Divided We Stand

...When, in 1864, the papal encyclical Quanta Cura condemned as "insanity" the notion that liberty of conscience was a universal right, there were plenty of non-Catholics to sympathize with Pius IX...

...In many respects they have outlived them too, or outflanked them...

...The process went on in the fin-de-siècle shadow of a movement that argued religion shouldn't be accorded any authority, not even a hearing...

...For Irish (or German, or Polish) Catholics, the Bible was not their Bible, the creed was not their creed...

...Secularism had held that unreasoning faith would fade away, and that as religious fantasies waned they would be replaced by their opposite: reason...

...It may be that they lie delusively dormant only to erupt once more...

...That is why, in 1810, a Congress mindful of the public weal created a national postal service whose agents delivered mail seven days a week...

...so can consciences, which need to be protected from errant pressures...

...It began with the hit-or-miss compromises that drew papists to tuition-free secular education and had public schools making concessions in the area of religious instruction...

...This is no longer quite the case today, and Feldman 's self-allotted task is to show how we got from there to here...

...The background to the tectonic shift was less ideological than economic...

...And it is why states legislated common schools that would sustain a republican system against the threat of uneducated masses pulling every which way...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Justice Felix Frankfurter believed that young Americans must be taught what they have in common, not what made them different: "The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment...

...heedlessness and euphemism kept its progressive collapse from sight...

...It may be that the religious volcanoes only cease erupting when they become extinct...

...By the mid-1970s, Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter became the first modern President to announce himself born again in Christ...

...A string of court decisions has lately moved that relationship from indifference to neutrality to equipoise...

...The Furies, after all, antedate the gods...

...They taught common values, and that meant religious values...

...The Free Exercise Clause guaranteed that government would not stop citizens from worshiping or practicing their religion as they chose...

...That would be the God of your choice, of course...

...No morality, no society-shaping function...

...informal collaboration forged ahead...

...Concurrently, mainline religions were learning to brandish the social gospel, and to reconcile science and faith in allegorical interpretations of Scripture, more or less consistent with scientific and technological advances...

...The situation was further complicated by the 19th-century clash between Christianity and modern criticism, Christianity and modern science...

...Unskilled labor had to be educated, to assure its taking part in civic life...

...The wall between religion and the state was crumbling...

...Despite criticism from local religious leaders, the regime lasted until 1912...

...The late-18th-century debate over the Constitution was carried on in colonial and postcolonial societies where most people assumed God's law trumps man's law, and man's law conditions consciences according to the will of God—or the Prince who represents Him...

...Witness the contrast between the declining total number of books Americans purchase and the steeply rising sales of religious works now sold by chain stores, mass-market retailers and regular bookstores...

...Statutes defining what is licit or illicit rest largely on Christian values that, as one Senator put it in 1876, are "our history...

...Legislative sessions open with public prayers...

...especially godless Communism...

...On June 1,2005, the New York Times reported the Supreme Court unanimously supporting a new Federal law that required prison officials to accommodate their inmates' religious needs, even the needs of Satanists and white supremacists, including adherents of something called Asatru "that preaches that the white race needs to use violence and terrorism to prevail over the mud races...

...As science and pseudoscience jockeyed for attention and for funds, innocent noninitiates found it hard to tell one from the other...

...The Establishment Clause guaranteed that government would not compel anyone to support teachings or worship they disagreed with...

...Religion should not meddle in public affairs...

...The solutions to ongoing cacophonies that he presents at his book's end, however, are the least convincing part of a lucid and engaging text...

...That may be why, between 1926 and 1950, church membership nationwide grew nearly 60 per cent while the country's population increased by less than half that...

...First, tax funds were not supposed to buoy religious education...

...Some church membership, and some of the attendance, can be attributed to social habit and inertia...

...For the apostle Paul, there was neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female— all were one in Christ...

...A true republic, Feldman observes, "called for shared knowledge and common moral values," not just because both instilled sound democratic sense, but because they helped to forge an American identity...

...our written as well as our unwritten law...

