The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  On the other hand, if by subordinate it is meant that religion will surrender its independence to the political order to merely justify, or even sanctify, its practices; that religion will abdicate its role as critic of governmental and state practices; that religion will no longer provide moral visions and ethical principles by which advocates of justice may call society to judgment, then religion is without question morally insubordinate to and politically independent of the political realm. Its functional subordination by no means entails its moral subordination.

  The difference is that functional subordination is the very premise by which American religions can claim their freedom to express faith and exercise their belief, especially in the social and public sphere. But moral insubordination is the way religions preserve their integrity and viability and perform their real worth to the republic by calling it to judgment in relation to their specific moral visions. Moreover, as I will more fully argue later, if the moral visions of religion are to have public persuasion, they must be cast in terms that transcend narrow or sectarian religious language and concern, demonstrating their relevance by their prophetic judgment of, or application to, the nation in compelling public terms.31

  Given these distinctions, Hauerwas and Baxter’s worries that religion becomes private and subordinate to the state in the First Amendment are dissolved when we bring more precision to our understanding of the terms of religion’s relation to the state. If Hauerwas and Baxter’s real concern is to resist the privatization and moral subordination of Christianity, their fight is not with constitutional views of religion, but with forms of Christian experience and belief that claim that the church’s most perfect social expression is limited to ecclesial expressions, as Hauerwas and Baxter proclaim.

  Ironically, then, it is Hauerwas and Baxter who turn out to be the real opponents of the full social embodiment of Christianity. By refusing to acknowledge the legitimate expression of Christian faith outside the perimeters of the church, Hauerwas and Baxter contribute to a fatal narrowing of religious belief, a position that has led to Hauerwas being characterized (fairly I think) as a sectarian.32 Their sectarian belief conflicts with Hauerwas and Baxter’s intent to resist the privatization, and indirectly, the subordination of Christianity.

  Their views also lead them to deemphasize the crucial features of the churchstate debate that have the best chance to illumine the historical conflicts over religious tolerance, plurality, difference, and diversity, issues that also clearly affect our contemporary religious and cultural scene. More important, their position also reduces the potential impact of the gospel on the lives of Christians struggling to understand the proper role of faith in contemporary political debates.

  Hauerwas and Baxter’s deficiencies are further magnified in the way they make analogies between freedom of speech and freedom of religion in pressing their case. Drawing on an essay by Stanley Fish, the authors claim that just as freedom of speech has paved the way for “indifferentism” in speech, so freedom of religion has led to “religious indifferentism.” According to Hauerwas and Baxter, Fish claims that speech has become a matter of indifference because it has been severed from an account of the good that assigns value to “free speech,” which in reality has builtin limits against those expressions its exponents deem harmful to its flourishing.

  In this view, freedom of speech is really an illusion. Furthermore, all the distinctions that Will made about religion find analogous expression in “a private sphere not only of speech and ideas, but also of ‘mere speech’ and ‘mere ideas,’ of speech and ideas understood apart from any substantive account of the good which they serve.”33 The same holds for religion. As Hauerwas and Baxter say, “Inherent in Christian convictions is a substantive account of the good,” an account that is in tension with “all so-called ‘political’ accounts of the good.”34 Moreover, when political accounts of the good underwrite a vision of God and Christianity that are rooted in civil religion, there is conflict with genuine Christianity. Hauerwas and Baxter state that when Christianity gets separated from its embodied social form, Christian belief becomes “asocial” and degenerates into mere belief, while a “counterfeit” religion, a religion of the nation, rises to take Christianity’s place.

  On the face of it—judging from the passages they cite—Hauerwas and Baxter’s use of Fish’s work appears consonant with their project, an act of untroubled appropriation. But closer reading of Fish’s essay suggests that there are irresolvable tensions between his views and Hauerwas and Baxter’s, tensions that have to do primarily with theological presumptions in Fish’s work that are diametrically opposed to Hauerwas and Baxter’s beliefs. Such tensions place Hauerwas and Baxter in a confounding dilemma. As a result, for Hauerwas and Baxter to successfully adopt Fish’s arguments, they will either have to substantially alter their positions or give up their present beliefs about the appropriate social expression of Christian faith.

  The tensions between Fish’s analysis and Hauerwas and Baxter’s use of it are glimpsed in Fish’s discussion of the possible objections to his view of free speech as articulated by its defenders. What the defenders of free speech could say, Fish hypothesizes, is that he has not appropriately anticipated future revisions to his specific account of the good for which speech stands, thus prematurely closing possible valid interpretations to future generations: “My mistake, it could be said, is to equate the something in whose service speech is with some locally espoused value (e.g., the end of racism, the empowerment of disadvantaged minorities), whereas in fact we should think of that something as a now inchoate shape . . . we cannot now know . . . and therefore we must not prematurely fix it in ways that will bind successive generations to error.”35 But Fish demurs from this position on the First Amendment, saying that it “continues in a secular form the Puritan celebration of millenarian hopes, but it imposes a requirement so severe that one would expect more justification than is usually provided.”36 Fish continues: “The requirement is that we endure whatever pain racist and hate speech inflicts for the sake of a future whose emergence we can only take on faith. In a specifically religious vision like Milton’s, this makes perfect sense (it is indeed the whole of Christianity), but in the context of a politics that puts its trust in the world and not in the Holy Spirit, it raises more questions than it answers.”37

