Tim's Light Reading (4/26/2012): A New Blog, "Secular Humanism," LGBT History, Chuck Colson, And The Problems Of Peer Review

1. A New Blog Of Interest

Two names familiar to USIH readers---Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Michael Fisher, both of whom attended last year's USIH conference---now share space on a three-person blog originating in the Syracuse-Rochester corridor. The blog's title is Longing For The Real, and it has been in existence since January 2012. Thus far the content ranges far and wide, but I expect USIH topics to appear.


2. What Is "Secular Humanism," And How Is It Used And Abused?

Rick Perlstein tackles these questions in his latest Rolling Stone installment that serves as a shot across the bow, for Democrats, in relation to the upcoming election season. Some of us have had a lively discussion on Andrew Hartman's Facebook page about Perlstein's article. We've been trying to think through the Culture Wars to figure out which part of the Christian right benefits the most by trumping up fears about "Secular Humanism." By the end of the article one is left wondering about the difference between "deeply held beliefs" and the "invention[s] of hucksters with right-wing agendas."


3. USIH, Chicago's LGBT Community, And Public History

This article explores recent leadership problems with Chicago's famous Gerber/Hart Library. Before reading this piece (today), I would have recommended the Gerber/Hart Library to any intellectual historian with ambitions of understanding the recent history of Chicago's non-hetero community. Now I wonder whether that recommendation can be made, due to disarray in the organization and in relation to potentially supporting a renegade leader who appears to be thwarting the LGBT community's wishes in relation to holdings. It sounds like a public history nightmare. And it's complicated by the fact the public history (in a different sense of the phrase) of this community is new---still evolving. My heart goes out to those involved because, as a former resident of the area who lived steps away from the Library, I was proud on behalf of the LGBT community that they had created a public space for holdings and gatherings. In addition, one of my good friends spent YEARS volunteering at Gerber/Hart, helping them organize their collections. I fear for my friend's hard work.


4. Chuck Colson: Delivered Or Disguised?

Our own LD Burnett wrote on Colson's passing last weekend. She noted that "Colson's conversion to charity -- and by 'charity' I mean both 'philanthropy' and 'Christian love' -- did not seem to dull his political instincts." This theme was echoed and expanded upon in polemical-historical pieces by Francis Schaeffer, Jr. and S-USIH member David Greenberg. Schaeffer's entry is more autobiographical, but his message is clear: Colson used his redemption for nefarious ends. Greenberg seconds that point, and argues further (not precisely in these words) that (a) Colson's conversion seems to be at least partially a sham, (b) Colson should've removed himself from politics, and (c) Colson simply continued his pre-Watergate/pre-Nixon political initiatives, particularly with regard to faith-based org-gov't partnerships, but with a post-prison Christian conversion stamp of approval. Colson used his deliverance to disguise a latent thuggishness, so says Greenberg, and continued his ongoing concerns. So who is the real Chuck Colson?

5. What Are The Goods Of Peer Review?

The deceased historian, Princeton graduate (under Dan Rodgers, I believe), and former Chicago Reader contributor Cliff Doerksen asked this question in a September 2010 Reader piece. Here are some salient passages:

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In the eyes of its critics, anonymous peer review sucks because it's slow, undemocratic, and hostile to new and potentially game-changing ideas and arguments. Advocates of the new approach [open review] discussed in the Times propose "using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience." It's an interesting and attractive idea, and one rife with potential for unintended consequences. There's no question that the existing review process is slow: an article can take years to reach publication. But it's not clear, at least not to me, that it really disfavors innovation by empowering unaccountable gatekeepers who select against new and threatening ideas. That's because academics are fundamentally creatures of consensus. ...  

It's hard to pick a fight around an academic conference table because every step of the industry's socialization process after admission to graduate school stresses playing well with others. When newly minted PhDs totter off to their first job interviews, they'll be lucky if a single person in the department to which they are applying has read so much as the title page of their dissertations. "On-campus" interviews, during which the candidate is typically entertained by his prospective employers for 48 hours, are simply protracted exercises in mutual butt-sniffing, designed to determine whether the prospective hire will fit harmoniously into the polyamorous marriage that is an academic department. 

The field of academic book reviewing is likewise a pillow fight. Few reviewers care to freely speak their minds when they know that an uncensored takedown might do real injury to the reviewed author's prospects for tenure or other advancement—and might piss off the author's friends and allies in the bargain. (Fun facts: Amid the thousands of academic book reviews accessible through Project Muse, a gargantuan database of 393 peer-reviewed journals, only nine books were deemed "poorly researched" by their reviewers. On the other hand, 374 were found to be "magisterial"—pretty much the warmest plaudit in the humanistic vocabulary.) 

On the odd occasion when scholars do get out their flick knives, it tends to happen outside of class and out by the bike racks....

Getting back to the issue of double-blind peer review: Theoretically the anonymity of the process creates conditions in which an academic referee can vote his or her conscience. In practice I question whether double-blinding really makes much difference, any more than the acquisition of tenure reliably turns your average prudent career academic into a fearless speaker of truth to power after years of careful self-censorship. ...By and large I have to agree with Professor Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, when he asserts that "there seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print." And keep in mind Dr. Rennie is referring here to the scientific precincts of scholarship, where especially robust standards of proof and argumentation supposedly prevail. 

