Faith and public institutions

I wrote this piece a while back as part of my effort at discussing the nature of so called secular institutions and in particular the importance of understanding the religious roots in American history. For readers interested in these themes that come through my writing, they stem in part, from an interest in political theology and its influence in regards to the nature of the state, education, politics and even economics. Broadly speaking, I am very interested in the whole issue of the place of faith and religion in contemporary societies and the political and philosophical problems that stem from arguments in relation to this issue. This piece of writing appeared in the Sunday New Straits Times, Learning Curve Section, November 4, 2012, page 4.

Faith and public institutions

‘America is a nation with the soul of a church.’ G.K. Chesterton

'LAST week, I drew readers' attention to Henry J. Perkinson's influential work: The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865-1965.[1] Again I will start with Perkinson's classic work and this time, in a continuation of a theme, will take a brief look at the religious roots of the American faith in education as a panacea. According to Perkinson, this faith began with the Puritans. One of the most important and powerful of the narratives of American modernity derives from its religious undercurrents. Education has in many ways carried forth the millennial mission that seems to characterise the American project. Education from the very inception has been invested with a degree of hope, possibility and mission.

The importance of religion lies in the millennial spirit it imparted to the educational project, the project of America, a spirit that carries through in secularised form today. One simply cannot understand American culture without grasping its religious roots. Religion has played a central and defining role in the history of the United States. Sidney E. Mead described the "Jeffersonian religious settlement in America as a rejection of state support of church organisations by men who shared fully the traditional conviction that religion must undergird the social order."[2] Along with ethnicity, religion goes to the heart of American identity and history. Both religion and ethnicity are at the forefront of conflict and the struggle to define the meaning of American democracy and the promise of American schooling.

The first US President and revolutionary war hero George Washington had noted in his farewell address that: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."[3] As Seymour Martin Lipset argues, "the United States has been the most God-believing and religion-adhering, fundamentalist and religiously traditional country in Christendom."[4]

Sacvan Bercovitch, in his brilliant: The Puritan Origins of the American Self, argues that the "myth of America" stems from Puritan origins and that this myth, stripped of its colonial content, still helps to shape the self-image of Americans and their society."[5] The Puritans provided a zeal and public-spirited passion to the American cultural and political landscape. Whilst Puritan content did not survive unmediated, its consequences and vision continue.

Part of understanding the American debate over the separation of church and state in education requires us to understand that the debate is far more complex and nuanced than may first appear. History shows us something which is revealing. With regards to the development of the common school in the early 1800s, most people saw the essential importance in schools imparting Christian values. State constitutions, which specifically mentioned public schooling, also often made mention of religion. This goes to an interesting tension between the Federal Constitution and the divergent, more substantially religious and democratic elements found in the respective state constitutions.

The early state constitutions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and North Carolina all placed "the religions of Christianity or of Protestantism in a preferred position."[6] In contemporary times, we are often informed that America faces some kind of "assault" by the forces of religious fundamentalism. Historically the term "fundamentalism" derives from a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915 in the US. Known as The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, these pamphlets form the bedrock of fundamentalist thought.

It is interesting to note that the use of the term "fundamentalism" globally is arguably an example of the way a specific description and discourse rooted in American history becomes a catch-all phrase and descriptor for quite diverse and often utterly unrelated social and religious groups around the world. This reduction of complexity to a simple phrase is a characteristic of the way we tend to oversimplify and in many ways caricature the diversity and complexity of religious responses to modern life.

The American roots of the term "fundamentalist" point to the powerful effect the discourse and struggle of fundamentalism versus modernism in the American context has had on the way we understand modernity in general. What is also interesting is that for the most part -- even in the American example -- the loose use of the term "fundamentalist" to describe most evangelicals is misleading. One can imagine how misleading such an oversimplified term can become when used to describe diverse religious and cultural beliefs and movements outside of America!

The way that faith is presented and the issue of religious belief being seen as somehow "irrational", "extreme" or "uneducated" are part of the discourse of secular modernity. Who wants to be considered "irrational", "uneducated" or "extreme"? Certainly, "backward" is not something most of us want to be associated with! This discourse tends to consign faith to the private realm and suggests that issues of faith and solidarities based on anything else than instrumental or commercial value are not properly part of the functional decisions of the "public square".

Arguments about faith and public purpose framed within the oversimplified binaries of modern views on religion tend to reduce debates over the nature of public institutions, public life and even the state to oversimplified choices between the secular and non-secular as if the deepest held beliefs and values of people can so easily be consigned to the private realm and as if recognising the importance of faith to our public values necessarily leads to irrationalism, tyranny or bigotry.

Framing a public discourse and debate about the role, influence and place of faith in relation to our ideas of the state and public institutions is better served if we move away from the oversimplifications the "either ors" of contemporary debate and recognise the ambiguities and productive possibilities of what the scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard referred to as "the yes and no".[7] In many respects, the legal arguments over the secular nature of countries like the US hide from view the deeper faith-based influences on the basic values of American society. Similarly, in other contexts, arguments over strict and legal definitions of a country's status in regard to religion are far less important than the substantive issues of the values followed in public life and practiced by the institutions of the state.

After all, a state can be legally or formally defined as Islamic or Christian or Hindu for that matter, yet in its day-to-day practices follow a path that is far from moral or defensible. Conversely, a state can define itself legally as secular (whatever that means to those who so define it) and yet in many substantive ways follow and realise through its practices and policies, a moral practice that sits very well with the highest and most noble beliefs and values of faith.

G.K. Chesterton's observation in regard to America is also suggestive in terms of our debate over faith and public institutions, more broadly. Despite what formal legal definitions we have in regard to the state, the question that I ask is what values lay in the soul of our nations and their institutional practices?'

References

[1] Henry J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea; American Faith in Education, 1865-1965, Studies in Education, Sed12. (New York,: Random House, 1968).

[2] Timothy L. Smith, "Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800-1850," The Journal of American History 53, no. 4 (1967)., p.679

[3] Pearlstein Mitchell B, "Honoring America’s Generosity of Spirit: Religion in Minnesota’s Public Square," American Experiment Quarterly Winter(1998)., p.17

[4] Seymour Martin Lipset, "Comments on Luckman," in Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (Boulder: Westview, 1991)., p.187

[5] Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)., p.186

[6] Lynford A. Lardner, "How Far Does the Constitution Separate Church and State?," The American Political Science Review 45, no. 1 (1951)., p.112

[7] Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2002)., p.11