  For Fish, this alternative to his view makes “perfect sense” only if it is rooted in a Christian interpretation of events that he implies does not prevail in our culture, or at least not in the political realms where decisions about the First Amendment are debated and resolved. Such a Christian interpretation of events, which would counsel enduring the present penalties imposed by free speech, could only be supported by belief in a future guaranteed by religious faith. Moreover, such a Christian perspective is only coherent within a political framework that puts its trust in the Holy Spirit. Thus, the key features of this opposing view to Fish’s position are dependent upon the premises of a religious worldview to make its claims cogent.

  Also, such a religious perspective would influence the political expression of the alternative to Fish’s position, and could therefore in no way be identical to his views of free speech or, by extension, free religion. As Fish has already indicated, one such crucial difference between his position and its alternative might be that free speech in the abstract must be protected, even though it means the present and concrete suffering by blacks and minorities, because of a future disclosure of truth that in retrospect will alter how we perceive present suffering. The good to be revealed in the future guaranteed by faith, we can infer, will compensate for, or at least justify, the present suffering.

  The point is that Fish’s view is predicated upon an explicitly secular view that would seem to severely contradict Hauerwas and Baxter’s views. The sorts of evidence that count in the realm of faith will not do for the secular realm—the requirement, as Fish says, is too severe. The opposite is also true, that the sorts of evidence sufficient in the
secular realm will not wash in the realm of faith. The severe requirement that Fish cannot imagine bearing derives from its linkage to a Christian worldview where evidence is supplied by faith and trust in the Holy Spirit. This latter alternative—which Fish says requires that we acknowledge “the (often grievous) consequences, but that we . . . suffer them in the name of something that cannot be named”—is the second of two unacceptable alternatives (and the one not mentioned by Hauerwas and Baxter) to his position. The first is the alternative Hauerwas and Baxter do mention, the position that makes speech inconsequential and a matter of indifference.

  This second alternative to Fish’s position seems ideally suited for Hauerwas and Baxter, and given their religious outlook—which emphasizes the social expression of Christianity in the church and opposition to secular liberal society as the “politics that know not God”38—the one that they would logically adopt. The only problem is that by adopting such a view Hauerwas and Baxter immediately face a dilemma. In accepting the religious basis of society signified by trust in the Holy Spirit and the Kingship of Christ, they are identified with a position that Fish claims is opposed to the sort of secular logic that clinches the case that he makes for speech inconsequentialism and that Hauerwas and Baxter by analogy extend to religious indifferentism. On the other hand, if Hauerwas and Baxter reject the secular logic of Fish’s position, they have destroyed the basis of their argument for the indifferentism of freedom of religion and would have to forfeit their claim that it has corrupted the churchstate debate, because it is rooted in the sort of reasoning they find offensive to Christian belief. Either way, Hauerwas and Baxter are caught in a damning dilemma.

  There is yet another point of tension between Hauerwas and Baxter and Fish. Fish contends that both alternatives to his views—speech as inconsequential, and present suffering for the sake of a nameless something—are unpersuasive. But he admits that “many in the society seemed to have bought them.”39 Why? Because such persons avoid facing

  what they take to be the alternative. That alternative is politics, the realization (at which I have already hinted) that decisions about what is and is not protected in the realms of expression will rest not on principle or firm doctrine but on the ability of persons and groups to so operate (some would say manipulate) the political process that the speech they support is labeled “protected” while the speech inimical to their interests is declared to be fair game.40

  To those who respond that politics would render the First Amendment a “dead letter,” or that it deprives us of norms in determining “when and what speech to protect,” or that it effaces the distinction between speech and action, Fish argues for the primacy of politics.41 Fish responds that

  the First Amendment has always been a dead letter if one understood its “liveness” to depend on the identification and protection of a realm of “mere” expression or discussion distinct from the real of regulatable conduct; that the distinction between speech and action has always been effaced in principle, although in practice it can take whatever form the prevailing political conditions mandate; that we have never had any normative guidance for marking off protected and unprotected speech; rather, that the guidance we have had has been fashioned (and refashioned) in the very political struggles over which it then (for a time) presides.42

  In sum, for Fish the “name of the game has always been politics, even when (indeed, especially when) it is played by stigmatizing politics as the area to be avoided.”43

