The Faith Instinct (39 page)

The success of Mormonism shows how effectively a religion can promote a group’s survival. Another example is that of the black churches formed after the Civil War. The churches were the one institution that African Americans controlled. Their clergy, more willing to provide political leadership than those of most white churches, have worked to secure advantages for a particular ethnic group but have largely done so without raising the specter of separatism. Black ministers and their churches spearheaded the Civil Rights movement. Without the religious motivation, it is hard to see how the movement would have remained nonviolent, the key to its success.

Given the acrid, religion-fueled wars in countries like Northern Ireland or Bosnia, how is it that the competing churches in the United States have kept their struggles so peaceful? The exceptions, on the whole, have been minor. Religious differences were evident between North and South in the Civil War, but were not a principal cause of war. Some religio
ns, despite the freedom accorded to their own modes of worship, have tried to impose their doctrines on others. One flagrant abuse was Prohibition, a largely Protestant attempt to punish Catholic drinkers. Another, some would say, is the campaign to outlaw abortion, a largely Catholic and evangelical movement to force others to their own view.

Despite the occasional difference, the American religious polity has so far remained surprisingly united. The usual glues that hold nations together are a single dominant religion, language, ethnicity and culture. Until 1850 or so, the United States fitted this mold, being essentially an Anglo-Protestant culture. Many of its people originated from England, Scotland or Northern Ireland, and other Europeans became American by adopting at least the language of Anglo-Protestantism. De Tocqueville in the 1830s referred to the population as “Anglo-Americans.”

The situation today is somewhat different. There are many diffe
rent subcultures in the United States, no ethnicity prevails an
d even the universality of English is being challenged by large
Spanish-speaking enclaves. As for religious affiliation, no denomination is domina
nt. Some 78 percent of adults describe themselves as Christian,
according to a Pew Forum survey published in 2008, 5 percent belong to other religi
ons (including almost 2 percent who are Jewish) and 16 percent
claim no religion. Within the Christian grouping, 51 percent of
Americans describe themselves as Protestant, 24 percent as Catholic and under 2 per
cent as Mormon. But the Protestants are divided into many diffe
rent sects, with the major groupings being evangelical churches (26 percent of the U
.S. population), mainstream churches (18 percent) and historica
lly black churches (7 percent).
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If the evolutionary role of religious behavior is to provide social cohesion, to what extent, if any, does this plethora of different faiths bind Americans together? And if neither religion nor ethnicity provides common links, does anything?

Some observers believe there is in effect an overarching faith that unites Americans. It has no church or ministers, and no one claims it as their personal religion. Its presence in American public life is so ubiquitous and familiar that no one gives it a second thought. This mysterious higher creed was first given serious attention by the sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967. A principal ceremony of American Civil Religion, as he called it, is the inauguration of a president. Its sacred texts include certain presidential addresses, such as Kennedy’s inaugural and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Its annual rituals include Memorial Day and Thanksgiving. The motto “In God We Trust” provides spiritual backing for the currency. The pledge of allegiance recited by schoolchildren describes the republic as “one nation under God.” The chief officer of the American Civil Religion is the president. The art of his religious duty is to avoid sectarian references and stick to generic invocations of the deity.

A recurrent theme of the American Civil Religion, like that of other national religions, is that the United States has found special favor in the deity’s eye or will do so if its acts are righteous. “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds,” said John F. Kennedy in concluding his inaugural speech, “let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

This activist conception of religious duty, Bellah noted, has h
istorically been associated with Protestant theology. That it s
hould have been articulated by the nation’s first Catholic president “seems to
underline how deeply established it is in the American outlook.”
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Others agree that American Civil Religion exists, despite the Constitution’s prohibition of an established church. “Every nation has a faith of sorts, a belief in itself, a civil religion—and in the United States this civil religion is profoundly infused with a sense that God has provided Americans with special blessings,” say the political scientist Robert Fowler and colleagues.
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But there is disagreement as to the real nature of American Civil Religion. It is, say some scholars, simply the Protestant or Puritan creed, disguised by the avoidance of any reference to Jesus. “The American Creed is the unique creation of a dissenting Protestant culture,” says the political scientist Samuel Huntington. Its sources include various Enlightenment themes and Anglo-Protestant culture with its long-standing English ideas such as the rights of Englishmen and the limits of government authority.

American Civil Religion, in Huntington’s view, has four major elements. First is the assumption of a supreme being—as President Eisenhower said, “Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.” Second is the belief that America is the new Israel and has a divinely decreed destiny. Third are the frequent references to God in public life, such as the phrase “So help me God” which presidents traditionally add to their oath of office (the words are not in the Constitution’s version of the oath). Fourth are the national holidays and certain sacred texts that have come to define the national identity, including the Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

“The American Creed, in short, is Protestantism without G
od, the secular credo of the ‘nation with the soul of a church,’ ” Huntington wrote.
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A similar conclusion has been reached by the historian George McKenna, who sees the creed as not only Protestant but as more specifically Puritan. “When the chips are down, when the stakes are high, American political leaders go back to the narrative and even the language of the Puritans; they do it then, especially, because that is when Americans especially want to hear it. They start talking about grace and consecration and sanctification, language found nowhere in the Constitution or even the Declaration of Independence. It is biblical, prophetic language, the language of
sermons and jeremiads. It reappears each time the nation needs to gird its loins, concentrate its mind and throw itself against whatever threatens its life: a foreign foe, a domestic rebellion, a Great Depression, a conspiracy of terror.”
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Equitable laws, a generally prosperous economy and a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth are all important ingredients of a cohesive society but probably do not fully account for the surprising social tranquillity of a nation as variegated as the United States. American Civil Religion, however, provides an emotional bond between people of all faiths. Perhaps even more pertinent is the bridge it provides between the races. Nothing is more corrosive to the social fabric than ethnic antagonism and its stimulus to deep-seated tribal loyalties. The fact that black churches have equal standing with all the others, and Martin Luther King is widely accepted as a national figure of transcendent moral authority, provides a strong signal of inclusion to African Americans.

