Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
The Christmas Wars: Religion in the American Public Square
Every year as the holiday season gets underway, debates break out across the country over the appropriateness of religious displays in public spaces, such as crèches and menorahs placed in town halls. But the so-called "Christmas Wars" are only a small part of a much larger debate concerning the proper place of religion in public life, a debate that began at the nation's founding. How did America's founders view religion and its role in our country's development? And how does the debate over church and state continue to inform politics today?
The Pew Forum invited Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek and author of American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation, and Michael Novak, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Washington's God: Religion, Liberty and the Father of Our Country, to shed light on these questions.
Moderator: Luis Lugo, Director, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
In the following excerpt from the transcript of the meeting, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org
LUIS LUGO: We have entered that time of the year when Americans are most likely to confront the thorny issues involved in the complex relationship between religion and public life in the United States. Like clockwork, it seems, come December, debates break out all across the country over holiday programs in public schools, seasonal displays in public buildings, and whether retail stores should use the word "holiday" or "Christmas" in greeting their customers.
This being America, 'tis not only the season to be jolly, 'tis the season for litigiousness. Not surprisingly, many of these debates end up in the courts. As our short legal backgrounder discusses, the Supreme Court has weighed in on the appropriateness of displaying crèches on courthouse steps and menorahs in town halls. As I sit here next to Jon Meacham and Michael Novak, I can't help but wonder what the founders would think if they learned that plastic reindeers have become a crucial consideration in the court's rulings on these cases. Maybe they can enlighten us on that.
MICHAEL NOVAK: I'd like to establish the larger picture. For a hundred years, historians have pretty much evaded the subject of religion and the founding. In the previous 100 years there were lots of books about it. Then in the last 100 years, the last 50 especially, historians appear to have been secular and not very much interested in religion, so they didn't use much care when they did write about it.
It's hard reading the founding documents and the actions of those behind them. You need to accept either/or -- either religious or not religious. I think their view of reason was that of commonsense -- such as the arguments of the federalists: Think about if we don't seek independence now, if we don't fight while the threat is just beginning, what will happen to our children? What will the country be like? What liberties will be left? Don't just think of your own self-interest today; think in a commonsensical way about what will happen. That's the sort of thing they meant by reason.
On the other hand, to make war against Great Britain, which had the greatest army and navy in the world -- arguably alongside France -- when we had no army, no navy and no munitions factory on this side of the ocean, required, as the Declaration puts it, "a firm reliance on Divine Providence." They had the view, expressed most clearly by Tom Paine -- Tom Paine is rightly regarded as the greatest foe of biblical religion in the founding generation, but he was not an atheist. He was a devout believer; he even took a ship to France at the time of the French Revolution to argue with the leadership of the revolution that they must not base their revolution on atheism because if they did, they would have no grounds for defending human rights.
What they believed is God created the world, the whole cosmos -- the stars, everything. It's a crazy belief. It's very Jewish and Christian; it's not universal, but it's what they held. God created the world for friendship. He wanted somewhere in it at least one creature, male and female, who was conscious, able to recognize what he did, and to whom he could offer his friendship.
The second set of points I'd like to make is they were not enthusiasts. They were not evangelicals. The evangelical movement started after this, beginning towards the end of the 18th century, but really in the early 19th century. There were very few Baptists and Methodists. They were there, and they were beginning to grow. They were important in our Bill of Rights because the Baptists of Virginia refused to endorse James Madison for Congress unless he promised to pursue the Bill of Rights against his declared intentions. Madison therefore agreed, and he went back to the Congress. And though everybody was tired of the philosophical arguments and wanted to get down to fisheries and post offices and import tariffs and so forth, he introduced one more philosophical argument, which he carried on quite brilliantly. But the founders were not evangelicals, nor were they enthusiastic. A good many of them were Anglican -- and I don't mean to joke here, but even the most devout Anglicans I know are not enthusiastic. It would just be wrong to be an enthusiastic Anglican. (Laughter) ...
JON MEACHAM: I am a child of the South, and I grew up an Episcopalian in the South. There are still three of us; two are in rehab, but we're working on that. (Laughter.) If you grow up in the South, particularly with the consciousness of the Civil War, you have to confront the complexities of the uses of faith, for you are living in a region that used faith and scriptural authority to support slavery and then to support Jim Crow. God is a complicated figure for almost all of us. If he's not, he probably should be, is my personal view.
My grandfather, who also grew up in Chattanooga, used to tell a story about rooming at Vanderbilt Law School in the '30s with a Southern Baptist. They met at a reunion about 30 years later, and for some reason, religion came up. They had a talk, and it was a lovely lesson in toleration and forbearance. As they parted, the Baptist said to my Episcopalian grandfather, "Yes, we both worship the same God -- you in your way, and I in His." (Laughter.) It ain't just the Sunnis and the Shi'a who have problems.
I grew up with that, and I believe in St. Augustine and St. Paul chiefly. Paul's central insight is we can't see everything; we see through a glass darkly. Appreciating what Chesterton called "the twilight" is to me the table stakes of faith. You acknowledge what you do not know so you can figure out what you can get your arms around.
As Michael was saying, the founders were very much in this tradition. Jefferson, for instance, was a ferocious atheist one day and a lukewarm Episcopalian the next. He went back and forth. He was terribly influenced, like a lot of us, by the last book he read. Sounds like another person with Jefferson in his name. We have to understand this is an Augustinian process unfolding -- at least as believers -- toward an endpoint in history. But mystery is the crucial element at the beginning.
