ, it can protect against atomized views of the individual...

...Psychology has replaced religion, yielding a therapeutic society which does not know how to produce Tocqueville's "blind sacrifice and instinctive public virtues...

...It will too easily coopt virtues or manipulate them to serve its own ends...

...And yet he knew that if religion does not take its citizenship role seriously not only is the republic in danger - since there is no institutional mooring for a set of habits of the heart which might counteract the vices ingredient in democratic capitalism - but religion itself would lose its vitality and moral authority...

...The duty of the good Christian citizen is to abate the evils of bad government by any and all means that conscience may suggest...

...Only if religion serves in this way as the first of our political institutions would we avoid the typical product of modernity which Tocqueville characterizes in L'Ancien Regime as "self-seekers, practicing a narrow individualism and caring nothing for the public good...

...Who" - the senator asked plaintively - "speaks in America for the broader public interest...

...In his book, The Machiavellian Moment, J.G...

...that each is responsible for what happens to this being, and that each, according to his wisdom is obligated to work continually for its well-being and to care that it submit only to beneficial, respectable and legitimate authority...

...It will be all the more dangerous if the churches come to share this shallow view...

...One difference between the public church as the first of our political institutions in Tocqueville's terms and a divisive sectarianism in public is the acceptance by the first of the moral legitimacy of citizenship as an active idea...

...A fortiori there should be nothing less independent than a free Christian citizen...

...In short, religion is a political institution inasmuch as it produces a certain kind of character necessary for public life...

...In one column he lines up under this rubric, three phrases: egoism, cupidity, and pride...

...Finally, some critics, such as Hannah Arendt, speak of an anti-political bias implied in espousing the impossible ideal of the Sermon on the Mount which can never be the sufficient basis for public and historically contingent societal justice, order, peace and liberty...

...He refers to it as a pluralist concept of citizenship, a citizenship mediated, as Tocqueville also argued, through associations acting in the public interest...

...What kind of citizen would we need to stem this tide of self-interest, if stem it we can...

...The ideal of citizenship gives direction to the appropriate posture of Christians as citizens and the fitting response of the churches as citizens to public participation and life...

...The duties of men among themselves as well as their capacity as citizens, the duties of citizens to their fatherland, in brief, the public virtues, seem to me to have been inadequately defined and considerably neglected within the moral system of Christianity.'' It should be clear that Tocqueville's main concern was with the demise of public virtues, an eclipse he argued was inevitable if either (1) religion declined or (2) on its part, religion neglected attention to its role in society - its role, it should be noted, as citizen rather than as charismatic community or bearer of particular revelation...

...It supports compromises and governments at the same time...

...In one of his chapter headings, Reeves sums up this transition to a therapeutic-technological society in the catch phrase, "From Puritan Republic to Selfish Democracy...

...For the good of both the government and the church, he rejoiced that in America religion and its ministers exercised only an indirect influence over politics...

...We lack a coherent developed Christian theory of citizenship...

...The preoccupation of Christians with a Jerusalem on high tempers their energies for the struggle for rough justice, liberty and dignity in the polis here below...

...Pocock remarks that the saints always feel some unease in the earthly Jerusalem...

...Tocqueville realized full well the difficulty for Christians or churches to leam this lesson of citizenship and civility in a public conversation they do not uniquely control...

...Liberty cannot be established without morality nor morality without faith.'' This formula entails much more than the classic utilitarian arguments for religion in society...

...First, "it tells us nothing about the political and moral dimensions of citizenship...

...My third and final contention will be that the ideal of citizenship has rightful autonomy as a moral goal in such wise that it, in turn, mediates and shapes the appropriate public engagement of Christians as citizens and the fitting response of the churches to public participation and life...

...He championed the separation of church and state and admired a free Catholicism wherever he found it...

...All too easily politics can displace religion or become an alternative civic idolatry...

...Again, there are well-founded fears of narrow patriotism, uncritical nationalism, and the collapse of Christianity into particular cultural forms, with a concomitant loss of both the transcendent reference to the Lord and Judge of all nations, including our own, and of that universality of community which must typify a catholic sensibility of the whole of humanity as, in some sense, the body of Christ...

...Indeed, he attributed the resurgence of religion in France under the July monarchy precisely to the severing of connections between religion and regime...

