Two Concepts of Secularism

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 47-72

  Mcclay, Wilfred M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85006592021     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2001.0026     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1950), 285
2. Michael G. Kammen, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York, 1972).
3. “How is it,” asked Samuel Johnson in his 1775 anti-American tract Taxation No Tyranny,“that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
4. For a more systematic investigation of his insight, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
5. James B. Twitchell, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York, 1999)
6. John Harmon McElroy, American Beliefs: What Keeps a Big Country and a Diverse People United (Chicago, 1999).
7. Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994)
8. “The Hipster and the Organization Man,” First Things, no. 43 (May 1994): 23-30.
9. D. Michael Lindsay and George Gallup, Jr. Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs (Atlanta, 2000).
10. See, for example, the survey press release for 6 May 1999, which states that nine in ten of Americans pray to God, and three of four do so on a daily basis. “Creative destruction” is the coinage of the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpter, in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1950), 81-86.
11. See, for example, Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Claud Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), and
12. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York, 1995).
13. An especially important formulation of the secularization theory is Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York, 1967).
14. A succinct but useful recent examination of the perdurability of religious faith, a book that represents a reversal of the position that the author put forward in his earlier work, cited above, is Peter L. Berger, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1999).
15. See also Theodore Caplow et al. All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion (Minneapolis, 1983)
16. Andrew Greeley, Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (New York, 1972)
17. David Martin, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization (London, 1969).
18. Stephen L. Carter has been especially effective in bringing this condition into relief, in such works as The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York, 1994), and
19. his 1995 Massey Lectures at Harvard, The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass. 1998).
20. A useful guide to the relevant Supreme Court decisions, with excerpts and commentary beginning with Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) and carrying the story up to and including Lee v. Weisman (1992), is Terry Eastland, ed. Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define the Debate over Church and State (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1993).
21. See also Marvin E. Frankel and Eric Foner, Faith and Freedom: Religious Liberty in America (New York, 1995).
22. Required reading is Richard John Neuhaus's highly influential The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1986).
23. A perspective reflected in, among others, Wendy Kaminer, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety (New York, 1999)
24. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York, 1996)
25. Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Me. 1997).
26. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994), 234.
27. On the influence of Roman Catholicism in Eastern and Central Europe, see especially the work of George Weigel, including The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York, 1992), and
28. his biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope (New York, 1999).
29. Jeffrey Rosen, “Is Nothing Secular?” New York Times Magazine, 20 January 2000, 40–45.
30. For some historical perspective on the provenance of such professions, see Michael Novak, “Faith in Search of Votes,” New York Times, 19 December 1999, A25.
31. An excellent overview of these matters can be found in Charles Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies (Princeton, 2000).
32. See also Stanley W. Carlson-Thies and James W. Skillen, eds. Welfare in America: Christian Perspectives on a Policy in Crisis (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1996).
33. An exemplary work by a prominent advocate of faith-based charities is Amy L. Sherman, Restorers of Hope: Reaching the Poor in Your Community with Church-Based Ministries That Work (New York, 1997).
34. An interesting and ideologically diverse examination of Clinton's use of religious language arises out of the essays in Gabriel Fackre, ed. Judgment Day at the White House: A Critical Declaration Exploring Moral Issues and the Political Use and Abuse of Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1999).
35. See also J. Philip Wogaman, From the Eye of the Storm: A Pastor to the President Speaks Out (Louisville, 1998).
36. For a skeptical view of the meaning of RFRA, see Wilfred M. McClay, “The Worst Decision Since Dred Scott?” Commentary, Vol. 104, no. 4 (October 1997): 52-54.
37. See Robert E. Hemenway, “The Evolution of a Controversy in Kansas Shows Why Scientists Must Defend the Search for Truth,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 October 1999, B7-8, for a response from the Chancellor of the University of Kansas.
