The question of whether religion has a place in civic life has been a constant source of controversy since the emergence of modern liberal-democratic societies—since it was within them that this very notion of civic or public life first came to exist. For instance, in 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote a well-known essay in which he tried to answer this same question but from the perspective of what—as Michel Foucault would later call it (see below)—the Enlightenment attitude toward truth and liberty.
According to historian James Schmidt, at the center of Kant’s discussion was a similar matter, that of whether clergymen (or the church) should have a place on what started to be seen—then as much as now—as a purely civic matter—that is, the signing of a marriage contract. Should a Clergyman preside at wedding ceremonies? That was the question that incited Kant’s response. As one of his contemporary laid it out, the problem of clergymen presiding at wedding was due to the fact that “unenlightened citizens” usually felt compelled to give a greater weight to marriage contracts—since they were “made with God himself”—than to other types of contracts—merely “made by men.” For Kant and many of his fellow thinkers, it was assumed that “enlightened citizens” shouldn’t behave that way; that they should do without all kinds of ceremonies and prejudices, and therefore that they should judge the quality of contracts not based on “dogmas and formulas”—like that of religiously presided matrimonies—but on reason. For them, civil life was synonymous of one’s public life and, in that realm, one should be entitled to freely “make public use of one’s reason in all matters,” including marriage and religious cult. So, having a clergymen presiding what should be a civic act—the signing of a contract—was problematic in two counts. First, it promoted an unhealthy reliance of civic acts on “dogmas and formulas” that prevented people from using their own understanding and natural endowments. Second, such a reliance kept people away from freedom—that is, from the free exercise of their public reason [1].
Recently, I was reminded of this old controversy as I read the case of Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island teenager who has been battling some of her town’s authorities on the issue of a religious banner that has been on display in her school’s gymnasium for almost half a century. Jessica, a self-proclaimed atheist, believes that such types of religious displays shouldn’t be allowed in public schools. Basically, she considered the banner offensive since it is an intromission on her own civic or public life. And I guess that Kant—as many other “enlightened men”—would have agreed with her.
The separation between religion and the state is not—as many modern-day American conservatives seem to believe—a matter of opinions. In fact, it is one of the fundamental premises on which the project of Enlightenment was founded—the same project that inspired American republicanism two centuries ago. And it is something that Roger Williams, the liberal theologian who founded the state of Rhode Island—Jessica’s own home state—understood very well (as writer John M. Barry reminded us on a recent op-ed on Jessica’s case).
In 1636, Williams left the intolerant Massachusetts—whose Puritans were particularly bigoted, as the Salem’s witch trials would later demonstrate—to establish the Providence Plantation, what later would become modern-day Rhode Island. There, he established a settlement in which a “wall of separation” was setup between religion dogma and the business of the state. As Barry explains, Williams understood early on that “any government-sponsored prayer required a public official to pass judgment on something to do with God,” something he considered “a sacrilegious presumption.” In his little essay, Kant argues similarly:
“It indeed detracts from [a ruler’s majesty] if he interferes in [his subjects’ religious affairs] by subjecting the writings in which his subjects attempt to clarify their religious ideas to governmental supervision. This holds whether he acts from his own highest insight—whereby he calls upon himself the reproach, Caesar non eat supra grammaticos [Caesar is not above the grammarians] —as well as, indeed even more, when he demeans his highest authority by supporting the spiritual despotism of some tyrants in his state over his other subjects.”
I guess that Kant would have agreed with Williams’ assertion that “when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics.” In other words, religion always looses. That is why whenever the state gets involved in religion, the latter ended up serving to the interests of the “tyrants” who use it to their own political (and economic) profit. At the end, it is always a zero-sum game for religious integrity and freedom—politicians win and religion loses.
By the way, in 1984, Michel Foucault published a comment on Kant’s essay, returning to the original question addressed by Kant’s essay: What is enlightenment? There, he argues that what the Enlightenment really means is certain ethos or philosophical attitude “in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” I suspect that Jessica may agree with him, since she—despite her age—embodies such an enlightened attitude very well.
Notes
[1] Kant introduces here a distinction between what he calls the public and private uses of reason:
The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind; the private use of reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted, without otherwise hindering the progress of enlightenment. By the public use of one’s own reason I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world. I call the private use of reason that which a person may make in a civic post or office that has been entrusted to him. Now in many affairs conducted in the interests of a community, a certain mechanism is required by means of which some of its members must conduct themselves in an entirely passive manner so that through an artificial unanimity the government may guide them toward public ends, or at least prevent them from destroying such ends. Here one certainly must not argue, instead one must obey. However, insofar as this part of the machine also regards himself as a member of the community as a whole, or even of the world community, and as a consequence addresses the public in the role of a scholar, in the proper sense of that term, he can most certainly argue, without thereby harming the affairs for which as a passive member he is partly responsible. Thus it would be disastrous if an officer on duty who was given a command by his superior were to question the appropriateness or utility of the order. He must obey.
What Jessica is asking for is nothing but her right to exercise her public reason on a matter that—although belongs to a different realm (be it a particular church or a household)—has been imposed on her publicly. Within the Enlightened liberal-democratic tradition, the reason why church and state should be kept apart has to do precisely with that—with protecting one’s right to dissent on things that are addressed to the public, while, at the time same time, protecting the rights of religious organizations (or private institutions or communities, etc.) to privately impose obedience on their members.
What is going on here is just a symptom—one among many others—of a deeper problem and maybe America’s democracy’s biggest challenge ever. It uncovers a profound gap between formal democracy and actual democracy—though Tocqueville may have foreseen it. As Žižek explains in his book Violence, American democratic habits are becoming less and less democratic, and they constitute an undercurrent, a dark unconscious that threatens the whole system. And, since the gap between formal democracy—which is what many interest groups, both conservative and liberal, pretend to defend—and actual democracy—the totally fragmented and dysfunctional hotchpotch of contradictory interests involved in actual politics and social life—is becoming abysmal, closing such a gap may end up being almost an impossible task. As Žižek rightly argues,”These obscene underground, the unconscious terrain of habits, is what is really difficult to change.” And that is why I claim that this may constitute America’s biggest challenge.