So what then might we anticipate from a brave new protocol of scholarly review premised on the idea that anyone with access to the Web is entitled to an opinion? Probably something pretty interesting, and at least as dysfunctional as the mess we have now.
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 Comments, praise, and disparagement are welcome! - TL

Judge W. Brevard Hand, Intellectual Historian

United States federal judge W. Brevard Hand (1924-2008) was one of the more important conservative intellectuals of the culture wars. And yet his significance is rarely recognized. His opinion in the infamous “Alabama Textbook Case” (1987)—published as American Education on Trial: Is Secular Humanism a Religion?, with an introduction by Richard John Neuhaus—is the work of a creative and far-reaching conservative intellectual. In fact, it reads like an intellectual history of secular humanism.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers briefly discusses the obstreperous Hand in the context of his discussion of constitutional originalism, part of his “wrinkles in time” chapter. Hand, as Rodgers writes, “set out to show that history proved the Supreme Court wrong” on its rulings on religion in school. As such, he made arguments from his Alabama bench in the early 1980s that served as an important precursor to the originalist movement, particularly in his disagreement with incorporation, a process by which portions of the Bill of Rights were applied at the state level. Among other revolutionary legal transformations, the precedent set by incorporation led to the 1962 Engel v. Vitale landmark decision that ruled school prayer violated the First Amendment. In contrast, based on a properly originalist understanding of the Constitution, Hand declared that states were not bound by the First Amendment and, as such, that Alabamans were free to establish religious practices of their choosing.

Hand’s early originalism proved influential, especially to Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, who made it the cornerstone of how the Reagan administration would deal with religious freedom issues. The Reagan administration openly pushed for prayer in public schools following this logic. Hand’s interpretation also influenced future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, among others. But Hand’s creative conservative jurisprudence did not end there. For in the 1983 case where he made his name as an originalist—Wallace v. Jaffree—Hand anticipated that the Supreme Court would reject his logic regarding incorporation. Thus, he helped the defendants in that case, those associated with the Alabama law that set aside one minute in the school day for school prayer or the equivalent in quiet contemplation, construct an alternative legal rationale for their actions. If it was determined that the Alabama law violated the First Amendment “establishment clause,” via incorporation, then Hand and the defendants-cum-plaintiffs sought to make their case by going through the “no establishment” provision. In other words, Hand sought to use the incorporation precedent against itself by making the case that “secular humanism” was a religion, and furthermore, that it was the established religion of the public schools, and thus, that it violated the religious freedom of Christians. This is an example of how conservative Christians often made use of multicultural “rights” language to advance their causes during the culture wars.

The “Alabama Textbook Case” (Smith v. Board of School Commissioners) (1987), then, was an attempt by Judge Hand and the plaintiffs, comprised of several hundred Alabama citizens, including teachers, to prove that secular humanism was the operant religion of the public schools by way of a close reading of textbooks. As Hand wrote: “What this case is about, is the allegedly improper promotion of certain religious beliefs, thus violating the constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.” The Neuhaus introduction nicely sets the stage for the nearly-100-page opinion that followed. Neuhaus argued that what Hand’s interlocutions proved was that “the law with respect to religion and public education is in a terrible jumble,” which is hardly controversial no matter your dog in this fight. In his book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, David Sehat makes a similar point from a very different perspective. He contends that the liberal mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court that overturned the moral establishment based its decisions on bad history, which encouraged dissent. “By underselling the liberalizing rationale for their decisions,” Sehat explains, “the Court created a damaging uncertainty as to its purpose in taking on these cases.” Furthermore: “In not acknowledging past religious power and not explaining that that power had led to an unfair exclusion or coercion of individuals, the Court left obscure the reason that it felt compelled to act in the first place, which in turn allowed conservatives to press their claims without acknowledging their desire for a return to coercion.”

Neuhaus also analyzes the work and influence of John Dewey in ways that I do in my book, Education and the Cold War, though, as with Sehat, I come from a very different vantage point from Neuhaus. In seeking to concur with Hand that secular humanism was indeed a religion, Neuhaus pointed to the influence of John Dewey, who was open and honest about his secular humanist position. “The main defendant, be it understood, is the venerable John Dewey.” More: “Dewey lives on, so to speak, in the establishment philosophy of government education today.” And more still: “If fish could write a report on their environment, probably the last thing they would notice is the water. Dewey is the philosophical water within which government education swims.” And yet again, more: “Dewey was both wiser and more candid than much of today’s public educational establishment. He made no bones about the fact that education required religion and, in his view, the religion required is the religion of humanism. I say he is wiser because, with educators from Aristotle through Secretary of Education William Bennett, he knew that education has most essentially to do with paideia, with the transmission and nurturing of truths by which a community would live. A new religion was needed, he believed, and he called it the religion of humanism.” This gets at the point I was trying to make in my previous posts on secular humanism and the teaching of evolution: teachers should not hide behind professionalism and pretend their pedagogies don’t challenge fundamentalist Christianity, or even, ideally, capitalism.

This then leads me to the intellectual history of secular humanism provided by Hand in his opinion, which was, in essence, an attempt to refute the notion that education should operate in a bias-free vacuum of professionalism—put on display in the trial by John Tyson, Vice-President of the Alabama State Board of Education, as paraphrased by Hand: “values are not something that he thinks should be taught in the schools, but should be taught at home and in the churches. ‘What you go to the public schools for is to be educated to learn how to read and write.’” Instead of this, Hand interpreted the thought of several key people who gave testimony. One such person was Glennelle Halpin, a professor of educational psychology at Auburn who gave a lengthy testimony summarizing the major philosophies that informed educational theory, from behaviorism to humanist psychology. She was a proponent of values clarification, a pedagogical method that conservatives pointed to as representative of the hyper-relativism that informed public school curriculum, though Halpin said it was often misunderstood. Hand summed up her thought process on this: “Dr. Halpin says that the school does not have the right to teach a value system that is different from the parent, but the content of the curriculum in the school is not necessarily based on a survey of the value systems of the parents, so when the teacher does instruct she may well match or mismatch, deliberately, the information about values that has been presented to that child.”

