Roundtable: Remillard on Haberski's *God and War*

In Search of a New American Creed
by Arthur Remillard
Saint Francis University (PA)


Halfway through God and War, Raymond Haberski shares his own close encounter with American civil religion. In 1976, on Independence Day, the author and his family joined millions of New Yorkers to celebrate the American bicentennial. “As I look back on it now,” he reminisces, “that celebration seems to stand outside of time” (p. 98). Indeed, in this liminal zone of swelling patriotic pride, crowds of strangers found common ground in their shared history. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, this sentiment was a welcome reprieve from the otherwise divisive tenor of the time. But if we scratch the surface of this expression of American unity, we find the looming presence of war, as the flashes of fireworks replicate exploding artillery shells. And parades and marching bands merely domesticate images of armed troops and battle formations. War is bloody. War is confusing. War is death. But when war moves from the battlefield to the ritual stage, war is sacred.

God and War investigates the sacredness of armed conflict in America, and the thorny issues that this reality brings forth. Raymond Haberski chronicles the civil religious discourse of political leaders and public intellectuals from World War II to the present who have struggled to make sense of the human and material cost of war. From Truman to Obama, civil religious rhetoric tactically replaces the language of loss with the language of sacrifice—sacrifice for a “higher cause,” a nation “under God.” And in public speeches and print culture, the events of war gain transcendent traction by buoying the narrative of American exceptionalism. But, as Haberski shows, there are always dissenters lurking in the shadows. These prophetic figures often ask whether or not a war is just. Or they doubt those who assume that any military conflict is free from moral hazard. To be sure, the bellicose patriot finds his or her dark twin in the gadfly who refuses to accept the status quo.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that Haberski follows his memory of 1976 with a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr, a central and recurring character in the book. While the theologian had died in 1971, Haberski suggests that Niebuhr’s critique of American idealism resonated throughout the bicentennial year. “A common refrain heard from many leaders,” Haberski explains, “was for the nation to redeem itself through humility, to humble itself before God and by doing so to recall that the United States remained a nation under God’s judgment not merely his Grace—principles Niebuhr preached but had rarely seen followed in his life” (p. 99). Here, Haberski sets forth the central tension of the book, an ideological tug-of-war between grace and judgment, between national pride and collective humility, between blind faith and healthy skepticism. The author situates Niebuhr everywhere and nowhere in this tension, since the theologian’s “Christian realism” both affirmed the necessity of war, and refused to conflate God’s will with political power.

Ambiguity notwithstanding, Haberski’s choice to foreground Niebuhr provides a stable guidepost as he surveys the civil religious territory of God, nation, and war. Some voices express very little Niebuhrian nuance. We hear from Billy Graham and Cardinal Francis Spellman, who, Haberski explains, depicted the Cold War as a “battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness” (p. 64). Similarly, after 9/11, President George W. Bush developed what the author terms, “an absolutist moral theology of the nation” (p. 222). For those sharing Bush’s civil religion, Susan Sontag and her ilk were “un-American” heretics. “Let’s by all means grieve together,” she exclaimed after 9/11. “But let’s not be stupid together” (p. 204). A distinct strength of this book is Haberski’s masterful shifts between competing perspectives. For every reference to George Weigel, Richard John Neuhaus, and First Things, we find counter-arguments from Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis, and Sojourners.

Yet, as the book concludes, Haberski circles back to Niebuhr. He notes that the theologian remains part of the American civil religious conversation, with everyone from Barack Obama to Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation channeling him. War hawks in particular admire Niebuhr’s abandonment of pacifism and advocacy of war in order to temper evil and establish justice. To this, though, Haberski responds, “Niebuhr’s sense of justice did not include endless wars, torture, and preemptive invasions of sovereign nations” (p. 249). Then the author steps out from his historical wizard’s curtain and presents his own civil religious prescription. “Believing in the myths that sustain American civil religion does not require the reduction of civil religion to a theology of war,” he explains. “And critiquing civil religion does not inevitably produce cynicism, for losing national myths can be as dangerous for the health of a people as believing in bad ones” (p. 253). In essence, Haberski calls forth for a new American creed where the voices of both judgment and grace have room to speak, where national pride does not require armed conflict, and where humility always trumps hubris.

God and War wraps a passionate appeal for a reformed civil religion inside a compelling intellectual history of modern America. The book’s accessibility makes it suitable for the undergraduate classroom. Questions raised by the author will no doubt generate vigorous class discussions. Scholars of American religion will also benefit by carefully reading this book. In addition to offering his own insights, Haberski opens new avenues of inquiry. For example, what would happen if we shifted focus from the metaphorical pulpit to the pew? In other words, what did the civil religion of the “common person” look like in this era? And how would it compare with the intellectuals of Haberski’s study? Yes, the old truism that good scholarship raises more questions than it answers applies to God and War. This book is a fine accomplishment and welcome contribution to the discussion of American civil religion. 

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Editor's note:  This is the third post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Roundtable: Hartman on Haberski's *God and War*

The Soul of the Nation
by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University


The nation was born when people committed to kill and die in its name instead of for God. Or so goes one of the major arguments put forward in the theoretical and historical literature on nationalism, beginning with Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. There are several important qualifications to this general rule, the existence of theocratic nations like Iran for instance. But among modern nations committed to Enlightenment values, this tenet has tended to hold steady in how scholars understand nations. The major exception, of course, is the United States. The first nation born of the Enlightenment, America has nevertheless always been one of the most religious nations on Earth, so much so that many Americans have believed their nation one with God. Conflating God and nation is otherwise known as “civil religion.”

Ray Haberski’s superbly written book God and War is a valiant effort to understand the American civil religion, a “strange beast” of an undercurrent in U.S. intellectual history. He writes: “There is a fundamental irony of American civil religion—the nation lives with a misbegotten confidence born from a union of religion and reason.” Haberski’s book is the best at seeking to explain how the modern democratic nation known as the United States goes to war in the name of God; how it finds national meaning in its wars. For this reason, God and War should become a touchstone for postwar U.S. intellectual historians.



