The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  The fact was that the stridency of the religious right’s demands for America to return traditionalist Christianity to the cultural mainstream only made most other parties less inclined to address issues of religious equity. The rhetoric of the religious right about “taking back” America and its institutions only made it easier for the more secular-minded people to dismiss religion as simply a threat to diversity in the public sphere. Conservative Christian attacks on the feminist and gay agendas reinforced the tendency of the champions of cultural inclusivism to favor a more thoroughly secular culture. So even though the value of allowing a diversity of viewpoints to be heard was increasingly being recognized in the cultural mainstream, proponents of diversity were seldom inclined to think about how to include a diversity of religious viewpoints.

  So as the era of the culture wars emerged by about 1980, none of the major parties had a well-developed heritage of thinking about how to accommodate religious diversity as it related to the public domain. Even as other sorts of multiculturalism were reaching the peak of their influence, most Americans lacked any adequate tradition for dealing with deeply held religious differences in the public sphere.

  Cross-cultural comparisons often help people see their own culture in a new light. In this case, the peculiarities of typically American ways of dealing with religious pluralism can be brought into focus by comparing them with an alternative view that arose in a slightly different cultural context. This alternative view does not resolve all the remarkably complex problems regarding religion and culture. But it does offer a starting point or framework for thinking about them that differs from the dominant American models. This outlook was developed in the Netherlands by the Dutch theologian, churchman, political leader, and publicist Abraham Kuyper in the late nineteenth century. Not everything in Kuyper is suited to addressing twenty-first-century American issues. He was a man of his times, and his outlooks were sometimes parochial. They need to be updated if they are to be applied to contemporary settings, as indeed they have been by a number of his current admirers. For understanding the underlying fundamental issues, however, the differences between his starting point and the treatment of the issue in most of the American Protestant heritage are nonetheless instructive.9

  Abraham Kuyper, who lived from 1837 to 1920, was easily one of the leading modern thinkers regarding religion and culture. He also had, not incidentally, an extraordinarily multifaceted career. Trained as a theologian, he began as pastor in the Reformed Church, which had formerly been the nation’s state church. His efforts to reform that denomination led to a division and the founding of a new Reformed denomination. He was also the editor of an influential newspaper as well as a prolific writer. He helped to found a university, and he then taught there as a theologian. And in addition to these ecclesiastical, editorial, academic, and intellectual activities, he also had an impressive political career: he founded a political party that he long headed, was a member of parliament, and served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper, who was first of all a person of principles, also had the energy and force of will to create reforming institutions that would embody those principles.

  Kuyper’s principles are illuminating especially because of how they contrast with the dominant American models. His most helpful insights reflect in part the differences between the cultural and intellectual settings of the Netherlands and the United States. Late nineteenth-century America had been indelibly shaped by the Civil War. Because that war had been about preserving the Union, national unification was a dominant theme in the social thought of the era. The two political parties that emerged from the war were “liberal” fraternal twins, both essentially nonideological. Faced with a flood of immigration after the war, the great social challenge was to assimilate peoples with all sorts of differences into this cultural-political mainstream. The Netherlands also was dealing with issues of rising liberalism and national consolidation. It had some heritage of religious diversity, but was relatively stable in its religious and ethnic makeup. In 1848 the Dutch state gave up efforts to regulate religious groups, and the central question for the next generation, as Kuyper saw it, was how to preserve distinctive subcommunities, especially religious subcommunities, in the face of growing secular trends and modern pressures toward uniformity. Owing in no small part to Kuyper’s own efforts, the Netherlands, which had a parliamentary system, developed multiple ideologically and religiously defined parties. So, in the Netherlands, unlike in the American two-party setting, enlightenment-based liberalism was only one option among many. Another difference from the typical American outlooks was that Americans tended to think about things in practical ways, from the bottom up, rather than from the top down; Kuyper, by contrast, was working in an intellectual setting dominated by European idealism, in which it was characteristic to look at things holistically from the top down. Kuyper himself adopted a holistic stance, but with principles derived not from modern idealism, but from his Augustinian Reformed heritage, in which God, the creator of all reality, must be the starting point for all understanding.

  One especially important feature of Kuyper’s outlook is that it illustrates how epistemology, or the study of the nature of knowledge, can help shape social policy. Kuyper’s approach literally provides a place to start in rethinking these issues. Most American Protestants regarded science and reason as ideologically neutral, and presented faith as something that went beyond the kind of objective but limited knowledge that science and reason could produce. Kuyper, by way of contrast, worked from a principle enunciated by St. Augustine: “I believe in order to understand.” Faith preceded understanding, and so faith informed and shaped understanding. Working from this principle, Kuyper insisted that reason, natural science, and methodological naturalism were not ideologically neutral. Even the most technical of natural sciences, he observed, operated within the framework of the faith, or higher commitments, of the practitioner.10