As counter to Halpin’s insider view, Hand relied upon the testimony of famed conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, whose traditionalism informed his many writings on education. Based on Kirk’s analysis, Hand presented a brief but compelling overview of secular humanism’s etymology. The term emerged in the twentieth century, used by humanists in the Dewey vein to separate themselves from new humanists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. For Kirk, as for Babbitt and More, this was the distinction between humanism and “humanitarianism,” the latter being a sickly form of relativism. On whether secular humanism is a religion, Kirk argued that it indeed was, based on the fact that it had a set of documents which formed a creed—the Humanist Manifestos—and because it tended to make immanent “symbols of transcendence.” As Christians claimed “that one enters upon immortality through perfection in grace in death,” secular humanists made immanent “the perfection of society here in this world.” “The equivalent of death to the secularists is passing through a form of revolution to a new order of a perfect kind. The role model for this secularist thinking, Dr. Kirk says, is the Marxist theory: revolution and then eternal changelessness here on earth, a condition of perfect equality.”

My musings here only briefly touch upon the intellectual history of secular humanism synthesized by Judge Hand in the “Alabama Textbook Case.” My argument is neither that this is necessarily good intellectual history, nor that Hand made compelling legal or political arguments (all of which, luckily, were shot down by higher courts). Rather, I find it fascinating that Hand’s opinion reads more like intellectual history. And I maintain that the conservative critique of secular humanism points to some of the weaknesses inherent to the professional cloak worn by contemporary progressive educators and proponents of multiculturalism.

Christian American Exceptionalism in a Secular Age

Last week I posted my thoughts on Charles Taylor’s theory of multiculturalism—what he terms the “politics of recognition.” (My post: "When the Zulus Produce A Tolstoy We Will Read Him.") This week, as promised, I continue engaging Charles Taylor with some preliminary thoughts on his 2007 tome, The Secular Age. My interests in Taylor are, of course, peculiar to my research about the U.S. culture wars. If you’d like more in-depth blogging on secularism’s relationship to religion and the public sphere, I highly recommend The Immanent Frame.

Although by accident, I could not have timed my reading of The Secular Age any better than I did, since it came during our roundtable discussion of David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. In his entry, Sehat responds to the charge that he had an uncritical attitude towards secularization by citing sociologist Mark Chaves. Sehat writes:

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.

This explanation of secularization despite the persistence of religious belief coheres with Taylor’s thinking on the subject (and with a number of other thinkers, such as Stephen L. Carter, who argues in The Culture of Disbelief that the American public sphere is hostile to religiously informed action, despite the fact that well over 90% of Americans say they believe in God when polled). Taylor argues that the incommensurable steadfastness of religious belief in the United States lends credence to theories of American exceptionalism. The doggedness of religious belief amongst a vast majority of Americans in the secular age also helps explain the culture wars.

But first, let's begin with how Taylor defines the secular age by three meanings:

1) Religion is not a state matter, but rather a private one.
2) Hardly anyone believes in God.
3) Religion is a choice, and not an easy one to make.

Obviously, these meanings are not all equally true everywhere. Though all are mostly true in western Europe, only meanings one and three make sense when discussing the United States, where the vast majority believes in God. As Taylor writes: “the United States is rather striking in this regard. One of the earliest societies to separate Church and State, it is also the Western society with the highest statistics for religious belief and practice” (2). Taylor stresses that being a believer in a secular age—and in a secular society (not all contemporary societies are secular, as Muslim nations make clear)—is different than being a believer prior to secularization, when belief was a given. Now, belief is a choice, and not always an easy one. In other words, the secular age is one of differentiated belief: “We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty” (11). In other words, belief (and unbelief) takes on new meaning in the secular age because we have passed from a “naïve” stage—where everyone automatically believed, because it was what people did, without question—to a “reflective” one—where people consciously think about how their lived experiences relate to the existence of God (or not).

Broadly, Taylor’s book is a polemic of sorts: he argues that the shift to secularism was not merely a history of “subtraction”—of people becoming disenchanted with God due to science and naturalistic explanations of creation and other phenomena. He thinks, rather, people found meaning or “fullness” in humanism—a humanism that had to be created, that wasn’t already fully formed. For this shift to happen it was “necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering” (27). As I have argued in an earlier post on secular humanism, the confidence in a human moral order, or even an immanent moral order, is the dogma underlying progressive pedagogy, and inasmuch as the public schools are secular and progressive, this dogma should be embraced as such by curriculum builders and educational theorists. In other words, religion should be engaged along these lines in our public schools, rather than ignored, which is current practice, and which confuses the very purpose of secular, progressive education.

Taylor’s analysis of secularization’s longue durée is interesting, though a little too abstract for my tastes. The book becomes more compelling by Chapter 13, which Taylor titles, in a nod to Lionel Trilling, “The Age of Authenticity”—about our current age, which he dates back to the postwar period, and marks more concretely with the cultural revolutions of the Sixties. He writes: “I believe, along with many others, that our North Atlantic civilization has been undergoing a cultural revolution in recent decades. The 60s provide perhaps the hinge moment, at least symbolically”—when expressive individualism or a “kind of self-orientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon” (473). More in the words of Taylor: “The causes cited for these changes are many: affluence and the continued extension of consumer life styles; social and geographic mobility; outsourcing and downsizing by corporations; new family patterns, particularly the growth of the two-income household, with the resulting overwork and burnout; suburban spread, whereby people often live, work, and shop in three separate areas; the rise of television, and others” (473). Taylor relates all of these developments to the seeming loss of community, and duly cites Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Alone heads up the “loss of community” canon (Rodgers’s Age of Fracture will no doubt join any such reading list).

This leads to a theoretical understanding of the source of the culture wars. It is against the era of expressive, individuated authenticity—“set in a wider critique of the buffered, discipline self; concerned above all with instrumental rational control” (476)—that conservatives revolt, both consciously and unconsciously. “The ideal [of expressive individualism], however distorted, is still powerful enough in a society like the U.S. to awaken strong resistance in certain quarters, and to be the object of what have been called ‘culture wars’” (478).