Prior to reading this book, I was skeptical that civil religion was an important concept in seeking to understand the intellectual history of American nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century. It seemed to me that when Americans reached consensus on the national purpose, especially in the years between World War II and Vietnam, the non-religious terms of the Cold War were explanatory enough. For every John Foster Dulles who put the nation’s mission in millennial terms there was an Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who understood the nation’s struggle against the Soviet Union in more earthly terms. Along these lines, I remain convinced that American foreign policy is best understood via the lens of economic interests. William Appleman Williams is the best guide to comprehending how the United States got involved in wars in far-flung places like Vietnam. In contrast, Ray seems to agree with historian William Inboden, who argues that religious impulses determine U.S. foreign policy.

And as I was skeptical about the concept of civil religion in the early Cold War, I was even more pessimistic that it might help us understand post-sixties America, when fracture was the norm. In the years after the sixties, years when American history is best understood through the rubric of the culture wars, it seemed that only conservative evangelicals held that America was a Christian nation. “I believe that God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has enjoyed,” Jerry Falwell preached, “because her heritage is one of a republic governed by laws predicated on the Bible.” This type of rhetoric did more to divide Americans than bring them together. Civil religion was a ruse. Even when Americans came together for the cause of war—the Gulf War and the aftermath of September 11 being two prominent examples highlighted in God and War—such cohesion was fleeting at best. Shortly after American victory in the Gulf, Pat Buchanan declared a “cultural war” against Clinton and satanic liberals. And shortly after September 11, 2001, half the nation had turned against Bush and his ill-begotten adventure in Iraq.

In this way, civil religion operated as a sort of culture wars riptide. To his credit, Ray agrees. He writes: “The ‘culture wars’ seemed to mock the idea of civil religion.” God and War has been extremely helpful to my understanding the boundaries of the culture wars. The culture wars were a war for the soul of America. Civil religion was recognition that the nation had a soul to begin with.

But more than anything else, what brought me around to the usefulness of civil religion as a concept important for intellectual historians was Ray’s layering of the different understandings of it. On the one had were those like Falwell who believed the nation was inherently good because it was a nation under God. On the other hand were those like Lincoln and Niebuhr who had a more ironic understanding of civil religion, those who had complicated views of America in relation to God and war. In this way, Ray understands irony as a form of critical self-reflection. Lincoln and Niebuhr, the heroes of the book, believed they must fight their wars. They believed fighting their wars was the right thing to do and that their conduct must accord with Christian principles. They concluded that their religion played an important role in how they framed their wars. But these ironists never assumed they were acting in the name of God.

At times, I must confess, it was hard to see how the ironic notion of civil religion was even civil religion to begin with. But Ray’s analysis of it made for fascinating reading.

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Editor's note:  This is the second post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Roundtable: Sehat on Haberski's *God and War*

Civil Religion: Who Needs It?
by David Sehat
Georgia State University


The very phrase “civil religion,” the subject of Ray Haberski's God and War, commits its author to taking on several different projects simultaneously. The book is therefore written on several levels, some of which are more effective than others.  At its most general, this is a history of religion and politics from the Second World War to the present.  Slightly below that level of generality, this is a history of American foreign policy and military engagements from the Cold War to the Iraq War.  And at its most specific, this is a book about conflicting conceptions of American civil religion.  This last project is the one that Haberski intends his own book to be about. 

The basic problem is that civil religion has no real definition, or at least no stable definition.  It entered the American political discourse in a wildly successful 1967 essay by Robert Bellah.  Surveying the demise of consensus in the face of Vietnam, Bellah fretted that American society was coming apart.  He proposed a renewed civil religion, a new conception of American ideals, beliefs, and symbols, to heal the fractures of war. 

But almost immediately after Bellah proposed the term, it was taken up into political discourse and used in wildly different ways.  Some conservative religious commentators believed that civil religion was a form of idolatry, a worship of the state instead of God.  Others of a more ecumenical bent took it to be the expression of a lowest common denominator of religious expression.  This shared religious framework, ecumenicals insisted, created a unity out of diversity that held the nation together.  Still others used it in a more sociological sense.  Civil religion in this definition consisted of secular symbols, rituals, and genuflections such as the national anthem and the pledge allegiance to the flag.  And, finally, people such as Richard John Neuhaus used civil religion as a synonym for public theology, the moral framework that is available to all people because God worked his rules and laws into His creation.

God and War is, at its best, a history of this intellectual dispute about the meaning of civil religion.  But Haberski did not just focus on the contestation over these different meanings.  He also asserted his own normative definition into the book in a way that I found both unpersuasive and confusing. 

He begins the book with Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.  For Haberski, Lincoln provides a model conception of American civil religion in this haunting address.  Trying to make sense of the Civil War, Lincoln wondered if perhaps the massive death in the war was a judgment from God for the sin of slavery.  In invoking Lincoln, Haberski agrees with him that the nation is united under God.  What that means is that it courts His judgment and can, particularly in war, lose its soul.  Civil religion in this sense is essential for Haberski in his conception of the United States. 

But even after reading this book, I’m still not sure that civil religion is all that.  For one thing, its multiple meanings suggest that it is more a rhetorical posture than an analytic category.  And because Haberski uses it to explain the thought of people who never used the term (like Lincoln), there are too many times in this book when you can never be sure just what Haberski is talking about.   Take this example: “Before Vietnam, American civil religion had been primarily about grappling with the spiritual stakes of the Cold War—steeling the American soul for the ideological conflict with communism.  After Vietnam, American civil religion would contend with a national soul in shambles”  (p. 90).  Haberski’s statement raises all kinds of questions.  Leaving aside whether the nation has a soul and whether that soul can be first steeled and then shattered, what does civil religion mean in the above statement?  Which definition is in use at that moment?  I have no idea.  The general fogginess of this passage suggests that civil religion is just not sharp enough to do the work that Harberski wishes it would.

Still, Haberski offers a fairly straight-forward pattern of conflict that saves this book from its conceptual confusion.  Throughout his account, Haberski shows the way that political leaders and their allies marshaled religion for nationalist and often militaristic purposes.  They “treated the notion that the United States was a nation ‘under God’ as if religion were a natural resource.  It provided unlimited virtue for Americans, warded off the detrimental effects that came from living with the remnants of unbelief dredged up by the Vietnam experience.”  But these politicians, Haberski laments, never “showed any intention of acting as if the nation was under God’s judgment.” (p.146).  And on the rare occasion that politicians have done so—think Jimmy Carter—they were punished for it. 