...For Protestants, Catholics worshiped idols...

...Or the evolving tally of insinuating issues that decent folk are expected to recognize as pivotal: the death penalty, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, the right to life, gay marriage, stem cell research, and other battle cries...

...No religion, no morality...

...Presumably the same spirit prompted Congress, in 1954, to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and, in 1956, to designate as our national motto "In God We Trust...

...But that was not why many Catholics and some Protestants drew closer together...

...Then they could be used, as vouchers for example, as long as nonreligious institutions benefited too...

...By the 1960s and '70s, the nonnegotiable fundamentals of faith had morphed into something easier to market: "values" that allegedly could hold together diverse participants in the common American enterprise...

...Before long fundamentalists would appeal against the teaching of evolution in schools, commending a rival science of their own and demanding equal time for intelligent design, creationism and creation science...

...As Voltaire once tactfully pointed out, if God created us in his image, we've done the same to him...

...Places of worship catered to Christianity à la carte...

...But—and this is where Feldman 's argument takes flight—the deep divide in American life is not primarily over religious belief, it is over the role belief should play in politics and government—meaning, above all, the unwillingness of people to pay taxes in support of someone else's church, or any church...

...Now public funds should be used, directly or indirectly, to remedy iniquities or spur good causes...

...That was before diverse identities outmatched national unity...

...But their causes and their politics sounded increasingly like devices for snaring ballots into ballot boxes, or making resources flow from taxpayers ' pockets into sectarian coffers...

...As many imaginative participants in American public life can testify, if you call your fantasies religion, you can promote them tax-free...

...Meanwhile, the religio-political wrangle drags on...

...Government, evangelical fundamentalists now claimed, should be actively involved in promoting moral values inseparable from their faith-based inspiration...

...A government with no established (that is, budgeted or endowed) religion theoretically cannot collect taxes for, or allocate public funds to, religious activities...

...Religio is the bond that links members of a church or some other assembly, like a political party...

...That is why the First Amendment's opening passage declares: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

...no subsidies hidden or overt...

...or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press___' Along with life, liberty and property, belief was an unalienable right, and free speech was crucial to its expression...

...government should not try to enforce sectarian or majoritarian orthodoxies...

...Some, though, was a reaction to the relentless rise of godlessness...

...America's Third Great Awakening was in full swing," the author notes...

...Again in that faith-friendly atmosphere, what Feldman describes as a "creative misreading of the American past" retrospectively included Jews in the national project, and rewrote the American heritage as "Judeo-Christian...

...Our New Age recognizes no binding ties, only the loose reins of diversity that generate balkanized schools and balkanized values...

...Nor can it delegate officials to aid or interfere with them...

...Less innocent fundamentalists made it harder still...

...In fact, when traditional beliefs faded, they were often replaced by products of unreason...

...Every kind of religious practice must be tolerated, as long as it does not infringe on government's responsibility to keep the peace, enforce the laws, and guarantee the basic natural rights of others...

...Witness, too, the more than half of our population that claims active membership of mainstream churches—not counting those who belong to a wide range of sects...

...and the choice was getting broader...

...It should abandon neutrality because evangelical politics promoted not religion as such, but ethical values and enterprises grounded in nonsectarian affirmations of common causes: the family, for instance, or America's role in the world as a force for good...

...Leaving aside the fissile propensities of other religions, his extended essay is about fissiparous pieties, about how divisive conceptions of divinity have affected American society, and about our attempts to reconcile national unity with spiritual diversity...

...no Sunday laws, no tax exemption for churches, no state support for chaplains in legislatures, jails or in the military...

...Nondenominationally theistic Bible read ing helped to teach a Protestant morality that was shared by almost all, until the mid-19th century brought Catholic immigration in culturally significant numbers...

...Subversive scholars, and even bishops (though not American bishops) were attributing the biblical account of Genesis to Hebrew myth, intimating that logistical considerations demonstrated the incredibility of the story of Noah's Ark, and so on...