Taylor turns to Émile Durkheim to explain the different paradigms of how religion interacts with society, naming three social forms: paleo-Durkheimian, neo-Durkheimian, and post-Durkheimian (at the Immanent Frame, these typologies are criticized by Robert Bellah, who is otherwise a big fan of Taylor, calling A Secular Age one of the most important books he has ever read). In paleo-Durkheimian societies religion is embedded and undifferentiated, such as in premodern Europe. In neo-Durkheimian societies, of which the United States was arguably the first, religion is only partially embedded, but it still manages to express a larger national identity. Another word for this might be "civil religion" in that the religious form is semi-generic, does not bear on the everyday public practices of all citizens, but is still crucial to a coherent normative framework of citizenship. The post-Durkheimian society is the secular age, when religion is immanent. (As William James made clear in The Varieties of Religious Experience, written over a century ago, models for post-Durkheimian religious expression have long existed, even in the neo-Durkheimian United States.)

The United States culture wars pit neo-Durkheimians against post-Durkheimians. “In a sense,” Taylor writes, “part of what drove the Moral Majority and motivates the Christian Right in the U.S.A. is an aspiration to re-establish something of the fractured neo-Durkheimian understanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God,’ or at least with the ethic which was interwoven with this.” But, and here’s the rub: “the very embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation”(488).

But what makes the United States exceptional relative to the other nations of the north Atlantic? (How lucky that one of our plenary sessions for the 2011 U.S. Intellectual History Conference will be on the topic of American Exceptionalism, featuring Eric Foner, Beth Bailey, Rogers Smith, and Michael Kazin. Only five days until the CFP deadline!) Taylor acknowledges that one of the hottest debates in secularization theory is over this question. He offers a few plausible answers. First off, historically, immigrants have found that integrating into the American mainstream is made easier through church attendance: “one can be integrated as an American through one’s faith or religious identity.” This explains divergent paths to modernity: whereas rural Sicilians who emigrated to the United States became more Catholic, rural southern Italians who emigrated to, say, Milan, usually become less religious, opting instead for the more common paths to assimilation there, typically through socialism or syndicalism.

Also, Taylor contends that the most important contemporary force for secularization is the modern academy. But although American academics are equally as secular as their western European counterparts, elite intellectual life does not influence the rest of American society the way it does in British or French or German societies. This is the old saw that Americans are less deferential, or in other terms, more anti-intellectual.

In explaining American exceptionalism, Taylor also builds on an argument made by Marx: that the ties of the church loosened in Europe because the state and church were so tightly wound that anticlericalism followed the age of revolution against monarchy. In contrast, since the United States never experienced such a paleo-Durkheimian phase, since it was always already neo-Durkheimian, there was never the urgent political need to revolt against formal religion. In contrast, religion often offered Americans apparent refuge from the intrusions of the state.

More compelling meta-analysis of American exceptionalism from Taylor: In European nations, any residual link between God and nation—the neo-Durkheimian society—was shattered by the trauma of World War I. But the United States never experienced such a trauma, at least not until the 1960s, when it experienced the combined shocks of a set of destabilizing forces—“the triple attack which the family-religion-patriotism complex of the 1950s suffered in the era of civil rights, Vietnam and the expressive revolution.” Taylor continues: “Was this not the analogue in the American case to the First World War for the British? Perhaps, but plainly not everyone sees it this way. Indeed, the different reactions to this era seem to underlie the ‘culture wars’ of contemporary U.S. politics. It seems that the fusion of faith, family values and patriotism is still extremely important to one half of American society, that they are dismayed to see it challenged, both in its central values (e.g., the fight over abortion or gay marriage), and in the link between their faith and the polity (fights over school prayer, the phrase ‘under God,’ and the like)” (527).

Of course, in spite of the trauma of Vietnam (and more recent traumas, Iraq and Afghanistan), the United States remains the most powerful nation in the world, which goes a long way in explaining the persistence of its civil religion, of its neo-Durkheimian state. “It is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power. The skeletons [in the closet] are there, but they can be resolutely ignored, in spite of the efforts of a gallant band of scholars, who are engaged in the ‘history wars’” (528)

Or put more simply: “Most Americans have few doubts about whose side God is on.”

Christian American Exceptionalism in a Secular Age

Last week I posted my thoughts on Charles Taylor’s theory of multiculturalism—what he terms the “politics of recognition.” (My post: "When the Zulus Produce A Tolstoy We Will Read Him.") This week, as promised, I continue engaging Charles Taylor with some preliminary thoughts on his 2007 tome, The Secular Age. My interests in Taylor are, of course, peculiar to my research about the U.S. culture wars. If you’d like more in-depth blogging on secularism’s relationship to religion and the public sphere, I highly recommend The Immanent Frame.

Although by accident, I could not have timed my reading of The Secular Age any better than I did, since it came during our roundtable discussion of David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. In his entry, Sehat responds to the charge that he had an uncritical attitude towards secularization by citing sociologist Mark Chaves. Sehat writes:

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.

This explanation of secularization despite the persistence of religious belief coheres with Taylor’s thinking on the subject (and with a number of other thinkers, such as Stephen L. Carter, who argues in The Culture of Disbelief that the American public sphere is hostile to religiously informed action, despite the fact that well over 90% of Americans say they believe in God when polled). Taylor argues that the incommensurable steadfastness of religious belief in the United States lends credence to theories of American exceptionalism. The doggedness of religious belief amongst a vast majority of Americans in the secular age also helps explain the culture wars.

But first, let's begin with how Taylor defines the secular age by three meanings:

1) Religion is not a state matter, but rather a private one.
2) Hardly anyone believes in God.
3) Religion is a choice, and not an easy one to make.

