Stephen L. Carter's The Culture of Disbelief: How Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion
Laarman, Peter
THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF: How LAW AND POLITICS TRIVIALIZE RELIGIOUS DEVOTION, by Stephen L. Carter. Basic Books, 1993. 328 pp. $25.00. Stephen Carter is dismayed that liberal culture doesn't...
...WINTER • 1994 • 147...
...But leave this contradiction aside...
...But Carter's main complaint isn't about the law...
...Carter does not, and so his book finally demeans the very faith it set out to defend...
...This explains why liberals will usually mistrust a one-sided emphasis on personal morality, as against social morality: they see it as evidence of shallowness and sanctimony in religious practice...
...Trivialization alert: the interview was taped inside New York's Riverside Church...
...For this reason, Carter writes, the courts are wrong when they treat religious freedom as though it were a mere variant of protected speech and refuse to sanction the religious practices that express the content of belief...
...A very scrupulous Yale theologian—Kathryn Tanner— recently devoted the bulk of her book on The Politics of God to showing that, despite the sorry history, Christian beliefs do not logically have to result in support for established social hierarchies, complicity in injustice, and quiescence in the face of evil...
...And while they may have grown cynical through the years about the prospects for justice and mercy in this society, most liberals are still not likely to deny a hearing to religious women and men who point to deeds of justice and mercy as abiding marks of faithfulness to God...
...On the other hand, those perfervid preachers and priests who would have Americans believe that God is really, really exercised about gay rights or rap music are apt to be dismissed by the liberal mainstream as meddlesome frauds...
...He just doesn't think it is necessary or appropriate to attack the religious source of these designs...
...they may feel—perhaps with too little justification—that these matters were settled long ago, and that God lost...
...Nevertheless, Carter lays all the fault on the liberal side of this impasse...
...Although Carter titles one of his chapters "Christian Fascism," he stoutly maintains that the "fear of religiously motivated automatons doing in politics what their leaders command" is a "delusion...
...For whatever reason, Carter will not acknowledge that the kind of religion he accuses liberal culture of trivializing has already made itself trivial from the perspective of prophetic faith...
...If there is a double standard here, as Carter 146 • DISSENT Books asserts there is, that double standard is solidly grounded in the tradition itself...
...As Carter correctly observes, WINTER • 1994 • 145 Books Bible-believing Protestants are in many ways the last rationalists, only they construct their "rational" edifice on the foundation of God's special revelation in the Bible...
...One leaves Carter's book wishing that its author had been able to grasp the crucial difference between the kind of religion that can shake an unjust society to its foundations and the trifling kind that concerns itself with window dressings at the charnel house...
...Savvier critics of our culture—notably Harold Bloom—are astonished by the pull that religion continues to exercise in national life...
...Carter loads his argument, however, by insisting that liberals' routine acceptance of a religiously grounded voice in public policy debates doesn't really count as long as the voice has its source in the religious mainstream: that is, in the National Council of Churches, the U.S...
...The legal section of the book reviews a number of cases in which Carter believes the courts have improperly constrained the free Books exercise of religion...
...If liberals dare to say that the "God talk" of religious believers is mere gibberish, or that it is narrow minded, or that it is inappropriate in a particular policy context, they are guilty of contempt, and they may also be provoking a fearsome backlash among the righteous that will smite liberalism itself...
...But many liberals will be, tongue-tied when it comes to religion...
...Liberals recall that God is notably unmoved by displays of self-satisfied piety, and that what God desires most in human beings is deeds of justice and mercy...
...In The Culture of Disbelief, Carter, the author of Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby and a professor of law at Yale, has actually written two loosely linked essays: an inconclusive ramble through legal issues affecting religion has been sandwiched between two shorter sections that make up a second, polemical essay...
...while exploiting the poor and marginalized in their midst...
...Such believers treat the Bible as a compendium of direct answers to pressing social questions...
...one cannot, therefore, take issue with their politics without taking issue with their religion...
...He notes that it is in the nature of religion to gather adherents into communities where belief and action complement one another...
...Most readers will agree on this point, though some may wonder whether the courts have erred as often as Carter claims...
...American legal theory has always distinguished between freedom of belief, which must not be infringed, and freedom of action, which may be balanced against other public goods...
...Religious motivation should never be an issue...
...Lacking an ear for biblical religion, Carter apparently never notices that the Bible reserves its harshest judgments for those who cry "Lord...
...First, he thinks liberals are unduly alarmed by the declared intention of the Christian Coalition and similar organizations to take control of school boards, city councils, state legislatures and the Republican National Committee in order to implement what is politely referred to as a "pro-family" agenda...
