The Wall’s Expansion
Religion itself has become controversial in a way that it has never been throughout American history.

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute.
May 22, 2001 10:15 a.m.

change of fundamental importance has occurred in this country, and we have yet to come to grips with it. Religion itself — at least organized traditional religion — has become controversial in a way that it has never been throughout the whole of American history. With all their concern that no single religion be established by the state, the Founders never imagined a situation in which organized religion as such would be feared or repudiated by large numbers of citizens as a source of oppression. Yet today that is what we face. The divide between the secular and the religious is now far more culturally and politically significant than the differences between any particular religions. And the division between church-going Americans and those who intentionally avoid or abjure organized religion has everything to do with our politics. Certainly that division was one of the crucial fault-lines in the last presidential election.

So it is not surprising to see that President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft are now being criticized for engaging in Bible study at work and invoking faith in their speeches. While most of the critics concede that Bush and Ashcroft are within their constitutional rights to pray at work or to invoke religion in public address, they fear the symbolism. They fear that the non-religious will feel left out of a country in which the leaders take their Christianity both seriously — and for granted. Yet the trouble is, the divide between the traditionally religious and the assertively secular in this country has sharpened to the point where each side has reason to fear the other.

Certainly during his confirmation battle, defenders of John Ashcroft were right to fear that the very fact of his faith was being held against him. The specter of religious conservatism has long been one of the Left's favorite tools for scaring voters away from Republicans. Now that traditional religious morality has become an almost reflexive object of hatred among much of the secular elite, the religious have every bit as much cause to fear being "left out" as anyone else — probably more.

Right-thinking liberals once used to shake their heads at Ronald Reagan's daring to call the Soviets an "evil empire." How old-fashioned and fanatical in a relativist world to think of anything as "evil." But the fact is, even for seculars, the notion of evil hasn't really gone away. Conservatives — religious conservatives, above all — are the new evil, at least to the many for whom Leftist political ideologies fulfill the role once taken by religion. And this is precisely what the founders could not have imagined — the rise of mass secular ideologies that function as de facto religions.

In an earlier piece on President Bush's faith-based initiative, I pointed to an unforeseen consequence of this cultural change. As the federal government expanded in modern times, it began to fund "secular" organizations governed by the quasi-religious ideology of the Left. Religious conservatives have rightly come to feel left out by this turn of events. The simultaneous rise of big-government and quasi-religious but technically "secular" leftist advocacy groups eligible for government subsidy has actually served to circumvent the establishment clause. In a sense, the American state is already perilously close to having established certain secular ideologies, simply because the government can systematically aid them, to the exclusion of other more obviously religious organizations.

This is not simply a question of political advantage. The problem is that a profound cultural change has frustrated the principled intentions of the Founders that no cultural ideology be supported by the state to the exclusion of others. The concerns of liberals and conservatives alike about the dangers posed by some aspects of the president's faith-based initiative to the separation of church and state are by no means entirely misplaced. But opposing the president's faith-based initiative will nonetheless leave intact the underlying inequality that brought the initiative about to begin with — the government's implicit endorsement, through its largesse, of the new secular ideologies at the expense of the traditionally religious.

But if the faith-based conundrum will be difficult to solve to the satisfaction of all, that is all the more reason to take care that the traditionally religious not be pushed further out of the public square. Few if any of the critics of President Bush or Attorney General Ashcroft call their prayers or public invocations unconstitutional. But if symbolism is what this debate is about, then the time has come to make a symbolic statement about the respected place that traditionally religious citizens must have in this country. In ways that we still have not understood or acknowledged, the new secular ideologies have been given an unfair advantage by our inability to see their hidden religious character. It's high time that these seculars learned to practice the fairness and tolerance they have long demanded of others.