Obviously, these meanings are not all equally true everywhere. Though all are mostly true in western Europe, only meanings one and three make sense when discussing the United States, where the vast majority believes in God. As Taylor writes: “the United States is rather striking in this regard. One of the earliest societies to separate Church and State, it is also the Western society with the highest statistics for religious belief and practice” (2). Taylor stresses that being a believer in a secular age—and in a secular society (not all contemporary societies are secular, as Muslim nations make clear)—is different than being a believer prior to secularization, when belief was a given. Now, belief is a choice, and not always an easy one. In other words, the secular age is one of differentiated belief: “We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty” (11). In other words, belief (and unbelief) takes on new meaning in the secular age because we have passed from a “naïve” stage—where everyone automatically believed, because it was what people did, without question—to a “reflective” one—where people consciously think about how their lived experiences relate to the existence of God (or not).

Broadly, Taylor’s book is a polemic of sorts: he argues that the shift to secularism was not merely a history of “subtraction”—of people becoming disenchanted with God due to science and naturalistic explanations of creation and other phenomena. He thinks, rather, people found meaning or “fullness” in humanism—a humanism that had to be created, that wasn’t already fully formed. For this shift to happen it was “necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering” (27). As I have argued in an earlier post on secular humanism, the confidence in a human moral order, or even an immanent moral order, is the dogma underlying progressive pedagogy, and inasmuch as the public schools are secular and progressive, this dogma should be embraced as such by curriculum builders and educational theorists. In other words, religion should be engaged along these lines in our public schools, rather than ignored, which is current practice, and which confuses the very purpose of secular, progressive education.

Taylor’s analysis of secularization’s longue durée is interesting, though a little too abstract for my tastes. The book becomes more compelling by Chapter 13, which Taylor titles, in a nod to Lionel Trilling, “The Age of Authenticity”—about our current age, which he dates back to the postwar period, and marks more concretely with the cultural revolutions of the Sixties. He writes: “I believe, along with many others, that our North Atlantic civilization has been undergoing a cultural revolution in recent decades. The 60s provide perhaps the hinge moment, at least symbolically”—when expressive individualism or a “kind of self-orientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon” (473). More in the words of Taylor: “The causes cited for these changes are many: affluence and the continued extension of consumer life styles; social and geographic mobility; outsourcing and downsizing by corporations; new family patterns, particularly the growth of the two-income household, with the resulting overwork and burnout; suburban spread, whereby people often live, work, and shop in three separate areas; the rise of television, and others” (473). Taylor relates all of these developments to the seeming loss of community, and duly cites Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Alone heads up the “loss of community” canon (Rodgers’s Age of Fracture will no doubt join any such reading list).

This leads to a theoretical understanding of the source of the culture wars. It is against the era of expressive, individuated authenticity—“set in a wider critique of the buffered, discipline self; concerned above all with instrumental rational control” (476)—that conservatives revolt, both consciously and unconsciously. “The ideal [of expressive individualism], however distorted, is still powerful enough in a society like the U.S. to awaken strong resistance in certain quarters, and to be the object of what have been called ‘culture wars’” (478).

Taylor turns to Émile Durkheim to explain the different paradigms of how religion interacts with society, naming three social forms: paleo-Durkheimian, neo-Durkheimian, and post-Durkheimian (at the Immanent Frame, these typologies are criticized by Robert Bellah, who is otherwise a big fan of Taylor, calling A Secular Age one of the most important books he has ever read). In paleo-Durkheimian societies religion is embedded and undifferentiated, such as in premodern Europe. In neo-Durkheimian societies, of which the United States was arguably the first, religion is only partially embedded, but it still manages to express a larger national identity. Another word for this might be "civil religion" in that the religious form is semi-generic, does not bear on the everyday public practices of all citizens, but is still crucial to a coherent normative framework of citizenship. The post-Durkheimian society is the secular age, when religion is immanent. (As William James made clear in The Varieties of Religious Experience, written over a century ago, models for post-Durkheimian religious expression have long existed, even in the neo-Durkheimian United States.)

The United States culture wars pit neo-Durkheimians against post-Durkheimians. “In a sense,” Taylor writes, “part of what drove the Moral Majority and motivates the Christian Right in the U.S.A. is an aspiration to re-establish something of the fractured neo-Durkheimian understanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God,’ or at least with the ethic which was interwoven with this.” But, and here’s the rub: “the very embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation”(488).

But what makes the United States exceptional relative to the other nations of the north Atlantic? (How lucky that one of our plenary sessions for the 2011 U.S. Intellectual History Conference will be on the topic of American Exceptionalism, featuring Eric Foner, Beth Bailey, Rogers Smith, and Michael Kazin. Only five days until the CFP deadline!) Taylor acknowledges that one of the hottest debates in secularization theory is over this question. He offers a few plausible answers. First off, historically, immigrants have found that integrating into the American mainstream is made easier through church attendance: “one can be integrated as an American through one’s faith or religious identity.” This explains divergent paths to modernity: whereas rural Sicilians who emigrated to the United States became more Catholic, rural southern Italians who emigrated to, say, Milan, usually become less religious, opting instead for the more common paths to assimilation there, typically through socialism or syndicalism.

Also, Taylor contends that the most important contemporary force for secularization is the modern academy. But although American academics are equally as secular as their western European counterparts, elite intellectual life does not influence the rest of American society the way it does in British or French or German societies. This is the old saw that Americans are less deferential, or in other terms, more anti-intellectual.

In explaining American exceptionalism, Taylor also builds on an argument made by Marx: that the ties of the church loosened in Europe because the state and church were so tightly wound that anticlericalism followed the age of revolution against monarchy. In contrast, since the United States never experienced such a paleo-Durkheimian phase, since it was always already neo-Durkheimian, there was never the urgent political need to revolt against formal religion. In contrast, religion often offered Americans apparent refuge from the intrusions of the state.

