Review of Stephen Carter’s “The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion”

The Culture of Disbelief: American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, by Stephen L. Carter
Basic Books, 328pp., $25

THERE are few topics in which America’s “chattering classes have leas interest than religion. Aside from the occasional news report on kooky cults, lecherous ministers or bearded, bomb-toting terrorists, religion seldom gets much serious attention. Ignoring the fact that studies show that nine out of 10 Americans believe in God and seven in 10 have faith in life after death, the cultural elite has declared religion to be intellectually disreputable.

Attempting to fill this gap, Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter, the author of “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” has written “The Culture of Disbelief,” a fascinating and provocative defense of the role of religious belief in American politics. In it Carter employs his considerable analytic and rhetorical skills to “discover why it is that religion is seen as worse than other forces that mold people’s minds, and to try to discover whether there might be a way to preserve the separation of church and state without trivializing faith.” While Carter’s first book was a deeply felt meditation on what it means to be a black intellectual, “The Culture of Disbelief” poses the equally important question of what it means to be a religion 18 American citizen.

The first thing it means, according to Carter, is that you will be asked to act as if your faith does not matter and be required to translate your religiously informed opinions on moral and political matters into the liberal language of rights and responsibilities. Whether the topic is abortion or prayer in the schools, you will not be taken seriously in—or perhaps even admitted to—the public sphere if you insist on defending your political beliefs with the conviction that they are God’s will. As a result, the citizen-believer is left with little more than, in Carter’s wonderful phrase, “God as a hobby.”

The ideal public realm Carter envisions would operate according to free-market principles; all points of view—secular and sacred—would be welcomed into the debate regardless of the source of their inspiration. The political battle over whether to teach creationism or evolution, for instance, would be decided in favor of the latter, with the former losing not because its proponents are religious but because it is simply bad science. Carter also argues that schools should avoid all forms of institutional prayer because “it is impossible” to design a non-coercive approach to school prayer.” While he crafts an eloquent plea to end discrimination against religious convictions, Carter does not intend that, once in the public sphere, such viewpoints should necessarily win.

The secular restrictions that exclude religion from the public sphere are evidence of a profound misunderstanding of America, Carter argues. “The truth—an awkward one for the guardians of the public square—is that tens of millions of Americans rely on their religious traditions for the moral knowledge that tells them how to conduct their lives, including their political lives. They do not like being told to shut up.” And further, by making the faithful, in effect, split themselves in two, the liberal state limits their rights as citizens, which in turn weakens the very foundation of American democracy.

Carter’s most suggestive historical and analytic point is that those who believe that the “separation of church and state” was designed to protect politics from the influence of religion have it backwards. In fact, Carter writes, the separation was intended to “prevent governmental interference with a religion’s decisions about what its own theology requires.” State tyranny rather than the threat of undue religious influence, he believes, is the real danger today. Echoing Tocqueville, Carter writes ·that “religions are in effect independent centers of power, with bona fide claims on the allegiance of their members, . . . [which] will sometimes trump the claims to obedience that the state makes.” Surely an idea that will spark controversy in post-Waco America.

“The Culture of Disbelief” is a fascinating effort to reconcile the competing claims of God and the state by restoring a more full-blooded notion of citizenship to those who are excluded from politics because of their faith. But although religious beliefs should be valued no less than secular ones, neither should they be valued more, as the book sometimes implies. While many will agree with Carter that believers have the right to enter the political fray on their own terms, this does not imply that once there the religious component of their convictions should be immune from attack simply because they are religious. In the public sphere—where, literally, nothing is sacred—one’s views are usually misconstrued and co-opted; indeed that is what politics is all about. To treat the citizen-believer any differently would be condescending.