Equitable laws, a generally prosperous economy and a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth are all important ingredients of a cohesive society but probably do not fully account for the surprising social tranquillity of a nation as variegated as the United States. American Civil Religion, however, provides an emotional bond between people of all faiths. Perhaps even more pertinent is the bridge it provides between the races. Nothing is more corrosive to the social fabric than ethnic antagonism and its stimulus to deep-seated tribal loyalties. The fact that black churches have equal standing with all the others, and Martin Luther King is widely accepted as a national figure of transcendent moral authority, provides a strong signal of inclusion to African Americans.
A pertinent question about American Civil Religion is whether or not this meta-creed possesses the necessary cohesive power to bind an increasingly disparate nation to common standards of morality and a common purpose in warfare. The United States, as its ethnicity grows less British and European, has few sources of cohesion save language, and even its common language is under threat in some regions from Spanish.
Conservatives fear damage to the social fabric from the decay of religious values. In the United States, they see the once unifying culture of Anglo-Protestantism as being under steady erosion from the pressures of secularism, multiculturalism, and the divisive assertion of group rights of various kinds over and beyond the individual rights promised in the Constitution. An obvious way to strengthen cohesion would be through religious education in the school years, the one major experience that everyone has in common. But religion has been largely evicted from American public schools, an event that would doubtless have dumbfounded the framers of the Constitution. They directed Congress to make no law respecting an establishment of religion but that was not because they were secularists. It was because they didn’t want the members of any Christian sect taxed to support another sect.
In the eighteenth century, some 95 percent of the American population belonged to Protestant sects of one kind or another. Almost everyone accepted that morality must be taught through religion, and that religion must be taught in schools. At that time, in the words of Noah Feldman, a legal scholar who has written about the history of church-state issues, “The notion of teaching children morality by some means that did not involve religion would hardly have entered the American mind. Morality, it was understood, derived from religion, and for even the most liberal of the Protestants who made up the northeastern elite in the 1820’s and ’30s, that meant morality came from the Bible, especially the Gospels. Without religion there could be no foundation stone on which to rest the basic values of honesty and rule following. None of the theorists of the new common schools advocated keeping religion out of the classroom. No religion would have meant no morality, and no morality would have meant that the schools could not achieve their society-shaping function.”312
The political solution arrived at under the founders and their immediate successors was called nonsectarianism. It consisted of teaching in schools a generic form of Protestantism that was acceptable to all the various sects and was based on reading the King James Version of the Bible. Nonsectarianism worked well until the tide of Catholic immigration starting in the 1820s.
The Catholics began to object that it was a Protestant idea to learn religion from the Bible, not from priests’ interpretation, and that they were being taxed to support schools they could not use. The Protestant majority said, in effect, that that was tough luck. This failure of the two Christian denominations to agree left them vulnerable, a century later, to a movement Feldman calls legal secularism. The legal secularists did not explicitly seek to abolish religion, merely to build a wall of separation between church and state with the formal goal of protecting religious minorities. The chief minority in the legal developments of the 1950s was that of Jews who, like the Catholics, did not welcome paying for religious instruction they had no use for. “American Jews,” Feldman writes, “gradually began to play an important part in the development of the strategies of legal secularism beginning in the postwar era.”313
The Christian churches felt secure in the 1950s and did not oppose the legal secularists until too late. Legal secularism was not addressed to the electorate, which would doubtless have rejected it flat, just to the Supreme Court, an elite group culturally attuned to the secularists’ arguments. “To embrace legal secularism was, for the Court, continuous with a set of liberal values characteristic of enlightened citizens and educated jurists,” Feldman writes.314 The outcome was that Christianity was evicted from the classroom.
Some 95 percent of Americans are Christians or belong to no religion. Minorities—including Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, together make up less than 5 percent. To protect the rights of a 5 percent minority by denying religious education to 95 percent of the population was a solution that could seem satisfactory to few besides lawyers. As the continued tussles over religious education attest, particularly the assaults on teaching evolution, it is not a fully accepted or stable solution.
To anyone approaching the issue from the perspective of social cohesion, morality is one issue in which diversity and minority exceptions are distinct drawbacks. The educational years, it could be argued, are a unique and invaluable opportunity to inculcate a common frame of moral reference in an otherwise diverse and heterogeneous population.
Many liberals, however, see no need to strengthen religion as a source of national cohesion in the United States and regard the churches as wielding too much political power already. Conservatives fear that despite the United States’ lively religious marketplace, religion in general is likely to yield eventually to the strong tides of secularism that have already undermined church-going in most European countries.