The heroes of this book then are not the politicians but the dissidents, those people like Reinhold Niebuhr who maintained an ironic detachment in the face of war, Will Herberg who lambasted the shallowness of mid-century religion, Martin Luther King Jr.  and Abraham Joshua Heschel who objected to the American involvement in Vietnam by appealing to transcendent values, and Stanley Hauerwas who has asserted, again and again, that Christian ethics are for the Christian community, not the nation. 

The best parts of this book, and I really loved them, are the ones in which Haberski shows people squaring off about the proper role that religious ideas should play in directing the nation.  This is especially true almost every time Richard John Neuhaus comes up.  Haberski is now writing an intellectual biography of Neuhaus, for which we will all be thankful once it comes out.  We get a sense of that biography here.  Neuhaus was the person most responsible for the advancement of the term civil religion through the 1980s and 1990s.  His version, though it changed over time, meant something like a public theology that drew upon revealed Christian ideas that were applicable to everyone. 

Yet Neuhaus was consistently hammered, first by the liberal evangelical Jim Wallis, and then by Stanley Hauerwas, over his notion of civil religion.  The basic question in these disputes, and the basic question about the proper relationship of religion and the state in general, was, in Hauerwas’s words, “Who is the ‘us’?”  (p. 164).  “Your rhetoric,” Hauerwas complained to Neuhaus, “mixes ‘we Christians’ with ‘we Americans’ in a way that I think compromises our ability as Christians . . . to help our non-Christian fellow citizens realize the story of righteousness they associate with being Americans is deeply problematic.” (pp. 164-165).

What I like most about this response is that Hauerwas does not confuse the national community with the religious community.   He does not confuse the thick axioms of a religious tradition with the thin and minimal conceptions of moral obligation that guide the national community.  This, it seems to me, happens all to often when people talk about civil religion.  It is a rhetoric that acts to advance religious power while claiming a kind of consensus.  

But Haberski ends the book with a declaration of civil religion’s indispensability.  It is, he tells us, “the only way to acknowledge that we still need to believe in something worthy of the sacrifices that have been and will continue to be made in the name of the nation” (p. 254).  I see in this statement what I so often see when people start talking about civil religion: Christian theistic assumptions being smuggled into a debate about how people in a pluralistic nation can live and die together. 

So, Ray, why again do we Americans need civil religion?


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Editor's note:  This is the first post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Szefel on Rodgers (Part III of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: Lisa Szefel's review of Age of Fracture is the third installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. Expect Mary Dudziak's comments to be posted soon, followed by a response by Dan Rodgers. [Parts of this paper were previously published on the History News Network website, February 24, 2011]

Daniel Rodgers is the Fred Astaire of intellectual history. Words and arguments flow across the page effortlessly. One idea glides to center stage then moves off as another waltzes forward. What I would like to do today is, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton: dance backwards and in high heels. I'd like to get up close and talk about Rodgers' steps.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers offers an elegant, often eloquent, history of intellectual life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Primarily interested in the construction of ideas that shaped conceptions of history, society, and responsibility, he analyzes texts from an eclectic array of academic thinkers across the political spectrum. Rodgers argues that in the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists and political philosophers established the terms of the debate on a range of issues concerning the self and society, obligations and justice, morality and destiny. To these postwar intellectuals, ideas had severe consequences, contexts and nature constricted human action, and history loomed very large indeed.

While the turmoil and chaos of the 1960s caused tremors, it was not until the quakes of oil embargoes, unemployment, and inflation in the 1970s, that fault lines in this ideological consensus emerged. Into this breach, a lexicon of microeconomic principles, which had been forming for decades in libertarian circles that stressed agency, contingency, and reason emerged, promising solutions to seemingly intractable problems of disco-era stagflation. Instead of focusing on property and production, workers and owners, these economists celebrated instead the slight of (an invisible) hand that produced wealth and fostered the virtues of competition.

The vocabulary, metaphors, and grammar of the free market boosters seeped into academic discussions. Instead of the public solidity of politics and pressure groups, American historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars seeking to understand the formulations of class and exercise of power, now uncovered the ineluctable influence of culture and diffuse workings of hegemony. Gramsci, Geertz, and Foucault replaced Marxist dialectics while close readings of popular songs, prisons, and cockfights superseded analyses of elections, parties, and unions. This cultural turn reshaped the color line as well, as race came to be viewed less as a fixed state and more as a social construction. Notions of gender likewise became subject to preoccupations with language and consciousness-raising rather than investigations into the architecture of patriarchy.

Some other reviewers of the book, most notably Robert Westbrook, have mentioned some important omitted thinkers, most importantly, Martha Nussbaum and, I would add, Elaine Scarry. Other critiques highlight the lack, at times, of sufficient causal analyses. We see how but why did the language and values of free markets triumph so decisively? How did the fall of Communism across Europe and in Russia affect attitudes toward liberal Democrats in America who, for decades, had insisted that the Soviet economy was out-performing domestic capitalism? Cold War triumphalism, after all, was grounded in the reality that the prime alternative to free markets had been defeated. In that scenario, why heed those who were wrong?

Along those lines, why didn’t liberals offer a stouter defense of communitarian principles? Focusing on the progressives’ multicultural and linguistic turn leaves unexamined some dramatic mistakes made by liberal politicians and their supporters, which diminished their credibility. It also ignores the many images of fat cat Democratic power players showing up for budget talks, after the federal government had been shut down, in limousines.

None of this went unnoticed among the working class in those parts of the country hardest hit by deindustrialization—the manufacturing cities of the Midwest and Northeast—who switched party affiliation to become Sunbelt and Rustbelt Republicans. The usual story about backlash and resentment, perpetrated famously in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, misses the point. Rodgers, however, is on the right track. A more vertical study that presents a cross-section of values would help to illuminate the common bonds that tied blue collar and Catholics to blue blood conservatives. This is something that is missing in the history of conservatism more generally.