  At the purely technical level, people of various faiths (either religious or secular higher commitments) might work side by side and get the same technical results. But as soon as they reflected on the larger implications of their science or their reasoning, they would begin to understand those results in radically different contexts. As an Augustinian Christian, Kuyper developed this principle as it related to differences in the thinking of Christians and non-Christians—that is, of those who by God’s grace understood reality through the lens of Christian faith as revealed in Scripture, on the one hand, and of those, on the other hand, who viewed reality through other lenses. Regarding that division, which for Christians is the most fundamental one, Kuyper could say, “there are two kinds of people and two kinds of science.” Kuyper used “science” here in the broad sense of any intellectual inquiry.11

  The significance of things, he insisted, depended on their relationships, and so Christians perceived everything (trees, birds, humans, and even social institutions, the arts, labor, capital, and so on) in relation to their creator, the triune God. Those who did their science and reasoning in the context of recognizing those relationships saw dimensions and implications of things that other people did not apprehend. Reflecting on the relationship of reality to its loving creator would reshape the meaning of even the humblest enterprises. Even though from an Augustinian Christian perspective, the greatest divide was between those who recognized and trusted the triune God of Scripture and those who did not, in fact the human race was divided among peoples of many different highest commitments. So one could say, following Kuyper, that there were many highest commitments that provided frameworks within which differing peoples did their science and other reasoning.12

  These views are closely related to a conception of pluralism in the public arena that has been characterized as “confessional pluralism” or “principled pluralism.” Such pluralism would attempt to take the differences among varieties of both religious and nonreligious perspectives seriously. By way of contrast, in the dominan
t midcentury American liberal-moderate view of building toward consensus, scientific outlooks were often presented as ideologically neutral. For instance, when the US Supreme Court in the 1960s was ruling against prayer and the promotion of particular religious viewpoints in public schools, it suggested that an impartial alternative would be to teach “objectively” about religion. In the Kuyperian approach to pluralism, there is no conceding that modern scientific methods are objective so far as they go and hence could serve as neutral ways to view religious faiths. Rather, the outlook recognizes from the outset that the modern world is divided by fundamental differences in underlying faiths and commitments, some of which have nontheistic naturalism as their starting points and some of which have various forms of theism and openness to the supernatural as their starting points. Hence, societies, especially in their schooling and intellectual lives, but also in their public conversations and debates about morality, justice, and the like, should be built around the recognition that varieties of viewpoints, including varieties of both religious and secular viewpoints, exist and ought to be included in a genuine pluralism. There would be no illusion, as developed in the American case, that a national consensus might be built on an ideologically neutral basis, and that therefore neutral scientific models provided the best hope for finding objective foundations for such a public consensus.13 In contrast to Kuyper, the mainstreams of American Protestantism from the eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century shared a tradition of having reconciled their faith to the moderate American enlightenment, so that they rarely offered any critique of the idea that science and reason were, in principle, ideologically neutral. That was true of both theological liberals and conservatives. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, was characteristic of the liberal outlook in conceding autonomy to scientific inquiry, so long as it kept to its proper domain of nature and did not intrude into the areas of human freedom. American theological conservatives, in the meantime, had been shaped by enlightenment commonsense philosophy and typically insisted that objective science and reason would support biblical faith. Even when they viewed Darwinian evolution as hostile to Christianity, they typically insisted that they were not against objective natural science, but that truly objective science would support the biblical account.14

  Abraham Kuyper developed his views explicitly as a critique of the enlightenment ideal of a neutral universal reason, yet he was not a postmodern relativist. Rather than holding that various claims to “truth” were artificial human constructions, he believed that God had created a reality that all people could know, in part if never completely. So he believed there was a place for shared rationality in holding a society together. Even though, as a result of human sinfulness, people were sharply divided as to their first commitments, they were still creatures of God who shared some commonalities in experiencing the same created order. So they also shared some important elements of common rationality and moral sensibilities, such as a sense of justice. Even though differing peoples need to recognize that no one stands on neutral ground, but all are shaped by their highest commitments, they can still go on to look for shared principles on which they can agree as a basis for working together. Kuyper believed that since all people share experience in God’s ordered reality, such areas of agreement among peoples of various religious or secular faiths could be considerable. Kuyper often spoke of God’s “common grace,” by which he meant goods that were extended to all people, such as natural resources, in which all can share, and common institutions for ordering and keeping peace in societies.