...Thus, in the very first pages of Democracy in America he writes that religion is "to purify, to regulate and to restrain the excessive and exclusive taste for wealth" which he noted as a tendency in a commercial democracy...

...The key to seeing in depth what this argument means lies in another justly famous passage in Democracy in America: "Liberty is the daughter of the mores [in French, les moeurs and in the felicitous translation of Henry Reeve, "habits of the heart''], rather than of institutions [of government], while habits of the heart derive ultimately from religion...

...He entertained nothing but scorn for Montalembert and the Catholic Party for their self-interest and opportunism in selling out to Napoleon III...

...I would go beyond Tocqueville to cite three other contributions of Christianity to citizenship...

...The alacrity with which the Catholic leaders allied themselves to Napoleon III must have been a particularly bitter pill for one whose principal aim in entering politics, as he wrote to his friend Corcelle in 1843, was to foster the reconciliation of "the liberal spirit and the spirit of religion," a reconciliation that was essential if France was to emerge as a modern democracy...

...Citizens should obey the laws and do their duty to the nation because they are the recipients of benefits only the state can give...

...Therefore, "the citizen is not primarily bound to the authorities at all but to his fellow citizens...

...The first is a passive and servile notion of citizenship...

...The reason that religion is the first and foremost of our political institutions is that only a non-established but also non-privatized religion can institutionalize and engender those steady habits of public concern and public participation that create a free citizenry of the republic...

...In an important set of essays on the theory of citizenship the political philosopher, D. W. Brogan, raises the question of a distinctively Christian contribution to the moral ideal of citizenship...

...And yet the rich meaning of Tocqueville's claim that religion is the first of our political institutions forces us to delve even deeper...

...This litany hardly constitutes a celebration...

...He thought that such self-serving pursuit of narrowly conceived goods, even religious goods, was no different, from the viewpoint of the ideal of citizenship, than the self-seeking pursuit of personal wealth or power...

...Most people are familiar with the formula of his famous argument which he originally derived from conversation with the Presbyterian minister, Rev...

...a care to make promises in public one only truly intends to keep and to communicate a firm intention toward fidelity to the good of one's fellow citizens...

...He had seen too close at hand the awful prostitution of religion in successive alliances of the altar and throne in the Ancien Regime, the First Empire, the Bourbon restoration and, most galling to him, under Louis Napoleon...

...In a free and pluralistic society, the state cannot be uniquely or primarily entrusted with something so central as the task of forming national character...

...that indifference with respect to this collective being is not permissible, still less making of indifference a kind of flabby virtue which enervates some of the noblest instincts we have been given...

...In a separate column he juxtaposes the term religion...

...Tocqueville, theorist of religion and society, statesman and - appropriately labeled as such by a major commentator - "Christian moralist,'' will serve us as a guide for our reflection on this question...

...In this context I want to tease out and systematize Tocque-ville's argument in Democracy in America about the distinctive and positive contribution of Christianity to citizenship...

...In dealing in his book, Citizenship Today, with the issue of the obligation of French Christians to oppose their government's war in Algeria, Brogan asserts the need for "the acceptance of the idea that a Christian citizen has more duties than and different from those that the state defines and demands...

...Walzer notes two corollaries of this Tocquevillian notion of citizenship through an active associational life...

...A proper appreciation of the real, if limited, human good of citizenship in the active shaping of the communal destiny is impossible if Christianity, as Arendt claims, involves "the degradation of politics into a means to obtain an allegedly 'higher end.' " Politics and citizenship can not be subordinated into mere means without losing their intrinsic purposes, excellences and goods...

...dangers, in his view, which were ingredient in the very institutional logic of this form of polity and not just because of the personal moral weaknesses of people who lived under such a form of government...

...Last year, the political journalist, Richard Reeves, published a book, American Journey, in which he retraces the travels of Tocqueville and raises anew his earlier question about democratic citizenship in America...

...Simultaneously with church membership, the Christian as citizen is called to an active engagement in the affairs of the republic by joining and truly participating in at least one association, besides the church, concerned with the public interest...

...The senator complained that the arsenal of monies which financed his opposition was amassed from narrow-visioned, single-interest Political Action Committees...

...I underscore this last phrase to make clear that Tocqueville knew that mere passive obedience to existing authority is not Christian public virtue...