An intellectual historian who clearly delineates his methodology, Rodgers rarely ventures outside the realm of books and articles to explain how conceptions are formed, leading to some connections that ring hollow. In discussing the post-Fordist focus on the present, for example, no mention is made of CNN, personal computers, or the ubiquity of media images. Ideas about race are dissected without analysis of the impact wielded by rap music, MTV, or films like “Boyz n the Hood,” giving the appearance that Charles Murray was primarily responsible for stereotypes that linked skin color to violence. However, Murray said little that Archie Bunker hadn’t already articulated more than a decade earlier and, while liberals were busy decrying the possessive investment in whiteness, ethnic Americans were denouncing the possessive investment in racism among the well-heeled. While lending sheen and coherence to a neat narrative about fracture, the methodology of this particular type of intellectual history can skew analysis of issues and omit important developments." So, while I appreciate the coherence and precision with which Rodgers traces ideas--from left to right, from economics textbooks to presidential podiums. Sometimes this approach--tracing the ebb and flow of ideas--is highly appropriate. Sometimes, however, it belies the way ideas actually circulate or the way history happens. I wonder: What is lost or distorted when intellectual history is not tied to social and cultural history?

Along these lines, I don't believe in trickle down economics and I don't know that trickle down intellectual history is the best representation of the way ideas emerge and circulate. What about trickle up intellectual history (or, for that matter, trickle up economics)? Who should we include as members of the "communities of discourse" that we examine? (There was a nice debate about this on the USIH blog earlier this year).

I mentioned earlier that I would like to dance backwards and in high heels. Let me now add "in drag": Rodgers devotes three pages to the topic of AIDS. In his examination of race and racism, conversely, Rodgers delves deep and wide, devoting an entire chapter to the topic and strewing comments throughout the text. He even makes a rare foray into pop culture, nodding toward the contributions of Sanford & Son, the television mini-series Roots, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. He discusses “the new black presence in public life” and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and black arts movement, and he goes into loving detail about the conscious quest of African American authors to inculcate race pride. He cites polls from Black Enterprise magazine about black solidarity and decries the “day-to-day injuries imposed by the social marks of race in American society.” Willie Horton, Jesse Jackson, the Los Angeles riots, Anita Hill, and the debate among black intellectuals about the persistence of poverty are all there. The chapter on gender is less comprehensive but still works toward explaining relevant questions.

However, where are the gay intellectuals, writers, and activists? Where are Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman, Cleve Jones, John D’Emilio’s landmark, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), The Celluloid Closet (1996), Lauren Berlant, Gayle Rubin, Matthew Shepard, and Ellen Degeneres? Where are the concerns about injuries inflicted on gay Americans, about their struggle for pride and dignity in the midst of denial and death?

Citing this omission is not just a plea for inclusion of yet another oppressed group. As Eva Sedgwick argues in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), leaving out queer voices distorts the historical lens. And, if these voices are needed to understand any era, it is most certainly the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years when anti-gay bigotry was embedded in social and intellectual life, when homophobia blanketed, like a fine layer of soot, the nation. What other community suffered as many casualties as a result of the government’s inaction? Estimates place the number of lynchings during Jim Crow as high as 5,000. Over 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. The number of reported AIDS deaths from 1980 through 1997 in the United States is 641,087. Globally 30.6 million people were infected.

Let me say that, citing these statistics is not an exercise in comparative victimology. First, comparative history is a legitimate enterprise. Second, juxtaposition can be useful to bring a stunning reality into bold relief.

Today, approximately 5,000 people die every day because of AIDS, a global calamity that, some scientists argue, could have been controlled had the federal government responded swiftly in 1981 to news of deaths, as it was, most famously, in Australia. But in America the victims were members of a hated, marginalized minority and received no compassion, a key emotion that Rodgers seeks to trace as it relates to the poor. As Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On documented, the CDC and NIH were chronically underfunded. As Reagan biographer Lou Cannon concluded, Reagan's response was "halting and ineffective."

If Rodgers was reaching for a capacious survey of shaping intellectual ideas, how could he ignore this disease or the ideologies and language that allowed it to become a pandemic? The word AIDS itself would benefit from a Rodgers-style definition. Paula Treichler takes on this challenge to analyze the construction of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification” with culture, medicine, linguistics, socioeconomic status, gender, class, and race all influencing scientific naming practices. Considering the emotional and physical toll, it is no wonder that LGBT activist and intellectual Urvashi Vaid writes that “For lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people, the Reagan-Bush years were the worst years of our lives.”

At the heart of the Reagan-Bush era, the moral center of the period, is the AIDS crisis, the callous reaction to victims, and the lurid homophobia that sanctioned isolation and death. Historians, as a profession, have not come to terms with these events. Look at the index to almost any book on the 1980s and AIDS along with the hatred of gay people that fueled the epidemic are barely mentioned, those who do mostly talk about the response to AIDS among homosexual Americans only and the formulations of difficult to read queer theorists.

I do believe that writing a history about this period without addressing the AIDS pandemic is like writing a history of the George Bush years without talking about 9/11. AIDS and the diminishing calculus of compassion during the Reagan era are linked. Conservatism drew its force from antipathy toward a group of people who loved differently. This animus animated evangelicals and justified indifference to AIDS sufferers among Catholic leaders. It can be found everywhere in sermons, political speeches, journals, and newspapers. It inflected thinking on what constituted “normal,” on sex and gender more generally as well as reproductive rights. William Bennett, included in Age of Fracture for work that expounds on virtues, was Secretary of Education, who, along with his Undersecretary Gary Bauer (who later became head of the Family Research Council), served as the principle spokesmen for Reagan’s AIDS policies. Instead of disseminating information to educate people about how transmission occurred and how to prevent infection, these two guys were too worried about saying anything even remotely positive about gay people. Precious time was lost. Lives were lost.