More compelling meta-analysis of American exceptionalism from Taylor: In European nations, any residual link between God and nation—the neo-Durkheimian society—was shattered by the trauma of World War I. But the United States never experienced such a trauma, at least not until the 1960s, when it experienced the combined shocks of a set of destabilizing forces—“the triple attack which the family-religion-patriotism complex of the 1950s suffered in the era of civil rights, Vietnam and the expressive revolution.” Taylor continues: “Was this not the analogue in the American case to the First World War for the British? Perhaps, but plainly not everyone sees it this way. Indeed, the different reactions to this era seem to underlie the ‘culture wars’ of contemporary U.S. politics. It seems that the fusion of faith, family values and patriotism is still extremely important to one half of American society, that they are dismayed to see it challenged, both in its central values (e.g., the fight over abortion or gay marriage), and in the link between their faith and the polity (fights over school prayer, the phrase ‘under God,’ and the like)” (527).

Of course, in spite of the trauma of Vietnam (and more recent traumas, Iraq and Afghanistan), the United States remains the most powerful nation in the world, which goes a long way in explaining the persistence of its civil religion, of its neo-Durkheimian state. “It is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power. The skeletons [in the closet] are there, but they can be resolutely ignored, in spite of the efforts of a gallant band of scholars, who are engaged in the ‘history wars’” (528)

Or put more simply: “Most Americans have few doubts about whose side God is on.”

Is Secular Humanism a Religion?

Most historians who study the modern Christian Right discuss, to some extent, how religious conservatives replaced the communist Great Satan with another bogeyman, “Secular Humanism,” a phrase common to the religious right lexicon from the 1970s on. For example, Daniel K. Williams, in his new book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, dedicates a sub-section of his chapter on the “Culture Wars in the Carter Years” to “Concerns about ‘Secular Humanism’ in Education.” Williams notes that religious conservatives did not focus on humanism when it first organized in 1941 under the auspices of John Dewey’s American Humanist Association (although, as I show in my book, they certainly focused their ire on Dewey’s educational philosophy). Williams continues: “Yet when social conservatives became concerned about changes in school curricula in the late 1960s, they decided that objectionable programs such as sex education and values clarification classes might be an attempt by the National Education Association and, in the words of conservative Catholic journalist John Steinbacher, John Dewey’s ‘coterie of sycophantic followers’ to ‘make good little Humanists out of the kids’."

But despite such cursory attention to the problem of secular humanism, historians rarely take religious conservative thought about secular humanism very seriously. In other words, what we need is an intellectual history of the Christian Right’s critique of secular humanism. We need this because such a critique has formed the intellectual basis and legal strategy of the Christian Right’s struggles over public education since the 1970s. We need this because doing justice to the Christian Right’s argument allows us to better understand the movement. And we need this because, as I will seek to make clear in my conclusion, the Christian Right's critique of secular humanism obliquely reveals a major blind spot of contemporary progressive education.

Influenced by the 1970s writings of Francis Schaeffer, Rousas John Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye, the Christian Right argued that the public schools were in violation of the First Amendment because the schools established an official religion: secular humanism. Yep, that’s right, they contended secular humanism, though atheistic, evinced all the traits of a religion and thus the public schools, awash in secular humanism, violated the religious freedom of Christians. Secularists considered this ironic, to say the least, given that the so-called Lemon test put the concepts “secular” and “religious” in direct opposition to one another in that for a statute to be deemed constitutional it must have a secular purpose and its principal effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

Nevertheless, the argument that secular humanism was a religion, and that its dominion over the public school curriculum was a violation of the First Amendment, guided conservative legal attempts to remove evolution from biology classrooms or, at least, have it taught alongside some form of creationism (including, recently, intelligent design). Occasionally, the Christian Right found sympathetic judges on this matter, such as Brevard Hand, a federal judge in Alabama who ruled against state schools in a 1987 decision, writing that the secular humanist “omission” of religion “does affect a person’s ability to develop religious beliefs and exercise that religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.” But Hand’s logic was overruled and, generally speaking, the courts have yet to grant legitimacy to this argument. For example, in another 1987 case, Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court found that a Louisiana law requiring teachers of evolution to give equal time to creationism was unconstitutional because its sole purpose was to “advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind.” Obviously, to make this argument the Court did not conceptualize evolution, which the Christian Right considers integral to secular humanism, as religious doctrine.

But, just because the courts have yet to take the Christian Right seriously when it claims secular humanism is a religion does not mean intellectual historians should do likewise. LaHaye, now famous for authoring the best-selling premillennial dispensationalist Left Behind series, wrote a three-part “Battle” series in the late 1970s and early 1980s that gave his readers a framework for understanding secular humanism. LaHaye dedicated the third book in the series, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children (1983) (which arrived quickly on the heels of The Battle for the Mind and The Battle for the Family), to those parents concerned about the decline of the public schools, especially “the growing army within that group who realize that secular humanism, the religious doctrine of our public schools, has brought on this decline.” LaHaye coined the awkward phrase “humanist educrats,” a reference to “the elite heads of many teachers colleges, administrators, and many superintendents and principals who are determined to jam atheistic, amoral humanism, with its socialist world view, into the minds, of our nation’s children and youth, kindergarten through college.” Like so many before and since, he blamed the apparently all-powerful John Dewey. “Dewey made the teaching of humanism exclusive by getting traditional religion and its values expelled from the public schools.” The expulsion of Christianity from the schools, and its replacement by secular humanism, was, for LaHaye, “the origin of rampant drugs, sex, violence, and self-indulgence in our schools, which are not conducive to the learning process.”