  As if Hauerwas and Baxter’s arguments were not already on the ropes because of their earlier dilemma, this last argument of Fish’s deals a fatal blow to their aspirations to make Christianity social but not political, especially because so much of their argument hinges on the effective correlation between Fish’s views on free speech and the conclusions Hauerwas and Baxter draw from them about the perils of free religion. Fish explicitly endorses politics as the means by which claims of free speech are made intelligible and cogent, precisely because politics has been the implicit basis of understanding and applying the amendment from the very beginning. The same, presumably, should hold for the application of politics to free religion claims. But Hauerwas and Baxter are unwilling to cede the primacy of politics in making the claims of Christianity cogent or in adjudicating religious conflict, which is the obvious application of Fish’s position to their own. Again, they are faced with a dilemma: if they give up politics, they give up the punch line to Fish’s arguments, severely compromising the force of his contentions and, by extension, their arguments. But if they adopt politics, they abort their arguments about the primacy of a confessional God and ecclesial religion to politics. Either way, a principle they cherish is surrendered.

  In some places in their essay, it appears that Hauerwas and Baxter will stick with Fish all the way through. They say that with “the indifferentism which inevitably ensues when speech is considered apart from the Good, ‘freedom of speech’ enjoys a protection in the United States according to arbitrary patterns of political influence and power as much as according to any consistent application of constitutional principles.”44 It seems as though they are on the verge of acknowledging that value-laden, good-dependent notions of free speech, and by analogy free religion, need to be negotiated by politics, which in this case amounts to the struggle to assign value to goods defined in the abstract.

  But Hauerwas and Baxter dismiss such hopes by saying that only “within the ecclesial context, that is, only within a context in which the social landscape is imbued with the presence of Christ, can Christianity emerge as an alternative both to liberal freedom and civic freedom, and more generally, to the political project we call the United States of America.”45 For Hauerwas and Baxter, the task is to “provide an alternative vision to the political vision of America, one that is shaped by the acknowledgment that true political authority is to be found not in any republican virtues, new or ancient, nor in any set of governmental procedures, but in Jesus Christ who is our true King.”46 So much for politics!

  By refusing to enter the fray, to give political justification and arguments for their beliefs about the Christian good, Hauerwas and Baxter not only repudiate their connection with the sort of social activity that Fish describes as necessary for those who refute nebulous concepts of the freedom of speech, but they also risk a more serious setback with disturbing consequences for the Christian Church: they fail to offer to everyday Christians stuck in the gritty interstices of politics adequate resources and substantive recommendations for moving beyond paralysis, confusion, or wrong practice. Just when Christians caught in the punishing political dilemmas of contemporary society need a note of reveille, retreat is sounded. Thus, the most harmful effect of Hauerwas and Baxter’s views of free speech and free religion may not be the indifferentism they worry over, but the sheer irrelevance of their views to the church to which they are committed.

  This irrelevance is pegged on the peculiar social but apolitical vision Hauerwas and Baxter have of Christian faith. By failing to take politics seriously, they can do little more than lament, for instance, the loss of rights by Smith and Black in the Supreme Court case they cite. At best, they can make intellectual moves to reject the distinctions that have made religion a matter of indifference. Because they refuse to engage a public beyond the church, Hauerwas and Baxter have little chance to affect the manner in which discussion is formed around these issues in the public sphere. More poignantly, Hauerwas and Baxter’s modus operandi cannot affect future legal and political decisions that similarly impact other citizens’ lives and their freedom of religious beliefs.

  Hauerwas and Baxter’s problems are also rooted in yet a third dimension of their discussion of religious indifferentism that they themselves seem not to take seriously: a substantive account of the good that is the background to their notion of Christian faith. Not only should speech have an account of the good, as Hauerwas and Baxter contend, but by extension of their analogy between free speech and free religion, so sh
ould Christian faith. The point here is not to highlight an account of the good to which Christian faith can be said to generally refer—Christian love, peace, or justice, for instance—but to elaborate the specific cultural contexts and social visions that have decisively shaped and made possible specific faith communities. I suspect this is not high on Hauerwas and Baxter’s agenda because their procedures and assumptions imply a homogeneity about the Christian faith that masks the social roots and cultural contexts of the ecclesial embodiment of religious belief.

  Hauerwas and Baxter’s approach mutes the radical diversity and complex pluralism within the Christian faith, a situation that long ago made it untenable in certain sociological and theological senses to speak primarily of The Church.47 Because of their procedures, Hauerwas and Baxter have failed to take into consideration, or even argue against, an expression of Christian faith that has creatively confronted many of the problems discussed by the authors: the black church.48 By turning now to this example, I intend to illumine the relation between religion and politics in one of the most helpful but neglected models available.

  Black Christian churches have had quite a different approach to the First Amendment than the position argued by Hauerwas or Baxter, largely because of the prominence of legal issues in determining the status, fate, and humanity of African-Americans for much of our history. And with the central importance of religion to African-American culture, the strong and vital connections between civil and religious concerns has been well established. Not only has religion helped sustain black survival in times of racial and national crisis, but it has furnished principles and persons to justify black claims to equal humanity and social justice in government, church, and school.49