I also wonder about historical context and if we need to consider authorial intention, that elusive quest that Roland Barthes deemed futile. Rick Warren receives mention by Rodgers for forging “more generous even radical frames for evangelical Protestant social thought” but not for barring gays from membership in his Saddleback Church. Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture war” speech gets airing for its patriotic invocations, but not his snide remarks about “homosexual rights” and denunciation of gay marriage as “amoral.” Irving Kristol’s work in the knowledge industry is acknowledged but not his charge that homosexuality was a “disease” (Reagan himself referred to it as “a tragic illness”). The issue of gays in the military and same sex marriage played a decisive role in elections, including ballot initiatives in the 1970s, and get-out-the-vote anti-homosexual campaigns, gay-bashing, and gay-baiting in campaigns since then, even affecting the outcome of presidential contests between the “straight panic” years of 1996 and 2004. If Rodgers is interested in the power of ideas, why doesn’t he analyze the origins and allure of anti-gay ideas? In our question and answer period, I hope we will discuss whether the motive of the people we analyze should form part of our analysis. How should intellectual historians consider statements motivated by bigotry and the desire to promote intolerance?

What would Age of Fracture look like if it had included this subject? On some matters, it would have reinforced his assertions. John D’Emilio’s classic essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” would have fortified the convictions held by many that free markets induced freedom. With pastors and ministers expending tremendous energy, expounding wrathfully on homosexuality as an abomination and blaming victims for their “choice” little room was left to speak of Jesus as the man who overturned the money tables, preached poverty, humbleness, compassion, and charity, the very kind of emotional economy that Rodgers is interested in mapping.

On other important points, Rodgers would have found his organizing principle, around fracture, did not hold or at least that it was more contested. For example, by citing Butler’s notion of sexuality as a performance, he gives only one side of the debate between nature and nurture. A very large constituency of gay people themselves argued publicly for essentialism. The debate played out on the pages of Time and Newsweek, National Review, The Advocate and Slate.com, with scientific studies examining the role of genes and hormones in determining sexual orientation. At stake in this ontological question was whether gayness was akin to race and thus deserved legal protections or a choice that could be changed (and criticized).

On a final note: Who mourns for the gay men and women who either committed suicide, lived closeted lives filled with fear and anguish, alienated from family, friends, church, and denied the opportunity to build their own families or to love who they loved. I understand it is not the historian's job to hold pity parties, but I wonder if empathy is a necessary first step before historians start weaving the experiences of gay people into the story of our past. It is certainly within our realm of responsibility to try to understand, as Ranke would say, how it really was, to see not only flawless execution but missteps, and trips, and dips, to assess not just waltzes, but break dancing, the Hustle, the rumba, the samba, and cha-cha-cha.

Livingston on Rodgers (Part II of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

(Addition: March 18, 2012: ArtsBeat readers: Welcome to the USIH blog, where Daniel Rodgers's Age of Fracture has been a topic of much discussion over the past year. Please see this post for links to several threads discussing Rodgers's book.)

Dear readers: James Livingston's review of Age of Fracture is the second installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here.

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It’s a pleasure to be here to comment on new work by Daniel T. Rodgers. As intellectual historians, we’ve been obliged to read whatever he wrote since the dissertation book on the work ethic—or rather, as students of this thing called America, whatever our specialization, we’ve been obliged to keep up with what he’s writing about our thing. You can’t say that about very many historians.

As some of you know, I wrote a book about the same period covered by Age of Fracture. It is by far the better book on the intellectual history of the late 20th century—I mean his, of course. I wish I had tarried with the negative as long as he has in this painstaking elegy, this elegant tombstone, this heartbreaking funeral oration—I almost said jeremiad—but then I had cartoons to cover. There’s no better book on the subject, and I can’t imagine there will be in my lifetime, maybe yours as well.

In its ambition and scope, Age of Fracture reminds me of nothing so much as James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory, the definitive work on the Atlantic world of intellectual development at another fin de siecle moment (again, there’s no better book on the subject, however pointed your disagreements with the author might be). Still, there’s a huge difference between these books. It’s hard to put into words because it resides in the tone, the pitch, the timbre of the texts, not in some telling lyrical content I can quote. And I suppose the difference could be explained simply, by the fact that Professor Kloppenberg was removed from the scene of the intellectual innovations he studied, whereas Professor Rodgers is a participant-observer, present at their creation, and can’t yet report any victory, however uncertain, for any side in an ongoing struggle. But look at the difference from another angle. No matter how you read Uncertain Victory, it’s the promise of uncertainty that sticks with you. No matter how you read Age of Fracture, it’s the threat of uncertainty that sticks with you, whether it’s the risk created by undisciplined market forces or the chaos determined by intellectual anarchy.

Read almost any book on the turn of the earlier century and you will come away knowing that every previous truth was whirled away in a tidal wave of change that spanned every possible dimension of human experience, from the economic and the social to the political and the intellectual, from the private to the public, from the domestic to the trans-national. You will come away from these books knowing that every brute inversion of received wisdom could be called progress because the truth was suddenly fungible, like property and personhood at the law.

You will come away knowing that William James had the last word on the topic when he offered this cruelly semiotic rendition of the truth: “Day follows day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents are not themselves true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them.”

Indeed the books focused on the last fin de siecle demonstrate that our own age of fracture is neither a beginning nor an end: it’s a new variation on old themes which has nonetheless changed what we can see and hear and feel—what we take for granted in the here and now. What great writers, artists, and intellectuals could glimpse by standing at the heart of change a century ago, telling us where it would lead, we can now see clearly, as embodied in our everyday lives: what was then evident yet unknown, except to the avant garde, is now common sense. That’s why “post-modernism” became a household word in the late 20th century—also an epithet, a slogan, even radio call letters, just another item in the inventory of popular culture. That’s why the de-centering of everything, including the familiar sources and sites of power, could begin at the same moment to look normal if not normative, in Eastern Europe as well as the United States.

James compared the potential consequences of pragmatism and its cultural predicates to the effects of the Reformation—he thought of both as social-intellectual movements that made truth plural, extra-institutional, and practical, rather than unitary, bureaucratic, and metaphysical. It was a playful, hopeful metaphor, but it retains some cash value, I think, in understanding the late-20th century, when the political valence of protest against the powers that be became unpredictable, even indecipherable, sometimes regressive and often murderous. That’s what happens when the dispersal of power from the clerics to the congregation, or from the state to society, becomes normal if not normative.