...Bible riots broke out in the 1840s and '50s, and Bible wars followed—not so much over issues of deep religious faith, but as part of a political, cultural and economic conflict between immigrants asserting their difference and nativists invested in American identity, American values, and the schools that were central to both...

...In courts, in schools and in political culture generally, the changing landscape of national identity extends freedom of subsidy and speech to institutions that may teach racism, empowerment, stress-reduction, or some other piffle du jour...

...Public schools were meant to sow the seeds of a distinctive American patriotic ideology...

...The framers of the Constitution intended the Establishment Clause to guard against taxation used to support religious teaching and other sectarian activities with which citizens might disagree...

...No wonder that, as Feldman tells us, "slowly, subtly, and with difficulty, Catholics came to see nonsectarianism as an American ideology that included them...

...In the push-me pull-you world of mazy legalisms, merger of church and state continued to be rejected...

...Thus in 1952 President Dwight D. Eisenhowerreaffirmed the crucial importance of religious faith, adding, "and I don't care which faith it is...

...No religious orthodoxy inimical to good science or other free inquiry...

...particularisms were there to be transcended...

...As with public schools, our prisons, mental institutions and similar public facilities may not deny inmates access to religious services or publications, or otherwise discriminate against extravagantly eccentric cults any more than against mainstream ones...

...Eugen Weber is a frequent NL contributor whose books· include The Western Tradition and A Modern History of Europe...

...Noah Feldman, who earned a doctorate in Islamic thought at Oxford and now teaches law at NYU, has already written about the religious, hence political, rifts in Islam.In Divided by God: America 's Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It (Fanai Straus Giroux, 306 pp., S25.00) he moves on to our own squalls and bickers to show how, despite the best efforts of the Founding Fathers, faith still operates less as a tie than as a factor of disjunction—a theme here argued with grim gusto...

...In 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became America's first Catholic President...

...Supreme Court decisions change with the times, and with the direction of political winds...

...That also is what Feldman 's book is about: divisions and accommodations that have existed since the country was founded...

...The First Amendment therefore concerns the liberty of conscience...

...Indifferent to authority and tradition, Darwinism suggested biological and geological alternatives to biblical revelations that left believers sputtering: "Leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I will allow you yours in the zoological gardens...

...It would be unjust to misquote Emerson's observation that the louder evangelicals touted their principles, the faster we counted our spoons...

...They sympathized yet more when, one generation later, Freud disparaged religion as "the most prominent precipitate of primeval experiences...

...Divine revelation is necessarily intolerant of contradiction...

...In that eclectic spirit, religious pluralism was good...

...We invoke God's help when taking oaths as witnesses or as public servants...

...Fundamentalism had risen in the aftermath of World War I to organize plainspoken believers around nonnegotiable "fundamentals" of the Christian faith threatened by implausible secularist notions that academics touted...

...Government was free to ignore Sunday observance, for example, if it clashed with equally or more beneficial activities...

...Tracing the fortunes of the First Amendment—its making, progress, conflicts, compromises, and sporadic resolutions—he lays out varying interpretations and tergiversations to demonstrate how we, or rather our courts, have managed to stretch the sense of the document and betray its spirit...

...It continued with growing state support for socially worthy enterprises: Catholic hospitals, orphanages, reformatories, homes for old soldiers as well as vagrant or destitute children, and industrial schools—all supported by local authorities before the coming of the welfare state...

...THE ORIGINAL INTENTION had been to protect state from church and church from state, by keeping the two separate...

...but places of schooling were harder to select, and sometimes more expensive...

...Feldman, who is sensible, tactful and a better writer than most, tries to tiptoe away from the present absurdities—possibly toward future imbroglios...

...Feldman agrees with Montesquieu that there never was a kingdom with so many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ...

...But secularism in the public eye was tarred with the brush of elitism—associated with atheist or agnostic academics and pretentious snobs alleged (perhaps correctly) to look down on the uneducated devout...

...But princes and laws can err...

...Although many of these observances and testimonials are formal, they are far from hollow...

...Jews in the 1950s accounted for 3.5 per cent of the national population, but the goal of inclusion justified anachronism...