...Lord...
...Peter Steinfels, the religion editor of the New York Times, praised Carter's "well-honed arguments" in his Saturday column...
...Thanks to its prophetic inheritance, the liberal culture that Carter wishes to upbraid knows this difference well...
...In fact, Carter thinks liberals should resist the policy designs of Robertson & Co...
...And dismissal is the appropriate response...
...Further, one might say that once conservatives (or liberals, for that matter) have introduced religious warrants for their policy proposals, they have to expect the debate to turn on the validity of those warrants...
...Carter's real theme is liberal culture's presumed trivialization of religion per se, not liberal misgivings about the Christian right's political program...
...His complaint has hit a nerve...
...Although there is no necessary connection between, say, Christian faith and illiberal outcomes, Carter should at least allow liberals to observe that the historical record has not been encouraging...
...But this is precisely the reason why American liberals rightly disdain the strident, superficial moralizing of the Robertsons and Falwells while revering the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...After all, as the Book says, God is not mocked...
...According to Carter, such judicial refusals serve to trivialize faith by disregarding the need for religion to fashion a sphere of "autonomy" out of the materia of its core beliefs...
...According to Carter, what was objectionable about the 1992 Republican Convention was what Robertson and Buchanan proposed, not the fact that they used religious rhetoric to buttress their proposals...
...One wishes Carter could see as clearly as Tanner does that the burden of proof here must rest with believers...
...Carter altogether misses the point that the values of many if not most American liberals— "secular" or otherwise—have been shaped in part by the old biblical criteria...
...Catholic Conference, the American Jewish Congress, and so on...
...Further, some liberals have strongly objected to the efforts of outspoken Catholic prelates—notably New York's John Cardinal O'Connor—to suppress abortion rights...
...Carter has two separate quarrels with what he takes to be standard liberal responses to the activism of politically conservative religious folk, whether Catholic or Protestant...
...Despite the absence of common epistemological assumptions, Carter says liberals must still take responsibility for initiating sympathetic "dialogue" with those who base their positions on God's will...
...He cites a case involving Native Americans who were denied the use of peyote in their ceremonies and cases in which Jehovah's Witnesses were made to accept blood transfusions against the tenets of their faith...
...Stephen Carter is dismayed that liberal culture doesn't take religion seriously...
...And Carter was granted a softball celebrity interview with MacNeilLehrer's Charlayne Hunter-Gault...
...Moreover, the fact that they and the Bible believers inhabit separate epistemological worlds tends to make any useful "dialogue" about values exceedingly hard to bring off...
...If he did, we would finally be getting somewhere, because the biggest failure of Carter's book is his complete obliviousness to the roots of the liberal critique in biblical culture...
...This is a peculiar charge to be making in the American context...
...It's about contemporary liberal culture and the way it allegedly trivializes faith by denying religion a respectful hearing...
...That's Carter's aim, but the execution is flawed...
...This is an old story, but Carter thinks he detects an ominous new readiness among judges to circumscribe religious action...
...Why all the fuss...
...Carter will not even allow liberals to assume that religion has a built-in tropism toward conservatism in politics...
...On Carter's own reading of the nature of religion, however, there is no way to make a clean distinction between beliefs and policy prescriptions...
...The courts, argues Carter, should be required to apply the "compelling interest" standard before permitting the state to interfere with unconventional religious practices...
...A likely explanation is that some members of the liberal establishment— including Stephen Carter himself and probably also our Southern Baptist president—are bothered in equal part by the political power of the religious right and by the cynicism of liberals who would use the antics of demagogues in preachers' robes to dismiss all religion as a delusion or worse...
...But of course he can't: he's much too fixated on the insensitivity of secular liberals to see that the anguished social legacy of Christianity could even be a serious issue...
...One wonders just how Carter can be so sanguine on this point, since a major contention of the book is that liberal culture has no choice but to accommodate religious rhetoric in the public square or else enraged believers will rise up and dismantle the structures of liberal democracy itself...
...For Carter, liberals must still be deeply hostile to faith because they have been up in arms over the Christian right's effort to flex its muscles in the policy arena...
...Bill Clinton read the book while on vacation in Martha's Vineyard and raved about it afterward to a group of religious leaders in Washington...
...Elsewhere, he adds that there is "no reason to presuppose" that the religious Americans who would enter a newly opened public square "will advocate positions that are inimical to American freedom...
...Carter thinks he can salvage a legitimate role for religion in public life while still contesting the politics of the religious conservatives...
...To this Carter might reply that the standards to which Christianity is being held accountable are themselves drawn from a Judaic root...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