As that dispersal did become normal in the late-20th century, with the rise of cultural-sexual politics on the one hand and a neo-liberal movement toward deregulation on the other—not to mention the more dramatic breakdown of fossilized states in Eastern Europe—so did the languages needed to address the fugitive complexities of power become more various, more cultural, more oblique, more tentative, and more useful. I mean that these languages and their attendant categories didn’t “thin out,” as Professor Rodgers argues; instead, they proliferated, along with the aliases and addresses of power.

We might even treat the emergence of rational market ideology as an instance of the same dispersal. Professor Rodgers assumes that this ideology willfully or ignorantly obscured the institutional determinants of economic power. Let’s grant him that assumption. What if that was the point, all along? Could it be that these economists were abstracting or abstaining from the question of power as traditionally construed, just like the Foucauldians on the other side of campus, and trying to redefine its habitat and its effects, as if the institutional determinants—like corporations, trade unions, and state regulatory agencies—were becoming less important than the echoes of the algorithms?

Could we then treat rational market ideology as an interesting, maybe even productive dimension of the intellectual earthquake that turned the world inside out in the late 20th century? Could we treat it as something more (or less) than a retreat from reality, as a new way of grasping what James called the “existing beyond”—that is, the impending future—as a vital dimension of the present? In other words, could we treat the “financial model” derived from the Black-Scholes algorithms as distant echoes of Irving Fisher’s mathematics and Albert Einstein’s relativity theorems (both published 1905-1907), thus as a new way of incorporating time into the calculations of the market? Or rather, wouldn’t Professor Rodgers be on firmer ground—oops—if he argued that rational market ideology was a redefinition rather than a displacement of time, historical and otherwise?

I know, free markets and political progress don’t mix—deregulation is the cause of all our troubles!—so why would I look for the latter in the former and use my discoveries as a criticism of Age of Fracture? Good questions, but only if you assume, as Professor Rodgers does (and I’d bet everybody else in this room does too), that markets and socialism are the terms of an either/or choice, or that capitalism and markets are synonyms, or that the commodity form is the solvent of all that is precious, or that anything with a price is by definition an affront to authenticity.

I’m trying to say that I agree with the broad arc of the narrative Professor Rodgers offers us—rational market ideology becomes the regnant paradigm in allocating worldly goods as well as academic or intellectual rewards, thus installing price systems as the foundational metaphor of late-20th century thinking as such—but I can’t enter the same complaint that he treats as the self-evident moral of the story. Here’s why.

Stagflation in the West and political-economic impasse in the East coincided in the 1970s. The outsiders, the radicals, the dissidents, and the misfits in both places offered perestroika as a solution to the problem they faced—more “marketization,” as the Polish and Czech economists put it in their manifestos, having anticipated, even planned for, the Prague Spring, and then been disillusioned by the experiment before the tanks rolled in. “Deregulation,” as the American economists and politicians put it—Alfred Kahn, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and Felix Rohatyn out front—in an attempt to revitalize competitive market forces, in keeping with the anti-monopoly, anti-trust tradition that galvanized American politics in the 19th century.

The “marketization” of more assets, including ideas, followed in both parts of the world, East and West, as Vaclav Havel had predicted. So did better prospects for political democracy, cultural pluralism, and intellectual innovation, as the dispersal of power from state to society became normal, and finally normative. Meanwhile, underneath or alongside the “marketization” of more assets—and perhaps as a direct result of this process, as when the family was codified as the principal bulwark against the anonymous forces of the market?—came a strange new phenomenon that I have elsewhere called primitive disaccumulation.

In Atlantic Crossings, Professor Rodgers began by drawing our attention to the “de-commodification” of things and ideas at the very moment industrial capitalism triumphed, in the early 20th century. He quickly and inexplicably dropped this promising notion as he traced the intellectual vectors of reform and regulation that reshaped the political landscapes of the US and the UK.

But is it not worth pursuing as the secret history of an age of fracture determined by “marketization”? Isn’t primitive disaccumulation happening under our feet—right under our noses—and thereby making the victory of markets and neo-liberalism uncertain at least?

Consider these facts. More people have easier access to better information than ever, and they don’t have to pay for it, whether by enduring TV commercials or buying a newspaper subscription. More people read more stuff, meanwhile producing and distributing their own writing via the blogosphere, than ever before, but it’s mostly free. More people listen to more music, and more people produce and distribute their own music than ever before, but they’re not buying CDs—they’re not paying for it, they’re downloading it. You can buy a used book by a semi-famous author just weeks after the publication date for one sixth the cover price; ask any editor outside of trade publishing, and she’ll tell you that her business model is not something to bank on. You can be sure that in ten years, maybe five, newspapers as we buy them now will be gone, regardless of how the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times or the paper of record now try to protect their contents.

And movies? The CEOs here are a step ahead of their counterparts in the music or the newspaper business, but it still looks like YouTube is the future of your viewing pleasure.

In sum: The reading, listening, and viewing audiences are larger, but the commodity form organizes less of their attention—the markets and the price systems that used to deliver the relevant goods are now options, not unavoidable structures that govern every approach to these goods. This is the incomplete reversal of primitive accumulation, the process by which almost all things, even human nature itself, became commodities. Primitive disaccumulation, I like to call it. And it coincides with the apparent triumph of rational market ideology.

You would never know it from reading Age of Fracture. Here you will find yet another complaint about the ascendance of markets and their nefarious attendants, in accordance with the academic Left’s assumption that deregulation is the cause of the current crisis and that re-regulation is the cure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that Professor Rodgers has neglected a side of the subject that happens to be my special interest, as in those reviews that wonder why the author didn’t argue what the reviewer wanted to, if only he had written the book. I’m suggesting instead that an inchoate, open-ended ambivalence about capitalism is a central, unavoidable dimension of late-20th century intellectual history, perhaps because the Internet made the disposition of and reward for intellectual property such live cultural issues. Neo-conservatism itself is predicated, pretty clearly, on this ambivalence, as even a casual reading of Irving Kristol, the founding father, would suggest. It begins with doubts about Hayek and Friedman, not enthusiastic embrace.