Secularism and Sacred Texts
Two serious assaults on religious belief, or at least on the three text-based monotheisms, have been the rise of scientific knowledge, including especially the theory of evolution, and “higher criticism,” the analysis of Bible texts spearheaded by nineteenth-century German scholars such as Julius Wellhausen.
Science has provided an increasingly comprehensive explanation for the material world, one which is now largely complete, in principle if not in detail, except for singular events such as the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. This knowledge, a soaring triumph of the rational mind, has from the seventeenth century onward eroded a major intellectual pillar of religious belief, that of religion’s claim to explain the natural world.
A second challenge to religious belief emerged from the nineteenth-century practitioners of higher criticism who showed that the Bible, far from being the inerrant product of divine inspiration, was cobbled together by a number of different human hands whose varied stitching, once pointed out, was all too visible. In other words the Pentateuch, as one affronted cleric summarized the charge, was not Mosaic but mosaic.
Higher criticism was particularly painful for Protestant faiths. Catholicism and Judaism had always emphasized their official interpretations of the sacred text rather than the text itself. But a major element of the Reformation was Luther’s belief in the literal truth of the Bible, a tenet firmly endorsed by the Puritans.
Catholics and Jews, after the initial shocks had worn off, adapted to the challenges from higher criticism and science by interpreting parts of their sacred texts metaphorically. They were followed by liberal Protestants. But the conservative wing of the Protestant movement, instead of hedging its commitment to the literal truth position in light of all this new information, opted to double down its bet. Fundamentalists owe their name to a series of essays called The Fundamentals: A Foundation of Truth, which were published between 1910 and 1915 with the help of a large grant from Lyman Stewart, the head of the Union Oil Company of California. The five basic tenets of this position were the inerrancy of the scriptures; the virgin birth and the divine nature of Jesus; the doctrine of atonement; the resurrection; and the authenticity of Jesus�
�� miracles.315
By the beginning of the twentieth century it seemed to many intellectuals that industrial societies like those of Europe and America would inevitably become more secular and that the role of religion would fade, perhaps to nothing. This prediction has turned out to be correct only in part.
Religiosity, as measured by church attendance and questions about the importance of religion, is consistently highest in agrarian countries (like Uganda and Peru), lower in developing industrial countries (like Mexico and Turkey) and lower still in advanced industrial countries (like France and New Zealand). This confirms the notion that religion tends to wane as countries modernize.
Further confirmation can be seen in the figures for religious participation in Europe, as measured by the proportion of people saying they attended church once or more times a week. Some 22 percent of the French population did so in 1975, a figure that had dwindled to 5 percent by 1998. Church attendance in Ireland fell from 93 percent to 65 percent over the same period, in Germany from 26 percent to 15 percent.316
Belief in God has also declined but not to nearly as low levels as church attendance. The proportion of the public saying they believed in God declined in Sweden from 80 percent in 1947 to 46 percent in 2001. In France the drop was from 66 percent to 56 percent over the same period. In the United States, ever the exception, 94 percent of the population said they believed in God in 1947 and exactly the same percentage did so in 2001.317
These fluctuations are easily explicable under the thesis presented here, that the capacity for religious behavior is inherent in human nature. The presence of the capacity does not mean it will always be fully exercised. People evidently feel less need to participate in religious activity when, as Norris and Inglehart propose, they grow up in Scandinavian-style states that are not threatened by war and that operate highly efficient welfare systems.
Conversely, a higher expression of religious behavior would be expected among populations that have endured severe stress, and in countries like the United States where there is a vigorous competition among churches for members.
Despite fluctuations, religious activity seems unlikely to disappear as long as the propensity for religious behavior is genetically embedded in the human neural circuitry. Moreover, even if only a small fraction of a population is highly religious, its values may still be shared by most other people and remain embedded in the national culture. “Although only about 5% of the Swedish public attends church weekly,” write Norris and Inglehart, “the Swedish public as a whole manifests a distinctive Protestant value system that they hold in common with the citizens of other historically Protestant societies.... Today, these values are not transmitted primarily by the church, but by the educational system and the mass media.” The result is a homogenization of values across different religions in a country, with the values of Dutch Catholics, say, being more similar to those of Dutch Protestants than to those of French or Spanish Catholics.318
The ancient function of religious behavior, to bind the in-group in defense against the out-group, seems likely to endure, even if fewer and fewer people attend church. And with the convergence of values between different branches of the same religion, the in-group/out-group polarization of society can occur on a scale that transcends the tribe or nation-state, that of a whole civilization.
