Religious Liberty, Cultural Dialogue, and Creative Minorities
By Coleman Fannin, PhD Candidate, University of Dayton
Note: This essay was originally prepared for the 2007 fall conference of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.
Commentary on Benedict XVI’s 2006 Regensburg address initially focused on his quotation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor in contrasting the role of reason in Christianity with that in Islam. However, as the question of whether the pope mischaracterized Islam has faded, it has become clear that his lecture marked not only another step in his argument with secular Europe but the beginning of a significant interfaith conversation. While Benedict critiqued forms of Islam that advocate conversion by force, he also lamented the separation of faith and reason among Christians and argued that only by bringing them together “in a new way” will we “become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.” He closed by inviting Muslims to become “partners” in such a dialogue. Among the numerous responses was an open letter signed by 138 Muslim clerics and scholars that has, in turn, prompted a regular Catholic-Muslim Forum that will address two topics raised by Benedict: religious liberty and the separation of religious and political authority.
Baptists can enthusiastically affirm this development. Our forbears’ recognition that a Christian culture maintained by coercion is, in the end, not Christian led them to stand, even suffer, for religious liberty. For example, John Leland and others pressed for the inclusion of the religion clauses in the First Amendment, and, on the whole, nonestablishment (rather than European disestablishment) was and is a welcome advancement. However, the burden of this essay is to show that Baptists and other Christians have yet to fully grasp its implications and, further, that this hinders our capability to engage in cultural dialogue.
Baptistification and Baptist Identity
There are inherent problems in employing “culture” as a parameter for dialogue. Cultural boundaries long taken for granted are rapidly destabilizing, if not disappearing, in the face of global commerce and migration, and the center of world Christianity is shifting south, undermining identification of the West with the church. Indeed, nostalgia for Western culture can obscure the influence of contemporary culture-makers, especially nation-states and the market(s) they shelter.
Baptists face particular difficulties in negotiating our globalized world. Religious liberty arrived in the wake of Christendom and took root in the midst of a Protestant social consensus. No longer dissenters, we applied the democratic spirit of the early republic to our congregations. Yet the Civil War and industrialization ended Protestant cultural hegemony in the North and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy marked the beginning of the end in the South. Much of the conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention in the last century was a consequence of divergent reactions to this breakdown. The most prominent type of contemporary Baptists have enforced rigid doctrinal statements and aligned themselves with evangelicals (and, in some cases, Catholics) in order to resist secularization and pluralism. Few are interested in theocracy, but these Baptists do seek to retain or recover a preference for Christianity—a pursuit that has prompted a seemingly endless stream of commentary and rebuttal.
Meanwhile, other Baptists have pledged allegiance to a secular government and a pluralistic culture, seeing in them vindication of “soul liberty” (or “soul competency”), a corollary of religious liberty. A classic formulation was given by Herschel Hobbs when he proclaimed that “religion is a personal matter between the individual and God” and that soul liberty “includes salvation by grace through faith without the need of a human mediator or any institution, ecclesiastical or political.”[1] When these Baptists engage public life, they typically attempt to translate biblical and theological admonitions into universal moral principles. Additional distinctions can be made, but the point is that both types of Baptists tend to conflate Christianity with America. Further, although their response has been regrettable and ineffective, the first type has better recognized the implications of the loss of cultural norms and the rise of individualism.
Martin Marty was essentially correct in observing that American Christianity has been “baptistified.” He identified this phenomenon not as the growth of Baptist denominations but as the prevalence of an approach to faith that grounds religious identity in personal decision.[2] Again, the second type of Baptists see baptistification as vindication. For example, Walter Shurden argues that Marty accurately understood the Baptist “style” as permeated by a spirit of “FREEDOM,” while William Hull contends that baptistification occurred because Baptists were “uniquely suited by history and temperament to offer common people an understanding of the Christian faith that coincided with their quest for freedom in a new land of opportunity.”[3] Hull and Shurden may be correct, but they and other such Baptists have failed to adequately consider how this land has changed, why a distinctly Baptist identity remains necessary, and whether there is a downside to grounding it in freedom. In short, does soul liberty—that is, voluntarism—produce religious vitality or religious superficiality?
In their landmark study Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-authors concluded that Americans find it difficult to employ moral language in ways that point toward a shared vision of the nature and purpose of life. Instead they tend to correlate “success” with being faithful to one’s values, “freedom” with the ability to choose them without coercion, and “justice” with the establishment of procedures that provide equal opportunity to exercise one’s freedom.[4] About the same time, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explained that because Western culture has all but lost the narrative that gives meaning to its ethical grammar, its quest for a universal rationality independent of religious or other similar commitments is bound to collapse into the assertions, the will-to-power, of individual selves.[5] Abandoning this quest implies neither accepting relativism nor retreating into a self-contained tradition, but it does problematize our public discourse and call into question the state’s capability of managing a society full of multiplying conceptions of the good.