  Abraham Kuyper combined the ideal of “confessional pluralism” in the public arena with an emphasis on recognizing and respecting a multiplicity of authorities in the structures of society. He saw these structures as reflecting a God-ordained ordering of social reality that people of all sorts of faiths could recognize as beneficial. Governments are one sort of agency of authority, but churches (and other religious groups), families, schools, businesses, agencies of the arts, and so forth are institutions with their own authority, each in its own sphere. The primary function of government is to promote justice and to act as a sort of referee, patrolling the boundaries among the spheres of society, protecting the sovereignty due within each sphere, adjudicating conflicts, and ensuring equal rights and equal protections for confessional groups, so far as that is possible. In this richly pluralistic view, society thrives when it promotes the health and integrity of what more recently have often been called “mediating institutions.” Such institutions likewise should stay within their spheres of competence. So, for instance, just as the government does not have competence to rule on confessional matters for churches, so churches and other religious groups should not be aspiring to dictate to the government and to impose their own views on the whole.15

  Such a conception of pluralism, although developed in a specifically Augustinian framework, would be compatible with many other outlooks and would help provide an alternative to the culture-wars mentality that has plagued American life for the past generation. Clearly, because of its theological premises, updated versions of Kuyperian pluralism would be most useful to Christians. And various sorts of Christians would need to take the lead in providing alternatives to the populist Christian neglect of issues regarding equity and pluralism. For a better understanding of what a Kuyperian outlook might look like today, one could do no better than to start with a 2011 book by Richard Mouw, Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction. Or one might explore the website of the Center for Public Justice, which provides examples of “principled pluralism” and suggests readings on its various dimensions. For Christians, especially theologically traditional Christians, the resources are already there for moving beyond culture-wars thinking and the either-or simplicities favored by the American political process. At the same time, although it is unlikely that there will ever be many “atheists for Kuyper,” secularists might look at him simply in terms of comparative intellectual history as an alternative to characteristic American assumptions regarding religion and public life. Even though secularists do not share the underlying assumptions of Kuyper’s outlook, they might nonetheless share his recognition that faiths (whether secular or religious) shape understanding, his concern for equity, and hence his regard for the merits of taking religious outlooks seriously in any discussion of public diversity.

  Although there may be signs of change, American society is still caught in the polarized pattern that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. At one pole is a liberal culture that includes most of mainstream academia and entertainment and that is self-consciously pluralistic in the inclusivist sense, but is also overwhelmingly secular, so that it does not have much of a way to deal with religious diversity in public life. At the other pole is a predominantly religious, conservative, popular political culture that does not often have a well-thought-out concept of pluralism that would provide equitable roles for non-Christian and secularist viewpoints in the public domain. Partisans of each side regard the other side as essentially imperialistic. Secular liberals believe their freedoms are threatened by a conservative Christian takeover. Conservative Christians believe that secularists are excluding their Christian views and using big government to expand their own dominion. The fears of each side are exaggerated, but those fears have some basis in a society that does not have well-developed traditions or conceptions of pluralism that can embrace a wide range of both religious and nonreligious viewpoints.

  Part of the problem is that Christian conservatives and secularized liberals each often act as though they see themselves as the proper heirs to the mid-twentieth-century consensus. Conservatives view that consensus as more Christian than it was. Secular liberals today may deny that they advocate any sort of consensus outlook, since they are open to embracing ethnic and racial differences. Yet, when it comes to thinking about religiously based differences, they are likely to sound like midcentury consensus thinkers, who believed that views congenial to secular naturalism were the only ones th
at should be taken seriously in the public domain. To the extent that they would insist on such a rule, they are in practice asking religious people to assimilate into a melting pot defined by naturalistic intellectual and cultural norms. Each side needs to recognize that neither a religiously based nor a naturalistically based consensus could ever be adequately inclusive.

  At the same time that the Kuyperian heritage provides a starting point for thinking about how to take religious differences seriously, its emphasis on common grace also provides a rationale for addressing the troubling issue of how people of fundamentally different outlooks may listen to each other and work together, rather than polarizing around their differences. Politicized American evangelicalism and fundamentalism have rarely addressed this issue well in the past generation. Despite its American enlightenment heritage, which acknowledged a common creator and some shared human common sense, politicized evangelicalism has tended to speak only in terms of dichotomies, as though the only choices were between a fully Christian society and a wholly secular one. A Kuyperian outlook provides a basis for recognizing that there can be both radical differences in fundamental outlooks and also a basis for social and political cooperation, based on the God-given principle of common grace.

  Since the 1980s, there has been increasing awareness that religion is not going to go away as a major factor in public life. That reality became widely apparent soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when religion, especially Islam, emerged as a leading force in world politics. For Americans, there was no ignoring that reality after the events of 9/11. In the meantime, both Christianity and Islam were growing at remarkable rates in many parts of the world. In the United States, conservative Christianity, rather than fading away, became a major long-term feature of American politics. Some scholars even declared that in the twenty-first century we had entered a “post-secular age.”16 That assessment may prove to be an overstatement—it is hard to tell. One thing is clear, though. It no longer makes sense to maintain, as many of the best observers assumed at midcentury, that secularization is steadily and inevitably advancing, and that religion is receding as the world modernizes. By now there is no denying that the interrelationships among modernity, secularity, and religion are far more complex than that. All three of these may be advancing at the same time.