We came together to talk about the Christmas wars. When I was writing American Gospel, I was searching around, because as a good newsmagazine editor, I knew my last couple paragraphs needed to be, "Here are the three things that if the world did them, we would be fine." Nothing worked. I was reading books on this topic by Judge John Noonan, a sane member of the Ninth Circuit, who wrote that when he tried to come up with a full set of standards to judge the establishment clause, after a lifetime of thinking and learning and pondering, he couldn't. There simply wasn't a standard that could be applied, which led me to Justice Stewart's line, "You know a violation when you see it."
Believers have a hard time with intellectual consistency on establishment questions, because you basically end up arguing the crèche on the courthouse square or the Ten Commandments don't mean anything so therefore they should be there. In the summer of 2005, the resolution to one of the Ten Commandments cases was if it had been up for a long time and no one had noticed it, then that was fine. If it was put up for a purpose, then that was [not] okay.
The establishment goes straight back to the sensibility of the founders. They very much wanted to avoid the worst excesses of the Old World. We forget sometimes they grew up in the shadow of terrible violence, both here and in Europe. There is a legend that James Madison heard the cries of tortured Baptist missionaries in Orange County, Virginia. Jefferson dwelled at great length in Notes on the State of Virginia, on how Quakers and other non-establishmentarian believers would be deprived of their civil rights in Virginia. This was very real to them; they wanted to avoid an established church at the federal level, and that was an important distinction. There were established churches in virtually every state. Massachusetts was the last to disestablish in 1833, so it took a long time there.
The phrase I hit upon to try to understand what I think of as a twilight understanding by the founders was a phrase Benjamin Franklin used in 1749 when he was writing a syllabus for what became the University of Pennsylvania: public religion. He said history has shown the usefulness of morality and public religion in the maintenance of the morality of a people. I liked the phrase more than the civil religion argument, which most of you are familiar with from [Robert] Bellah back to Rousseau back to Plato. To me, public religion had more to do with people and the values that shaped them, which took on a national significance when viewed collectively. Civil religion seemed to tend toward idolatry -- that the nation-state was the thing to be worshipped.
There was a common view of God among the founders, and it's not unlike the one that pertains today, which is he was a Creator God; he weighs prayers; he's attentive to history; he will, in an afterlife, reward or punish us for our conduct in this. Those basic standards would probably get a quorum of the founding fathers. They were very careful to avoid sectarian allusions. Jesus is not a huge figure in the public documents, even in the ones meant for private consumption.
I make a distinction - my more theologically conservative friends dislike this - between public religion and private religion. There is a strong school of thought that says this is idolatrous and unsound and that you cannot say one God is blessing America, or we trust in one God on our currency and have, in my case, the God of Abraham in private. There has to be one God; if there are two, then you've missed the mark. As a practical matter, I simply reject that. I understand why people believe it. I understand the theology. But if we are going to make our way through what George Eliot called the dim lights in tangled circumstance of life on this side of paradise, then we're going to have to make those compromises. I think that's an acceptable one.
You can put a crèche in a churchyard. You can put a crèche in your front yard. You can put a crèche in your house. Put the reindeer on the cross, whatever it is you want to do. One has to be confident enough in one's faith to figure it's a pretty poor God who needs shopping malls and courthouse lawns to support his cause. If he's God, he's got it taken care of. I don't think he needs Santa, the menorah, and the crèche.
MR. NOVAK: [O]n the Christmas Wars, the notion of religious liberty, as the Americans grasp it, as you see in Jefferson's Declaration of Religious Liberty, and as you see it very much in Madison -- is that religion was the duty which man owes to his creator. But if a duty, then a right. The duty is to follow God according to conscience. This is the Christian and Jewish part -- first from Judaism, second from Christianity -- the duty to God as an individual in conscience. That's distinctive in world history.
But then, the self-denying part of the ordinance is -- and I think this is the really beautiful thing -- it does not apply just to Jews and just to Christians; it's universal. It applied to atheists, to Mohammedans, Hindus. They said this expressly in the debates in Virginia. It's the most extraordinary achievement of human history on this axis, I think, just brilliantly conceived.
Now, when I went to Korea, I was amazed that it was this time of the year and Seoul was filled with Christmas decorations. They may be 30 percent Christian in Korea. And in Japan, many fewer -- I mean, they'll never have to worry about putting the Christ back into Christmas in Japan. But Korea, then, also had the Buddhist month where everything is in purple. And one other, I don't know if it's Confucian or whatever. So they space the calendar out; they recognize the different traditions; but nobody gets all the recognition. You ought to represent the whole pluralism of the American people.
God may not need crèches in malls and in courthouses, but human beings do. This is where I think Madison went wrong. Madison argued for such a pure conception of religious liberty that it was angelic. It would be good if you were pure spirit, but we're not that way. We've got to do things physically that we can see and touch. Madison believed you shouldn't have chaplains in the Army or Navy. But as president, he couldn't do that. They forced him to abide.
CARYLE MURPHY (The Washington Post): Mr. Novak, you said that God doesn't need crèches but humans do. But do those crèches have to be in publicly financed locations? Why not just have the crèches in homes, churches, other facilities like that that are privately owned?
MR. NOVAK: You can argue that if you think of religion as solely private, a private matter, but I don't think either Judaism or Christianity can be construed that way. They are addressed to our bodies and to ourselves as public creatures. Aristotle said humans are political animals and we have political as well as private roles.
MS. MURPHY: It raises a big practical problem because this country is far more religiously plural today than it was at the time of the founding fathers. So if Christians feel that they have a right to put crèches, for example, in airports or schools, what about the Muslims and the Jews and the Hindus and the Sikhs?
MR. NOVAK: Why not have them all? The Seattle airport is 40 million square feet, or something like that. It seems to me there's room for them all. I don't see any problem with that.