“The” market doesn’t ever exist as an inert externality or a unitary device. Markets do, of course, exist, but their languages vary, and they don’t emerge or endure in the absence of rules, symbols, gestures, and thoughts that change over time and space. Moreover, these variations never cancel the progressive, democratic possibilities still resident within socialism—socialism, by the way, is not necessarily progressive or democratic—even though, and even when, we frame the issues as an either/or choice between markets and social democracy. I’m one of those people who believes, on historical grounds, that liberty and equality require markets as a social-intellectual presupposition; but I also believe, on the same grounds, that if they are to work properly, markets require democracy.

In these terms, Robert Westbrook is right to place me at a respectful remove from the position that Professor Rodgers has so poignantly and brilliantly mapped in Age of Fracture. I still see the promise of uncertainty: I don’t want to know where we’re going, not just yet. I like to think that for all the mourning that Professor Rodgers does in this indispensable book, he doesn’t want to, either.

Secularization, Pluralism, and Moral Minimalism: A Response to Williams, Hartman, Haberski, and Hickman (Roundtable Part V)

David Sehat

I am grateful to Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman for their careful readings and their generous evaluations of my book. They have largely captured my argument and, though I have a few points of disagreement, a point-by-point engagement would be both tedious and ungenerous to their efforts. Instead, let me explain how I approached this book, which might capture and clarify to what extent we agree or disagree.

As I see it, my book turns on three somewhat abstract but important concepts: secularization, pluralism, and moral minimalism. Each involves complicated theoretical and normative positions. Since I was aiming at the general reader (that mythical beast), I didn’t want to burden the text with a full elaboration of these concepts. But after reading these responses to the book, it now seems to me that more remains to be said.

1. Secularization

Williams chides me for what he sees as a persistent tendency to seek out “a secular basis for the expansion of rights” by neglecting the role of religious people, particularly religious liberals. And it is true that The Myth of American Religious Freedom is a history of secularization. But I do not mean secularization quite the way that Williams suggests, so let me be clear about my understanding of the term.

Over the last few decades, secularization theory seemed dead at times. After all, at its base secularization seemed to require the decline of religion and, love it or hate it: we all know that religion is alive and well. But more recently, historical and theoretical sociologists have been refining and reformulating the notion of secularization. Though there are many perceptive writers that I might have drawn upon, in this book I relied upon the work of the sociologist Mark Chaves.

Chaves argues that secularization involves two distinct processes. The first is the differentiation of religion from other institutional structures such as government, education, or business. This differentiation of institutional structures is a mark of modernity. In other words, whereas in past ages governmental, religious, and business authorities might have been connected or combined in the king or prince or pope, modernity entails the division and separation of these various structures. Secularization then occurs as religious authority declines in scope, that is, as religious authority becomes increasingly confined into its own institutional sphere with less relevance for other institutional spheres. The key issue in this version of secularization theory is religious authority. Though many, many people may continue to believe or to practice various religious traditions, this fact is not relevant to the process of secularization, according to Chaves. By focusing on the scope and intensity of religious authority, Chaves offers a theory of secularization that focuses our attention not on the prevalence of individual belief but on the social significance of religion.[i]

Those who have read The Myth of American Religious Freedom will know that the issue of religious authority is a major theme of the book. Religious partisans have long argued that their religion provides the morals to be enforced in law. Another way of saying it is that religious partisans made their religious authority determinative in law and government, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so. The success of religious partisans in imposing their religious authority on law resulted in a moral establishment, a proxy religious establishment that provided religious authority with the coercive powers of law.

My book focuses on the role of dissenters to the moral establishment—those who objected to the reach of religious authority into law and government. Dissenters were central to the decline of the moral establishment and the secularization of American public life, a secularization that, I must add, is tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse. And it is this understanding of secularization that apparently did not come across as clearly as I wished. Williams, for example, thinks that I depict religious liberals as people “who quickly realized that their arguments did not depend upon religious faith and who therefore embraced secular language in advancing human rights.”

But this is not quite what I say, or at least what I intended to say. I sought to say something at once more specific and also stronger: Religious liberals, precisely because of their religious beliefs, were agents of secularization, a secularization that involved the expansion of rights because it meant the decline of religious authority outside the sphere of religious institutions. In making this argument, I think I am being true to liberal theology. Religious liberalism, especially in the nineteenth century but also in the twentieth century, involved a belief in the immanence of God in human history. To religious liberals, God was so present in human affairs that history involved the progressive and inexorable working out of his will for the glorious culmination of his millennial rule.

As a result, there was no basis for a transcendent, prophetic religious voice in religious liberalism. The practical obliteration of any distinction between the sacred and the profane, with the profane all but swallowing up any independent religious authority, meant that religious liberalism followed the currents of the age that others put in motion. As the late-nineteenth century religious liberal Theodore Munger put it in his widely regarded manifesto of religious liberalism, The Freedom of Faith, religious liberalism “allies itself with the thought of the present age.” This alliance, according to Munger, provided the basis for liberal theology’s distinctive character relative to other religious traditions: “Hence its ethical emphasis; hence its readiness to ally itself with all movements for bettering the condition of mankind,—holding that human society itself is to be redeemed, and that the world itself, in its corporate capacity, is being reconciled to God; hence also an apparently secular tone, which is, however, but a widening of the field of the divine and spiritual.”[ii]

That last sentence precisely shows the absolute loss of any distinctive religious authority in religious liberalism. I’m sure Munger would have preferred to see religious liberalism as so successful that it diffused liberal Protestant ideals into the wider culture. This was how John Dewey saw religious liberalism, which explains why Dewey viewed churches as relics of a once distinctive religious voice that were, by Dewey’s time, holding back the emergence of a truly religious society. But I view the process, instead, as the collapse of a distinctive religious voice, as those from the outside of the tradition pressed claims upon religious liberals that religious liberals accepted for reasons within their own tradition. The effect is the same. The advance of religious liberalism meant the decline of religious authority in other arenas of society, precisely because religious liberalism aligned itself with the thought of the age. So profoundly did religious liberalism blur any distinction between religious and secular, so complete was the loss of any basis for religious authority without relying on another source, that Will Herberg, when considering the American religious establishment at its liberal apex in 1955, would marvel at “this secularism of a religious people, this religiousness in a secularist framework.”[iii]

2. Pluralism

This brings me to my second point. The debate that I try to illuminate is not ultimately one between Christians and secularists. It is, rather, a debate between establishmentarians and pluralists—that is, between those who seek the use of law to advance their sectarian religious vision and those who seek the use of law to create a social and political framework capacious enough that many different types of people would be able to live unmolested under the same law.