LaHaye listed all of the traits that he thought defined a religion, and argued that secular humanism, “the official doctrine of public education,” displayed all of them:

1. A well-defined Bible or “Scriptures”
2. A stated doctrine or dogma
3. An object of worship
4. A priesthood
5. Missionaries
6. Seminaries
7. Temples
8. An established life-style
9. A support base
10. Its roots are grounded in ancient religions
11. Recognition by the Supreme Court as a religion
12. Vigorous opposition to theistic religion
13. A world view
14. Open acknowledgement of its position

Now, I don’t buy the argument that “secular humanism” qualifies as a religion by those standards, or any other set. But, the Christian Right had valid reasons to believe that the nation’s public schools no longer represented their moral vision. The Supreme Court enshrined secularism (if not secular humanism) in the schools with a series of landmark cases, most famously the Engel v. Vitale decision that declared school prayer unconstitutional in 1962. (Stay tuned for an upcoming roundtable at this blog on David Sehat's new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, a discussion which will no doubt deal with some of these issues.) Curriculum trends were just as distressing. Though progressive educators since Dewey had desired that schools teach skepticism of established institutions, including organized religion, few teachers actively challenged local norms, especially religious orthodoxies. But this changed in the 1960s. In English classes, teachers increasingly assigned works by minority and women authors that complicated traditional canons. In social studies, students were challenged to clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by their parents. In science, teachers slowly overcame the century-long taboo against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussions of sex came to replace moral exhortations.

A popular anthropology curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome Bruner in the early 1970s—MACOS, or, “Man: A Course of Study”—exemplified this liberalization of the curriculum. During a MACOS unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand, yet not judge, cultural difference. Such relativism became the norm. The single, authoritative account of American history increasingly gave way to an approach that accentuated multiple perspectives. This was highlighted by a 1991 New York state report, “One Nation, Many Peoples,” that deemphasized assimilation by affirming “a right to cultural diversity” that the authors argued must be reflected in the curriculum. In short, God and Country gave way to something else, call it “secular humanism” if you like, although “multiculturalism” works better.

This is not to say that such liberalization or secularization or multiculturalization took hold everywhere or at all times. In some parts of the country, for example, the traditional patriotic historical narrative has never given way to social “history from the bottom” or a curriculum that deemphasizes American exceptionalism. Not all Americans get acquainted with evolution in school. Some biology teachers in Kansas no doubt still adhere to the 1999 state board of education decision to remove evolution as one of the five unifying themes in the science classroom. Perhaps more importantly, at least since the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, neoconservative educators like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, and (until her recent intellectual u-turn) Diane Ravitch, have sought to implement standardization in order to reverse progressive educational trends in place since the 1960s. But, such facts notwithstanding, generally speaking, the way our children learn is much different than it used to be, much more liberal or progressive or multicultural or even secular humanist.

This then leads me to my conclusion: The conservative critique of secular humanist schools should make clear that, like all curriculums, the contemporary school curriculum, despite its implied cultural relativism, proves to be more tolerant of some cultural positions than others. This is normal and good. I think education should be intolerant of some positions. In my perfect world, I would have schools inculcate socialistic values and be prejudiced against values inimical to them.

I contend that the progressive educational establishment is dishonest about their project. A 1987 report put out by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, entitled “Religion in the Curriculum,” found that “references to religion have all but been excised from the public school curriculum.” Progressive educators should come out and say, forcefully, that religion is not welcome in the public schools because it contradicts the values children need to learn to become tolerant citizens in a multicultural society. If they don’t believe this to be their project, and most probably don’t, then there needs to be serious reflection about why religion is hardly taught in the schools, given how important it continues to be in our political culture. Religion is progressive education’s blind spot. Why isn’t it taught about? Is it too controversial? Should something so important be so taboo?

Is Secular Humanism a Religion?

Most historians who study the modern Christian Right discuss, to some extent, how religious conservatives replaced the communist Great Satan with another bogeyman, “Secular Humanism,” a phrase common to the religious right lexicon from the 1970s on. For example, Daniel K. Williams, in his new book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, dedicates a sub-section of his chapter on the “Culture Wars in the Carter Years” to “Concerns about ‘Secular Humanism’ in Education.” Williams notes that religious conservatives did not focus on humanism when it first organized in 1941 under the auspices of John Dewey’s American Humanist Association (although, as I show in my book, they certainly focused their ire on Dewey’s educational philosophy). Williams continues: “Yet when social conservatives became concerned about changes in school curricula in the late 1960s, they decided that objectionable programs such as sex education and values clarification classes might be an attempt by the National Education Association and, in the words of conservative Catholic journalist John Steinbacher, John Dewey’s ‘coterie of sycophantic followers’ to ‘make good little Humanists out of the kids’."

But despite such cursory attention to the problem of secular humanism, historians rarely take religious conservative thought about secular humanism very seriously. In other words, what we need is an intellectual history of the Christian Right’s critique of secular humanism. We need this because such a critique has formed the intellectual basis and legal strategy of the Christian Right’s struggles over public education since the 1970s. We need this because doing justice to the Christian Right’s argument allows us to better understand the movement. And we need this because, as I will seek to make clear in my conclusion, the Christian Right's critique of secular humanism obliquely reveals a major blind spot of contemporary progressive education.

