Perils of Freedom

Religious freedom is one of the fundamentals of the American creed. But how does religion fare in the free society of the U.S.? This week four scholars--Protestant, Jewish, Roman Catholic--deal with the question in a new study sponsored by the Fund for the Republic. * All express a surprisingly common concern: U.S. religion is in more peril than U.S. freedom.

In "the widely prevalent and intellectually debilitating relativism" of American life, writes Presbyterian William Lee Miller, Yale Divinity School professor, religion is being spiritually sapped. For Americans religion is apt to be "the belief in believing, the faith in faith"--exemplified by the radio program called This I Believe, which had "plenty of 'believe' and quite a bit of 'I' but not very much of 'this.' " There is an inclination to hold almost all positions to be equally valuable and true.

Religion-in-General. The loss of so-called absolutes is not the problem. "It is rather the disappearance of trust in the proposition that the mind and conscience are capable of making any genuine discriminations at all." Nor, as Dr. Miller sees it, is anti-intellectualism at the heart of the matter. "It is not that we do not have enough respect for other people called intellectuals; it is that we do not have enough respect for our own intellects."

For "positive thinking" and "official Washington piety," says Dr. Miller, the justifications are "sincerity" and the vast ''numbers of people who respond favorably." What Americans are driving toward "is a shallow and implicitly compulsory common creed ... It is epitomized in the patriotic-religious pronouncements of the President and the Joint Chiefs' effort to formulate an ideology ('militant liberty') for us all." It is "a religion-in-general, superficial and syncretistic, destructive of the profounder elements of faith."

Modern Jacobins? There is agreement on this point from Roman Catholic Layman William Clancy, education director of the Church Peace Union (an interfaith organization aimed at abolishing war), and Arthur Cohen, a Jew and publisher of Meridian Books Inc. Both agree that (as Cohen puts it) religion in the U.S. is apt to be "ineffective," victimized by "internal confusion and disorder," generally "deteriorating," and that (in Clancy's words) religion is apt to be a matter of good fellowship and good works, with the American "consensus" on moral and philosophic principles growing ever narrovver.

Cohen and Clancy, in notably parallel views, attack the extremists on either side of the running church-and-state debate. Clancy asserts that the all-out "separationists" are really a minority, and just as dogmatic in their way as the dogmatic churches they oppose. Cohen refers to the same group as "latterday Jacobins." Instead of regarding the secular as the neutral arena where conflicts of principle may be fought out, he says, the Jacobins have turned secularism into a weapon.

Public or Private Values. Cohen defends both Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism against the secularist charges that they are incompatible with democracy; just because one's neighbor holds different religious opinions, says Cohen, is no reason to accuse him of being disloyal to a pluralist, democratic society. Clancy, on the other hand, attacks those Catholics who are trying to "impose on the public values that, in this time and place, have become private values," as is often the case in censorship fights. Such Catholics, says Clancy, "act as though the last few centuries had never happened." Both Clancy and Cohen agree that the Jacobins, as well as the extreme advocates of "religious establishment," are enemies of the free society, that both seek to make "the law a weapon against heresy."

The report generally agrees that legal action cannot excuse all concerned from using their brains and consciences. So far as the law can act, however, Mark de Wolfe Howe, Harvard law professor (and a nondenominational Protestant) has some significant suggestions. He seems far less worried by the religious partisans than by the Jacobins. He notes that there are a number of possible "aids to religion which do not appreciably affect the religious or other constitutional rights of individuals." Under the First Amendment, he feels, even such aids should not be offered by the Federal Government. But he thinks that state governments, similarly limited by past court interpretations of the 14th Amendment, ought to be free to offer them whenever they choose. For instance, there is no good reason, says Howe, why states should not settle such questions as whether public schools may permit receptive students to accept the gift of Bibles. And "all the current demands which fly the colors of religious liberty" are not necessarily and automatically "entitled to preferential respect."

Overextended Virtues. Summing up, Yale's Dr. Miller notes that most of the faults in the American system of religious pluralism are "closely related to the merits of the free society. They remain problems because they are linked to the very nature of freedom." Pragmatism, relativism, drives against dissent, the churches' preoccupation with social reform instead of spiritual matters--all have their good side; in each case, "the fault is the overextension of virtue."

To the still unique problems of religion in a free society, concludes Dr. Miller, there is one answer: "The retention, restatement and recapture of that transcendent dimension, for something like it is necessary if a society is to recognize the claims of both truth and liberty without allowing either to destroy the other."

* Aided by Manhattan Attorney Maximilian W. Kempner, who contributed a survey and analysis of Supreme Court decisions dealing with religious freedom in the U.S.

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