Religion and the Fault Lines Between Civilizations
The global politics of the twentieth century were long dominated by the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the West. With the collapse of this ideological struggle, new divisions have surfaced, notably a rekindling of the differences between Islam and the West, and a looming tension between China, a resurgent power, and its neighbors.
At first glance, these global fault lines have nothing to do with religion, as if this ancient coordinator of human societies had no role to play in a global economic order founded on rational pursuit of self-interest. But in fact religion, in some observers’ view, has turned out to be more critical than either economics or ideology in shaping the highest level of political alignments.
In a 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington predicted that the principal political divisions of the world would revert to being those that delimit civilizations. Since the Peace of Westphalia that separated church and state, Westerners have been used to thinking of nation states as the chief actors on the world stage. Tensions now occur across much larger groupings which are in effect those of civilizations, Huntington argued. A civilization consists of people who view themselves as belonging to a common culture. A civilization transcends two of the usual binding forces of nations, language and ethnicity. The binding force it does not transcend, and which is therefore most central to it, is that of religion.
“Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations,” Huntington writes.319 He sees the world as divided into seven principal civilizations—Western (Europe and the United States), Confucian (China), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu (India), Slavic-Orthodox (Russia) and Latin American. These civilizations, he says, “are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.”320
These differences are of long standing and far more fundamental than political differences. The fault line that divides Western Christianity from Orthodox Christianity goes back to the great schism of 1054. Islam and Western Christianity have been at war, on and off, for 1,300 years. “The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations,” Huntington writes.
He lists eight characteristics that define Western culture. These are the legacy from the civilizations of Greece and Rome; Western Christianity in the form of its two main branches, Catholicism and Protestantism ; European languages; the separation of church and state; the rule of law; social pluralism; representative bodies; and a tradition of individual rights and liberties.
Why is Slavic-Orthodox civilization so different? Because none of these characteristics are familiar to it with the exception of the classical legacy, and even that was bequeathed through the Byzantines with different overtones. The eight Western features are also alien to other civilizations, particularly that of Islam, which does not recognize any separation between church and state.
Despite the profound differences between Western civilization and the others, Americans often assume that their political values of democracy, pluralism and individual rights are universal and urge that they be adopted everywhere. “What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest,” Huntington observes.321 War between two or more of the seven civilizations is far from inevitable, but the polarizing effect of religion-based cultures causes many tensions to emerge as tensions between civilizations.
The centrality of religion to these arrangements is no surprise, given the arguments developed in the preceding pages. Human societies have several kinds of linkage but religion is the only one that binds people on an emotional level, signaling who has common values and whose values are alien. Language and even ethnicity can be split—a person can be bilingual, or half French and half Dutch—but religion confers an indivisible identity; it’s hard to be half Catholic and half Muslim.
Each society adapts its religion to its own needs, so it is no surprise that religion does not play the same leading role in every civilization. In China, unlike in Christendom or the Islamic world, a single ethnic group, the Han, constitutes a majority of the population and dominates all other ethnic groups. Ethnic cohesion among the Han is strong and it matters less if they share no particular religion or ideology. Indeed the Chinese government, officially atheist, has long regarded religions as potential sources of opposition and has not hesitated to bring them under control by whatever means necessary. The Falun Gong movement, a Buddhist-tinged mixture of morals and breathing exercises, has been severely persecuted by Beijing since the mid-1990s. Even the fading of communism in China has so far posed no obvious threat to stability, whereas the erosion of the same ideology in the Soviet Union led to that empire’s disin
tegration into units shaped by the traditional cohesive forces of ethnicity, language and religion.
The cohesive powers of religion should be of particular interest to nations and civilizations in which other kinds of social bonds are being eroded, such as Europe and the United States. Europe is engaged in the bold experiment of integrating nations that have fought one another for centuries into a structure that will make serious internal wars much less likely. The shared heritage of Christianity would be a common bond. But the modern disdain for religion is evident in the new constitution of the European Union, which does not even mention Christianity, the historical creed of all member countries and an indelible part of their culture and history.
Religion continues to play a central role in the Islamic world, though not altogether happily. Islam began as a religion of empire, a seamless web of authority for a prophet-ruler, and for most of its history has been a highly successful religion. But in recent centuries most Islamic nations have failed to adapt to the more productive European model of competing centers of power within a state.
For the Islamic world, a civilization that until the Renaissance exceeded Europe in science, military strength, economic power and religious tolerance, decline has been steady and painful. “By all the standards that matter in the modern world—economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low,” writes the Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis. 322
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