RELIGION AND THE STATE

(As a brief follow-up to the post below:) There are primarily three groups of people who would argue that my dichotomy between religion and the state is misguided:

• Christian Reconstructionists, who believe that the U.S. is and always has been a "Christian nation" (see David Neiwert's recent piece here),


• intellectual conservatives who believe for one reason or another that Christian or Judeo-Christian traditions are integral to the success of government in the U.S. (see the folks at Claremont, for example; Justice Scalia should also be put in this category, as well as President Bush),


• and Christians who see themselves in the tradition of religiously-based activism; Martin Luther King, Jr. is probably the most famous example of someone who argues that the best interpretations of American political principles coincide with the best interpretation of christian thought.

My loyalties lie more with the last group than with the other two, practicioners of which ignore the contributions of enlightenment thinking to the question of the dangers of religion as such. Obviously a more fine-grained analysis is necessary in any particular situation; obviously enlightenment thinking can be criticized for its inattention to human sociality and its relationship to shared religious belief. Nonetheless, I think that it is incredibly important to underline the deep sense in which U.S. constitutional principles are not only compatible with a skeptical view of religious power but also may in fact require such a view. I may be wrong here, but I don't think so right now!

P.S.: if you're in any of my classes and you're reading this, please note that nothing that I have written here will determine my approach to any of your work. Just ask former students of mine! And please feel free to talk with me about these issues if you have any concerns. My basic pedagogical belief is that you will not get smarter by learning to think the way that I do; you will only get smarter by attempting to articulate your own intuitions in any given area.