...Walzer lodges three objections to this way of grounding the concept of citizenship...

...In a pluralistic society, this will entail the constitutional or customary separation of church and state...

...In a seminal essay, "The Concept of Citizenship," Michael Walzer distinguishes three sources for the grounding of the duty of citizenship...

...I have done so in order to respond to the genuine crisis of citizenship most thoughtful observers of American life have noted...

...Politics remains an art and a risk rather than a science...

...The second corollary is that "citizenship (as a moral choice rather than a legal status) is possible only if there are other groups than the state within the state...

...These associations in the public interest, in turn, are the places where Christians exercise the virtues of citizenship...

...Clearly his is not a call for some Erastian political religion manipulated for the purposes of the regime...

...The lack of complete fit between religion and politics flows from several fears on the part of Christians...

...They wear their mantle of citizenship with some ambiguity...

...Since he saw that total identification with a private group is always fatal to public life, he took every opportunity to berate his fellow Catholics for behaving as though they were members of a separate group with its own principles, leaders, and interests unrelated to any wider set of principles, leaders, and interests which might link them to their fellow citizens...

...For the moral authority of religion to be publicly available to the wider society, it needed, in turn, a society rich in associations, "those large free schools where all the members of the community learn the lesson of association...

...The sin is hated but the sinner, provided he truly repent of his unjustice, is pardoned...

...I would argue three fundamental theses about the relation between Christianity and citizenship...

...In its stead our people pursue self-fulfillment, getting ahead and moving on, the gratification of their immediate desires and needs...

...Note that what Tocqueville has in mind is not private virtue exercised in public roles (i.e., don't steal or lie in public office) but public virtue in the sense of culturally central and stably institutionalized habits of character which ground a willingness to care for and sacrifice for the public good...

...He cites with alarm Daniel Yankelovich's survey data which suggest that "we see the beginnings of an ethic built around the concept of duty to oneself in glaring contrast to the traditional ethic of obligation to others...

...Thus, in his very last unfinished book on the French Revolution he notes, "The clergy always behaves in this fashion...

...Because of the scale in size and complexity in the modern state, the citizen must delegate to others much of the active role of coordination and determination to a particular of the public good...

...He avers that "the nation I saw no longer shared the view that public religion was necessary for the survival of republican institutions...

...The second thesis maintains that Christianity has a positive contribution to make to the classic ideal of the active and critical citizen...

...The second moral ideal of citizenship is the classic Athenian notion of the active citizen according to which the citizen is duty bound to obey the laws of the polity because he or she had a direct hand in making them...

...Here I will draw on some ideas of Hannah Arendt in her modern classic, The Human Condition...

...The senator's lament can situate the urgency and genuine importance of raising the question of the relation between Christianity and citizenship...

...Passive obedience but not active engagement becomes the ideal...

...Its contribution will come from a penetrating understanding of Toqueville's famous dictum that religion - although it rightly takes no part directly in government and properly keeps clear of partisan entanglements - is the first and most important of our political institutions...

...James Richards of Auburn Seminary, during his journey to America...

...The ordinary citizen lacks both sufficient expertise and the time to be continuously determining public policy...

...Christianity and consequently its morality went beyond all political powers and nationalities...

...As he put it in a letter to Gobineau, "Because the French clergy emphasizes only private morality the nation at large has not been taught the duties of citizenship...

...THESIS #2: Christianity has a positive contribution to make to the moral ideal of citizenship...

...the emergence of administrative governmental centralization...

...All patriots are potential traitors...

...Religion serves as at best a loyal opposition to this form of polity by creating public participants in society with habits of the heart - with characters - antithetical to greed, egotistical individualism, the loss of excellence, and the eclipse of public virtue...

...In return for the pottage of a promise of Napoleon III to come to the aid of the temporal power of Pius IX and to guarantee the Catholic interest in a separate confessional school system in France, the Catholics remained silent about the destruction of a free press and parliamentary institutions or the eclipse of any habits of the heart which might urge public opposition and voice in the France of the Second Empire...

...I have used the writings and life of Tocqueville not for antiquarian or purely exegetical purposes but to distill from this student of religion in America a theory of Christian citizenship...