These conclusions point beyond our discussion, but can be more concrete. Baptists of all stripes are finding that their congregants are no longer part of a context in which a tradition can be grasped. Few stay members of any church for long, and their involvement is often minimal. Also, while it is right to lament divisions among us, the decline of denominations has brought neither unity nor an adequate replacement for the formation they provide. In short, a lack of continuity and accountability has left an authority vacuum easily filled by secular reasoning or the personality- and media-driven groups that dominate the American religious landscape. This helps explain why Baptists and other Protestants struggle to counter problematic elements of our culture; instead we identify ourselves as conservatives or liberals and fight over who are the true heirs of the American project. Doing otherwise will require recovering what James McClendon described as “a shared and lived story” that is not the story of the Enlightenment, democracy, or capitalism with a Christian gloss but that of the Messiah who perished on a cross rather than accede to the demands of empire.[6] This story is irreducibly communal and sustained across time by authorities other than the self.
Americanism and Pluralism
One alternative is the Catholic Church, which defies idolatrous claims of sovereignty via a transnational unity embodied by a hierarchy of ministry. However, while the story of Catholicism in the United States is very different from that of Protestantism, the outcome has been much the same. A detailed narration would show that the children of Catholic immigrants first dreamed of converting the nation, then sought to counter nativism by proving their loyalty to it (especially by fighting in its wars), and finally joined the postwar consensus and escaped their subculture to achieve the same levels of social, economic, and political success as their neighbors. They came to view their church’s theoretical rejection of religious liberty as an embarrassment. “Americanists” such as John Ireland, John Keane, and Denis O’Connell had challenged this position, only to be rebuked by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899). Not until the adoption of the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae, 1965) by the Second Vatican Council did Catholic teaching shift definitively.
Central to this story is John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit who helped compose the declaration. Murray affirmed the Protestant claim that the West had developed a new truth about human dignity: freedom, the responsibility of each citizen for his or her religious beliefs. He added that this truth is grounded in natural law, a fact reflected in the “self-evident” truths in the Declaration of Independence and the consensus balancing individual freedom and civic order inaugurated by the First Amendment. Contra secularists, other Catholics, and Baptists such as J. M. Dawson, Murray contended that the establishment and free exercise clauses are not “articles of faith” but “articles of peace.” That is, they are not theological but political and therefore do not imply a free-church ecclesiology. In fact, Murray sensed that voluntarism had eroded the consensus and that civic unity was endangered by a transition from religious to moral pluralism. He solemnly explained what “widespread dissent” would entail: “The guardianship of the original American consensus . . . would have passed to the Catholic community.”[7]
Murray has been critiqued for a distinction between the temporal and spiritual orders that leads to dualism. Michael Baxter explains that although Murray was right about the political arrangement of the United States, by “excluding final ends” this arrangement “relegate[s] matters of theological truth to a separate sphere.” By separating nature from grace, Murray could only hope that consensus would be achieved via natural law. Yet if civic morality needs only perfection by the church, then the church has no recourse when the will of the majority contradicts what natural law requires. In other words, Murray’s public theology provides no substantive role for the church if (or when) the consensus fails.[8]
Further, American Catholics were unable to assume the role Murray imagined for them. Neo-scholasticism, the Catholic response to modernism after the First Vatican Council, asserted that natural reason discloses essential truths about God and humanity. It followed that the supernatural virtue of faith could be applied “to virtually every sphere of life,” Philip Gleason says. “Catholicism came to be viewed as a culture, a total way of life.” Unfortunately this way of life was so closely identified with neo-scholasticism and its institutions that when the latter were abandoned the former was also lost.[9] The dissolution of their subculture revealed that Catholics were already so much like their neighbors that distinct ethical positions now made little sense. Those who saw Vatican II as a call to embrace modernity soon encountered a society no longer bound by the mores of Protestant-Catholic-Jew but in turmoil over civil rights, the sexual revolution, and Vietnam. Yet few questioned their Americanist assumptions; instead both conservatives and liberals, with Murray as their totem, laid claim to the council’s vision and to America itself. Today Catholics join Protestants in seeing only the state as necessary to maintain whatever moral vision emerges from pluralism.
A Different Way of Seeing Things
This story indicates something disturbing about the present and offers hope for the future. If, as William Portier claims, Dignitatis Humanae was not an endorsement of pluralism but “a formal rejection of Christendom, ushering in a new ‘post-Constantinian’ age in the Church’s history,” then perhaps Baptists too can hear “the Johannine incarnational imperative to make the word flesh” in a new way and join Catholicism in “[crying] out to be embodied in a culture at the center of which is the church.”[10] Importantly, such a culture neither coerces religious faith nor depends on a state to defend its borders.