Influenced by the 1970s writings of Francis Schaeffer, Rousas John Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye, the Christian Right argued that the public schools were in violation of the First Amendment because the schools established an official religion: secular humanism. Yep, that’s right, they contended secular humanism, though atheistic, evinced all the traits of a religion and thus the public schools, awash in secular humanism, violated the religious freedom of Christians. Secularists considered this ironic, to say the least, given that the so-called Lemon test put the concepts “secular” and “religious” in direct opposition to one another in that for a statute to be deemed constitutional it must have a secular purpose and its principal effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

Nevertheless, the argument that secular humanism was a religion, and that its dominion over the public school curriculum was a violation of the First Amendment, guided conservative legal attempts to remove evolution from biology classrooms or, at least, have it taught alongside some form of creationism (including, recently, intelligent design). Occasionally, the Christian Right found sympathetic judges on this matter, such as Brevard Hand, a federal judge in Alabama who ruled against state schools in a 1987 decision, writing that the secular humanist “omission” of religion “does affect a person’s ability to develop religious beliefs and exercise that religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.” But Hand’s logic was overruled and, generally speaking, the courts have yet to grant legitimacy to this argument. For example, in another 1987 case, Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court found that a Louisiana law requiring teachers of evolution to give equal time to creationism was unconstitutional because its sole purpose was to “advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind.” Obviously, to make this argument the Court did not conceptualize evolution, which the Christian Right considers integral to secular humanism, as religious doctrine.

But, just because the courts have yet to take the Christian Right seriously when it claims secular humanism is a religion does not mean intellectual historians should do likewise. LaHaye, now famous for authoring the best-selling premillennial dispensationalist Left Behind series, wrote a three-part “Battle” series in the late 1970s and early 1980s that gave his readers a framework for understanding secular humanism. LaHaye dedicated the third book in the series, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children (1983) (which arrived quickly on the heels of The Battle for the Mind and The Battle for the Family), to those parents concerned about the decline of the public schools, especially “the growing army within that group who realize that secular humanism, the religious doctrine of our public schools, has brought on this decline.” LaHaye coined the awkward phrase “humanist educrats,” a reference to “the elite heads of many teachers colleges, administrators, and many superintendents and principals who are determined to jam atheistic, amoral humanism, with its socialist world view, into the minds, of our nation’s children and youth, kindergarten through college.” Like so many before and since, he blamed the apparently all-powerful John Dewey. “Dewey made the teaching of humanism exclusive by getting traditional religion and its values expelled from the public schools.” The expulsion of Christianity from the schools, and its replacement by secular humanism, was, for LaHaye, “the origin of rampant drugs, sex, violence, and self-indulgence in our schools, which are not conducive to the learning process.”

LaHaye listed all of the traits that he thought defined a religion, and argued that secular humanism, “the official doctrine of public education,” displayed all of them:

1. A well-defined Bible or “Scriptures”
2. A stated doctrine or dogma
3. An object of worship
4. A priesthood
5. Missionaries
6. Seminaries
7. Temples
8. An established life-style
9. A support base
10. Its roots are grounded in ancient religions
11. Recognition by the Supreme Court as a religion
12. Vigorous opposition to theistic religion
13. A world view
14. Open acknowledgement of its position

Now, I don’t buy the argument that “secular humanism” qualifies as a religion by those standards, or any other set. But, the Christian Right had valid reasons to believe that the nation’s public schools no longer represented their moral vision. The Supreme Court enshrined secularism (if not secular humanism) in the schools with a series of landmark cases, most famously the Engel v. Vitale decision that declared school prayer unconstitutional in 1962. (Stay tuned for an upcoming roundtable at this blog on David Sehat's new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, a discussion which will no doubt deal with some of these issues.) Curriculum trends were just as distressing. Though progressive educators since Dewey had desired that schools teach skepticism of established institutions, including organized religion, few teachers actively challenged local norms, especially religious orthodoxies. But this changed in the 1960s. In English classes, teachers increasingly assigned works by minority and women authors that complicated traditional canons. In social studies, students were challenged to clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by their parents. In science, teachers slowly overcame the century-long taboo against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussions of sex came to replace moral exhortations.

A popular anthropology curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome Bruner in the early 1970s—MACOS, or, “Man: A Course of Study”—exemplified this liberalization of the curriculum. During a MACOS unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand, yet not judge, cultural difference. Such relativism became the norm. The single, authoritative account of American history increasingly gave way to an approach that accentuated multiple perspectives. This was highlighted by a 1991 New York state report, “One Nation, Many Peoples,” that deemphasized assimilation by affirming “a right to cultural diversity” that the authors argued must be reflected in the curriculum. In short, God and Country gave way to something else, call it “secular humanism” if you like, although “multiculturalism” works better.

This is not to say that such liberalization or secularization or multiculturalization took hold everywhere or at all times. In some parts of the country, for example, the traditional patriotic historical narrative has never given way to social “history from the bottom” or a curriculum that deemphasizes American exceptionalism. Not all Americans get acquainted with evolution in school. Some biology teachers in Kansas no doubt still adhere to the 1999 state board of education decision to remove evolution as one of the five unifying themes in the science classroom. Perhaps more importantly, at least since the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, neoconservative educators like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, and (until her recent intellectual u-turn) Diane Ravitch, have sought to implement standardization in order to reverse progressive educational trends in place since the 1960s. But, such facts notwithstanding, generally speaking, the way our children learn is much different than it used to be, much more liberal or progressive or multicultural or even secular humanist.

This then leads me to my conclusion: The conservative critique of secular humanist schools should make clear that, like all curriculums, the contemporary school curriculum, despite its implied cultural relativism, proves to be more tolerant of some cultural positions than others. This is normal and good. I think education should be intolerant of some positions. In my perfect world, I would have schools inculcate socialistic values and be prejudiced against values inimical to them.

I contend that the progressive educational establishment is dishonest about their project. A 1987 report put out by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, entitled “Religion in the Curriculum,” found that “references to religion have all but been excised from the public school curriculum.” Progressive educators should come out and say, forcefully, that religion is not welcome in the public schools because it contradicts the values children need to learn to become tolerant citizens in a multicultural society. If they don’t believe this to be their project, and most probably don’t, then there needs to be serious reflection about why religion is hardly taught in the schools, given how important it continues to be in our political culture. Religion is progressive education’s blind spot. Why isn’t it taught about? Is it too controversial? Should something so important be so taboo?