38. See Charles Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace, and, from a different perspective
39. Jennifer S. Braden and Thomas L. Good, The Great School Debate: Choice, Vouchers, and Charters (Mahwah, N.J. 2000).
40. Roy S. Moore, “Putting God Back in the Public Square,” Imprimis 28, no. 8 (August 1999)
41. Linda Greenhouse, “Cases Give Court Chances to Define Church and State,” New York Times, 19 September 1999, A1.
42. Warren Nord, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill, 1995)
43. James H. Hutson et al. Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C. 1998)
44. Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding (Baton Rouge, 1991)
45. Gary L. Gregg II, ed. Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition (ISI Books, 1999)
46. John Witte, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (Boulder, 1999)
47. John Noonan, The Lustre of Our Nation: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998).
48. Paul Marshall, Their Blood Cries Out: The Untold Story of Persecution Against Christians in the Modern World (Dallas, 1997)
49. Nina Shea, In the Lion's Den: Persecuted Christians and What the Western Church Can Do About It (Nashville, 1997).
50. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York, 1978), 594-96: “And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language…. the beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue.”
51. Gertrude Himmelfarb's book One Nation, Two Cultures (New York, 1999) argues not only that contemporary American culture is deeply divided, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, though plausibly, that it is the advocates of traditional values, morality, gender roles, and the like who comprise the “counterculture” in our time.
52. A good brief description of this coalescing outlook is provided in Robert P. George, “What Can We Reasonably Hope For?” in First Things, no. 99 (January 2000): 22–24.
53. More detailed, more adventurous, and more controversial is Peter Kreeft, Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War (New York, 1996).
54. see, for example, “A Shift Looms,” Washington Post, 3 October 1999, B1
55. (with John J. DiLulio) What's God Got to Do with the American Experiment? Essays on Religion and Politics (Washington, D.C. 2000).
56. Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy and has recently published The Secular Mind (Princeton, 1999), calling into question the adequacy of the secular outlook of modernity.
57. William E. Connolly's Why I am Not a Secularist vigorously advances a new model of public life that more adequately addresses the deeper needs of human beings. 28.
58. Also implicit in Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, 2000).
59. See George A. Lindbeck, ed. The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Post-Liberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, 1996), and
60. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, 1984)
61. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, 1980)
62. Stanley Hauerwas, ed. Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Eugene, Ore. 1997)
63. John Milbank et al. eds. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (New York, 1999).
64. A view well expressed in Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York, 1995). 32.
65. James Davison Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars (New York, 1994), esp. 45-82;
66. and the earlier Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991). 33.
67. Some of the dangers of overemphasizing the middle ground can be seen in Alan Wolfe, One Nation After All: What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other (New York, 1998).
68. Mary Ann Glendon, “Religious Freedom and Common Sense,” New York Times, 30 June 1997
69. Glendon and Raul F. Yanes, “Structural Free Exercise,” Michigan Law Review 90 (December 1991): 477-92.
70. See Michael Sandel, “The Political Theory of the Procedural Republic,” in Richard John Neuhaus, ed. Reinhold Niebuhr Today (Grand Rapids, Mich. 1989), 19-32.
71. Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, Mass. 1999)
72. John Murray Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York, 1978). 37.
73. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Unbelief (New York, 1994).
74. It is perhaps for this very reason that some of the most interesting work on the concept of secularism is coming out of the Indian subcontinent. See, for example, Rajeev Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics (New York, 1998).
75. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Phillips Bradley (New York, 2000), esp. 1:303–14;
76. Wilfred M. McClay, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Liberal Tradition in the American Republic,” in Gary Quinlivan, ed. Public Morality, Civic Virtue, and the Problem of Modern Liberalism (Grand Rapids, Mich. 2000).
77. This language comes from the Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
78. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York, 1969), 121.
79. Four Essays on Liberty 127
80. Four Essays on Liberty
81. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book One, Chapter Seven.
82. Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 142–43.
83. Two Concepts 143.
84. Two Concepts 133.
85. Two Concepts 171.
86. Two Concepts 171-72.
87. This is one of the central assertions put forward in Casanova, Public Religions.
88. See McClay, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition.”
89. John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, 1990).
90. Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 135–41.
91. Ken Myers, Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace (Charlottesville, 1994), 62-63.
92. See the thoughtful essays in Michael Cromartie, ed. Caesar's Coin Revisited: Christians and the Limits of Government (Washington, D.C. 1996).
93. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York, 1993)
94. Walter Truett Anderson, The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person (New York, 1997).
95. See Isaiah Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York, 1991), 40-46.