As William Cavanaugh explains, the modern state not only created violence “and then charged citizens for its reduction,” it also precipitated “a shift from ‘complex space’—varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority—to a ‘simple space’ characterized by a duality of individual and state.”[11] The key question, then, is how to conceive of culture and dialogue in ways that take politics seriously without accepting this duality. For example, “complex space” imagines identity as not being bound to the sovereignty of the self or the state. Indeed, “identity” is but one aspect of the multitude of activities and structures that constitute a culture. It follows that Baptists have been too concerned with definitive and explicit notions of identity and neglected the everyday practices and interactions that sustain us.
Another helpful concept is that of “creative minorities,” which Benedict XVI (as Joseph Ratzinger) borrows from historian Arnold Toynbee in Without Roots, a dialogue with philosopher Marcello Pera. The pope may seem an unlikely ally, given that in the Regensburg address he paints culture and reason in broad strokes. Deus Caritas Est, his first encyclical, also grants the state that guarantees religious liberty a degree of autonomy and the responsibility to achieve justice through politics. Still, Benedict sharply criticizes the “mere bureaucracy” of a state without love; rather, a proper state “generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces.”[12] That is, the renewal of Christian cultural “roots” falls to the entities that inhabit complex space.
In responding to Pera’s proposal for a non-denominational civil religion, Benedict asserts that the “Christian consciousness” of the United States is due to the free churches (with help from Catholics) and a separation of church and state that “is conceived positively, since it is meant to allow religion to be itself.” Here “the private sphere has an absolutely public character. This is why what does not pertain to the state is not excluded in any way, style, or form from the public dimension of social life.”[13] The pope contrasts this state of affairs with Europe, where separation proceeded from conflict between state churches and the Catholic Church. The history of the reception of the Enlightenment is complex, but the result is that Europe’s remaining Christian majorities are only numerical. “If [civil religion] is no more than a reflection of the majority’s convictions, then it means little or nothing,” Benedict says. “If instead it is a source of spiritual strength, then we have to ask what feeds this source” (119-20).
In order to play up the contrast, the pope does not fully consider whether the American state really is “little more than a free space” or American society retains a “Christian consciousness.” However, this neglect does not detract from his discussion of creative minorities.
Such minorities are formed when a convincing model of life also becomes an opening toward a knowledge that cannot emerge amid the dreariness of everyday life. Such a life choice, over time, affirms its rationale to a growing extent, opening and healing a reason that has become lazy and tired. There is nothing sectarian about such creative minorities. Through their persuasive capacity and their joy, they reach other people and offer them a different way of seeing things (121).
Benedict clarifies this remark by noting that “the decisive reason for the abandonment of Christianity,” vocalized by Nietzsche, is that “its model for life is apparently unconvincing” (125). What he is trying to spark, then, is a renewal of groups that pursue a form of life modeled not on Western culture but on the love of Christ. These groups are neither a majority nor independent; rather, “they live naturally from the fact that the Church as a whole remains and that it lives in and stands by the faith in its divine origins” (122-23). In other words, they endure only because they are intentionally and visibly connected to the Christian tradition. This location enables them to critique the culture and, when necessary, the church itself.
Benedict offers primitive Christianity and medieval monasticism as examples of creative minorities, but we can readily think of others. One is the Catholic Worker movement, which continues to embody a public Christianity defined not by national loyalty or party ideology but by nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and the sacraments. Another is the New Monasticism, a growing number of urban Protestant communities united by a rule of life and dedicated to contemplation and hospitality. A more familiar example is the variety of congregations and associations that mediate and break down the simple space characteristic of modern life. Renewal of these familiar entities holds great promise if it includes a recovery of the communal roots of the Baptist tradition—the understanding that freedom from coercion is inseparable from freedom for the disciplined community—corroded by American individualism.
Authentic creative minorities are not idealized and do not avoid cultural engagement. On the contrary, they embrace the messiness of everyday life while cultivating the practical reason required for discerning when to collaborate and when to resist. They also prepare Christians for dialogue by teaching the radical hospitality shown to all persons—the poor, the enemy, the non-Christian—by Jesus Christ. For example, Benedict illustrates dialogue with Jesus’ comparison of the kingdom of God to “a tree on whose branches various birds make their nests” (Mt 13:32). This tree “reaches beyond the branches of the visible Church” and “must be a hospitable place in whose branches many guests find solace.” As we “move toward each other with a new openness,” we learn that “there are ways of partaking of the truth by which seekers and believers give to and learn from each other” (121-23).
Creative minorities enable Christians to join with those of many cultures in working for the kingdom of God. When agreements cannot be reached, they provide us with the strength to exercise our liberty in faithfulness. As English Baptists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries insisted, the local congregation has liberty only because it stands under the rule of Christ who is present among them. These Baptists understood that liberty cannot be created or enforced from outside, and they recognized that the congregation cannot make responsible decisions without attending to the rule of Christ manifested in other places, be it among other Christians or among non-Christians with whom we are called to fellowship and dialogue.[14]