A pertinent question about American Civil Religion is whether or not this meta-creed possesses the necessary cohesive power to bind an increasingly disparate nation to common standards of morality and a common purpose in warfare. The United States, as its ethnicity grows less British and European, has few sources of cohesion save language, and even its common language is under threat in some regions from Spanish.

Conservatives fear damage to the social fabric from the decay of religious values. In the United States, they see the once unifying culture of Anglo-Protestantism as being under steady erosion from the pressures of secularism, multiculturalism, and the divisive assertion of group rights of various kinds over and beyond the individual rights promised in the Constitution. An obvious way to strengthen cohesion would be through religious education in the school years, the one major experience that everyone has in common. But religion has been largely evicted from American public schools, an event that would doubtless have dumbfounded the framers of the Constitution. They directed Congress to make no law respecting an establishment of religion but that was not because they were secularists. It was because they didn’t want the members of any Christian sect taxed to support another sect.

In the eighteenth century, some 95 percent of the American population belonged to Protestant sects of one kind or another. Almost everyone accepted that morality must be taught through religion, and that religion must be taught in schools. At that time, in the words of Noah Feldman, a legal scholar who has written about the history of church-state issues, “The notion of teaching children morality by some means that did not involve religion would hardly have entered the American mind. Morality, it was understood, derived from religion, and for even the most liberal of the Protestants who made up the northeastern elite in the 1820’s and ’30s, that meant morality came from the Bible, especially the Gospels. Without religion there could be no foundation stone on which to re
st the basic values of honesty and rule following. None of the theorists of the new common schools advocated keeping religion out of the classroom. No religion would have meant no morality, and no morality would have meant that the schools could not achieve their society-shaping function.”
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The political solution arrived at under the founders and their immediate successors was called nonsectarianism. It consisted of teaching in schools a generic form of Protestantism that was acceptable to all the various sects and was based on reading the King James Version of the Bible. Nonsectarianism worked well until the tide of Catholic immigration starting in the 1820s.

The Catholics began to object that it was a Protestant idea to learn religion from the Bible, not from priests’ interpretation, and that they were being taxed to support schools they could not use. The Protestant majority said, in effect, that that was tough luck. This failure of the two Christian denominations to agree left them vulnerable, a century later, to a movement Feldman calls legal secularism. The legal secularists did not explicitly seek to abolish religion, merely to build a wall of separation between church and state with the formal goal of protecting religious minorities. The chief minority in the legal developments of the 1950s was that of Jews who, like the Catholics, did not welcome paying for religious instruction they had no use for. “American Jews,” Feldman writes, “gradually began to play an important part in the development of the strategies of legal secularism beginning in the postwar era.”
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The Christian churches felt secure in the 1950s and did not oppose the legal secularists until too late. Legal secularism was not addressed to the electorate, which would doubtless have rejected it flat, just to the Supreme Court, an elite group culturally attuned to the secularists’ arguments. “To embrace legal secularism was, for the Court, continuous with a set of liberal values characteristic of enlightened citizens and educated jurists,” Feldman writes.
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The outcome was that Christianity was evicted from the classroom.

Some 95 percent of Americans are Christians or belong to no religion. Minorities—including Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, together make up less than 5 percent. To protect the rights of a 5 percent minority by denying religious education to 95 percent of the population was a solution that could seem satisfactory to few besides lawyers. As the continued tussles over religious education attest, particularly the assaults on teaching evolution, it is not a fully accepted or stable solution.

To anyone approaching the issue from the perspective of social cohesion, morality is one issue in which diversity and minority exceptions are distinct drawbacks. The educational years, it could be argued, are a unique and invaluable opportunity to inculcate a common frame of moral reference in an otherwise diverse and heterogeneous population.

Many liberals, however, see no need to strengthen religion as a source of national cohesion in the United States and regard the churches as wieldin
g too much political power already. Conservatives fear that despite the United States’ lively religious marketplace, religion in general is likely to yield eventually to the strong tides of secularism that have already undermined church-going in most European countries.

Two serious assaults on religious belief, or at least on the three text-based monotheisms, have been the rise of scientific knowledge, including especially the theory of evolution, and “higher criticism,” the analysis of Bible texts spearheaded by nineteenth-century German scholars such as Julius Wellhausen.

Science has provided an increasingly comprehensive explanation for the material world, one which is now largely complete, in principle if not in detail, except for singular events such as the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. This knowledge, a soaring triumph of the rational mind, has from the seventeenth century onward eroded a major intellectual pillar of religious belief, that of religion’s claim to explain the natural world.