...By its transcendent reference and wider appeal to humanity it can restrain the power of the majority by appealing beyond an unjust or selfish majority to "humanity justice, reason and vested individual rights...

...While individual citizens might lack the energy, time or expertise for active involvement on a relatively continuous basis in the affairs of public life, they can invest some of their real time, energy, and expertise, in concert with others through associations, in exercizing active citizenship...

...Nothing short of this kind of moral ideal would join the argument of Tocqueville and other critics of Christianity when they complain that Christianity neglects to define the duties of Christians as citizens and incorporate these duties within the Christian moral code...

...Still others, following Rousseau, feel that Christians subscribe, in their theory at least, too much to the Stoic ideal of universal citizenship, espousing allegiance to the abstraction of the whole of humanity but showing a distinct apathia for the struggles of one's own political time, place and home...

...Throughout his American Journey, Reeves encounters the embodiment of the great Frenchman's worst fears for a commercial democracy: the rise of an industrial and military aristocracy with few checks on that "breathless cupidity" Tocqueville saw latent in America...

...I suggested that he could do worse than re-read Alexis de Tocqueville's two-volume classic, Democracy in America...

...and it is fully accepted only by joining other groups along with the state...

...In this view, the citizen's duty derives from gratitude for the liberties and other benefits which directly flow from the protection and benevolence of authority...

...He asked my friend for some classic work which might articulate the importance for democracy of citizens who could forsake their own interest, at least at times, to seek a more inclusive good...

...Public action often has tragic consequences and victims we cannot undo...

...Ruefully, he acknowledged that his own campaign funds were derived from a consortium of similarly narrow-interest lobbies...

...with a friend who recounted a request he had received from a progressive Democratic senator who had recently been re-elected in a close campaign...

...First, there is a legitimate distrust and distancing from the demonic charismatic potential inherent in politics...

...Forgiveness is premised always on a sense of the innate dignity of the human person...

...Again, it can provide that breadth of vision and community which, according to Tocqueville, democratic society does not characteristically encourage...

...THESIS # 3: The ideal of citizenship has a rightful autonomy as a moral goal in such a wax that it, in turn, legitimately mediates and shapes the appropriate posture of Christians as citizens and the fitting response of the churches as citizens to public participation and life...

...These dangers are enumerated for us on almost every page of Democracy in America: greed, envy, an individualism which disintegrates into egoism, the loss of a taste for excellence in the sense of the Greek concept of arete as well as the eclipse of public virtue...

...There are other ways in which Christianity has a positive and public contribution to make to citizenship...

...Tocqueville, the realistic political analyst and Christian moralist, would never allow himself the delusion of dreaming of institutions, laws or social systems so perfect that human beings would no longer have to be good...

...Brogan assumes that Christian citizenship must be more than mere obedience to the existing secular program...

...The moral ideal of citizenship is, itself, a contested notion...

...Instead, something like public spirit, public morality and, most importantly, public virtue are necessary if a republic is to survive...

...A STRIKING PASSAGE from the correspondence with Gobineau illuminates Tocqueville's twofold complaint that Christianity neglected to define the duties of individuals as citizens and to spell out their obligations to their country and failed, as well, to incorporate the duties of citizenship into the Christian moral code...

...His other two objections are quite close to Tocqueville's thought...

...Others note that throughout history the ordinary exegeses of Romans 13 and similar New Testament passages make a case for at best a dutiful citizenship, lacking enthusiastic commitments and autonomous initiative in the role...

...Seymour Drescher, one of the best secondary commentators on Tocqueville, cites in his book, Dilemmas of Democracy, a manuscript draft of Democracy in America in which Tocqueville set forth a schema under the rubric, "A commercial people...

...Walzer suggests a third grounding for the ideal of citizenship, one close to the Greek notion of the active citizen, shaping and participating in the defining and enacting of law for the common good but more suited to modern societies...

...John Updike, Rabbit is Rich I AM STILL under the spell of a conversation I had in December of 1982 in Washington, D.C...

...But it is important to remember that if Tocqueville accepted this form of polity as provisionally legitimate, he neither celebrated it ideologically nor approached it without profound fears and suspicion...

...It is my contention that a direct move from Christian ideals and symbols to public action, unmediated by a respect for the autonomous moral ideal of citizenship, is dangerous to our common life...