That divide explains my treatment of the civil rights movement, which Williams sees as downplaying the movement’s religious component. But of course the civil rights movement had a religious component, and I did not try to suggest otherwise. In fact, I went out of my way in the brief space that I devoted to Martin Luther King Jr. to pick one of his most theological texts: his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he addressed to white, Christian ministers. My point about King was not to try to make him into a secularist. It was to show King as a pluralist. That is exactly why the civil rights movement was successful. Its appeals to justice were capacious enough to include the support of conservative Jews, liberal Catholics and Protestants, and secular activists (including, most prominently, secular Jews). But the pluralism of the civil rights movement—as well as its offshoots in the other social movements of the later 1960s and 1970s—is exactly what made the 1960s into a secularizing period. Pluralism necessarily means the destabilizing of a single religious authority in law, which has the ultimate effect of an absolute decline of religious authority in law since religious authorities conflict.

This divide between pluralists and establishmentarians is the fundamental intellectual divide of the book, so it is not surprising that my other reviewers train their criticisms on it as well. Andrew Hartman and Christopher Hickman complain, in slightly different ways, that I make too much of the divide and so both overstate its relevance and, in the process, overstate the argument’s claims of originality. I think this, too, misreads the book. As I maintained in my introduction, “There are always many who occupy a middle space, or who remain aloof from any divide, having altogether different concerns and different conceptions” (pp. 9-10). My point was not to stretch the history of this divide to cover everything in American history, but to reveal a previously unappreciated tension that has existed for all of American history. And by connecting the debate between pluralists and establishmentarians with other debates over slavery, women’s rights, or labor, I sought to show that these debates featured not merely disagreements over particular issues but disagreements over divergent political philosophies. This focus on political philosophy is what Hartman especially misses. His contention that slaveholders' invocation God in support of their social arrangements was merely an “opportunistic cover for slave power” seems not only unprovable but also beside the point. When we move beyond the specific debates to the wider political philosophies that they entail, the divide between the pluralists and the establishmentarians asserts itself as part of, if not fundamental to, these wider debates over political philosophy that were taking place around slavery, women’s rights, and the rights of labor in an ordered society.

3. Moral Minimalism

Ultimately, though, pluralism is not in itself a workable political philosophy because it does not explain how these different groups are supposed to be connected in a single polity. So, too, individualism, which could be said to be the most extreme form of pluralism, leads only toward the utopias of anarchism. We need something else. I am, as Hartman points out, in deep sympathy with the early twentieth-century liberal thinkers such as Croly and Lippmann. But their vision of progress was, alas, naive and proved too technocratic, too reliant on a bureaucracy of experts, and too utopian in the aftermath of World War I.

This leads me, at the very end of the book, to Michael Walzer’s idea of moral minimalism. The fact is that we do owe other members of our society something. We are not little islands. Walzer lays down some helpful distinctions as we think through our obligations. In Walzer’s explanation, moral ideas are ordinarily embedded in thickly contextualized moral outlooks that remain tightly connected to a person’s or group’s view of the world. A Christian might believe that sex outside of marriage is wrong. He or she might base this belief on the Bible, which this person was taught in the family or in the religious community. This maximal moral code is connected to an entire set of ideas about divine governance of human affairs, the status of Jesus Christ as the redeemer of the world, Jesus’s authority to lay down moral precepts, the formation of the body of writings through which Jesus’s maxims come to us in a scriptural tradition that is now called the New Testament, and the status of church and family as the primary purveyors and interpreters of this scriptural tradition.

But these maximal moral ideas cannot form an adequate moral framework for complex modern societies. They are too fully elaborated, too maximally particular in their religious, political, and social perspectives. By contrast, minimal moral ideas, or moral ideas that have been separated from their particular context in order to converse with those not of that tradition or worldview or group, are absolutely necessary for any functioning society. Minimal ideas are the basic codes of conduct that we require of one another even when they are not in our group. They are what enable a Catholic Latino migrant laborer, an atheist professor of religion at an Ivy League University, and a Hindu engineer living in the suburbs, though they may have radically different maximal moralities, to live together in a complex society without it degenerating into anarchy. In that sense, the role of minimal moral ideas cannot be overemphasized. “‘Minimalism,’” Walzer claims, “does not describe a morality that is substantively minor or emotionally shallow. The opposite is more likely true: this is morality close to the bone. . . . The minimal demands that we make on one another are, when denied, repeated with passionate insistence.”[iv]

The distinction between minimal morality (which is publicly affirmed, and therefore publicly regulated) and maximal morality (which is privately believed and thereby privately maintained) still leaves plenty of room for disagreement about what ought to be considered minimal and what ought to be considered maximal moral obligations. Those disagreements are the stuff of contemporary debate. I don’t propose to solve that debate in this book.

My aim is only to reframe the debate so that it is a productive one. To do that, we must have an adequate conception of our past. As Tony Judt said in an interview in Historically Speaking, “The historian’s task is not to disrupt [our false memories of the past] for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly.” The belief that we need a truthful understanding of the past in order to live well and to live properly is the book’s animating impulse. We need, as Ray Haberski says, to “confront versions of ourselves that we’d rather just forget,” because to remember this past, to come to terms with it, is a first step in determining the minimal obligations that we have to other another.

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[i] Mark Chaves, "Secularization as Declining Religious Authority," Social Forces 72 (March 1994): 749-74. See also, Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 1-96; Karel Dobbelaere, "Secularization: A Multi-Dimensional Concept," Current Sociology 29 (1981): 1-216.

[ii] Theodore Munger, The Freedom of Faith, 6^th ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1883), 24 (first quotation), 25 (second quotation). Emphasis added.

[iii] Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 15.

[iv] Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 6.