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Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?

Would the democratic public culture of the United States be well served by a robust, critical discussion of religious ideas? Or do principles of ethical propriety and political prudence encourage us instead to ignore each other’s ideas about religion, however silly they may seem? Two recent developments give point to these questions. One is a striking increase in the number and intensity of demands for a greater role for religion in public affairs, and for more “flexible” and “realistic” approaches to the constitutional separation of church and state.1 Faithbased initiatives are widely supported by leaders of both political parties. The very idea of a distinctly secular public sphere is said to entail a bias against religion. Republicans tend to favor more religion in public life than do many leading Democrats, but the latter scramble to assure their constituents that they, too, learned a lot from the nuns when they were in parochial school, or that they still attend services at a church or synagogue. The leaders of the Air Force Academy have not believed it a violation of the church-state separation to place heavy and repeated pressure on cadets and faculty to attend Protestant and Catholic religious services regularly and to decorate the ostensibly secular campus with banners proclaiming the Air Force of the United States to be “Christ’s Warriors.” Only a lawsuit led the academy’s leaders to somewhat modify their practices, as has been pointed out in Ray Suarez’s The Holy Vote.2 If religious ideas are going to be more widely accepted as legitimate justifications for public policy, shouldn’t those ideas be assessed according the same rules that apply in the public debate of other ideas? The second development is the sudden appearance of, and extensive public attention given to, what the press likes to call “the new atheism.”3 The books of four polemical atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam