By Alec Solomita

Gazette Staff

The debate over the role of religion in political and social decision-making has intensified over the past few years into a roiling controversy. Ronald Thiemann, Dean of the Divinity School and John Lord O'Brian Professor of Divinity, recently joined this vital discussion not with a whimper but a bang. His new book, Religion in Public Life, A Dilemma for Democracy (published last spring by Georgetown University Press), argues in closely reasoned yet user-friendly prose that the American notion of the strict separation of church and state is based not on the Constitution but on a misreading of that document. It is a notion, argues Thiemann, that has unfairly and inappropriately excluded religious discussion from public debate.

Thiemann's proposition, according to the favorable review the book received in The New York Times, is "guaranteed to wake the reader, if not the dead." It has certainly provoked lively and fruitful discussion in panels nationwide. One such panel will be taking place at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 2 p.m.

During a recent interview in his Divinity School office, Dean Thiemann talked about some of the issues he addresses in Religion in Public Life.

Do you think of the American people as a religious people?

Yes, I certainly do. The statistical information is clear that in both belief and practice, Americans think of themselves as religious. Ninety-three percent of Americans identify themselves as professing some religious belief, and 73 percent of that 93 percent identify themselves as practicing some particular religion. Of those, another 50 percent say they're regular in their practice. Compared to any other post-industrial Western democracy, those numbers are off the scale. It's a distinctive quality of American democracy that there's so much vibrant religion.

When most people think of religion in the world of politics, they think of conservatives. That is, it seems that the right and far right have a monopoly on religious expression in public life. Is that a fair perception?

It's not an entirely fair perception but it is, I think, the predominant perception. There are two reasons for it: First, the media have tended to focus on the religious right because they see the issues in essentially political terms. Second, with the exception of African-American churches, Reformed Judaism, and, increasingly, Roman Catholicism, the evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant right has, in fact, been the most active politically and publicly over the last 20 years.

There's been a real silence along most of the spectrum from the left to the middle within Protestant Christianity, with the exception of African-American churches. Other than those voices, most of Protestantism has been silent. So, it's not as though the media have had a lot to hear from the rest of the spectrum.

But during the civil rights movement there was a religious element to the left.

During the civil rights movement, during the Vietnam period, the left and center were very active in trying to shape public opinion about these fundamental moral -- and also political -- issues. But with the breakdown of coalitions that had been so strong during the '50s and '60s, there was a fragmentation both in the center and on the left, and a period of real silence on the part of many religious people. The exception to this has been the Roman Catholic Church, which has done some brilliant work both on questions of war and peace in a nuclear age, and on the economy.

You argue that our notion of the separation of church and state is one of the reasons for this silence.

Well, the dilemma I refer to in the subtitle of the book is essentially that we are a vibrantly religious people but we don't know what to do with religion when it becomes public. Part of the reason that we don't know what to do with it is that the so-called separation of church and state has influenced the way we think about the proper role of religion in our constitutional democracy.

The fact is that the words "separation of church and state" don't appear anywhere in the Constitution. The language of the First Amendment religious clauses is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

So it is both a non-establishment and a free exercise guarantee. It's only been since a 1947 Supreme Court decision that the shorthand for the First Amendment clauses became "the wall of separation between church and state," which carries with it the implication not only that government-sponsored religion is unconstitutional but that religion has no legitimate role in public life. The actual language is about non-establishment and free exercise.

And you also see a possible tension between the two sections of the First Amendment itself.

There is an intended tension between the two. They are both designed to protect the freedom of religious practice, but the Court has developed two different modes of jurisprudence on the two clauses. Having read James Madison, the two are much more complementary than the Court has allowed them to be. But because the Court starts by thinking of separation and neutrality as the primary concepts, then they've got to work with the issue of accommodation. How do you accommodate a religious practice which doesn't fit the mainstream religious situation?

The Smith case, for example, which I refer to, is a free exercise case. The Smith case is the Native American peyote case in Oregon -- Smith v. Employment Division -- where two Native American drug counselors were fired from their jobs and denied unemployment compensation because they ingested peyote in a Native American religious ritual. The Court decided that this practice was not protected under the Constitution. And, indeed, it said that it would be courting anarchy to allow this accommodation of religious practice.

That's really an outrageous decision, especially if you think about the era of prohibition in the United States and the fact that many Christian denominations used wine -- then a prohibited substance -- in the communion celebration. If Congress had not made a specific exemption -- and they did -- that practice would not have been protected and there would have been a religious revolution. Because Native American religion is a minority religious tradition, the Court could deny them that exemption, whereas you know that if it were the majority religion, it would not have happened. That's an alarming part of the Court's confusion. I've got problems with their jurisprudence both on the establishment and on the free exercise side.

How can government adjudicate controversial issues without employing notions of the good? Your argument is they cannot. But traditional liberalism insists that they must. And you see a problem there.

Yes. This argument relates to the notion of "neutrality." Both in the Court's understanding of itself and in some strands of liberal political theory, government in a liberal democracy is to be neutral on all questions of the good. Because there is an assumption that there will be plurality of goods within any democracy, and it's not the role of government to decide among them.

So the government should be primarily concerned with what's called procedural justice and should adjudicate only questions of conflict of process or procedure but never try to adjudicate questions of the conflict of the good itself. That creates an impossible situation. Too many conflicts about the law are conflicts about what kind of people we are -- what is just in a certain situation.

If the Court or the government exempts itself altogether from moral reflection, it's not going to be able to address most of the fundamental issues that underlie the question of what's legal, what's right, what's just.

And you specifically talk about abortion and pornography in this context.

In both the debates there are conflicting goods at stake. If the courts, for example, refuse to acknowledge the very goods that people are putting on the table as part of the political debate, then they fail to take seriously the very arguments that people are passionately pushing in our democracy. If they think they are always to be distant from these goods, then there's no way the courts can play a role in adjudicating an important point of law. I'm not saying that the Court has to choose one or the other, but that fundamentally it has to recognize that these are moral debates, and the Court has to engage in much more sophisticated moral reasoning than it has historically, or at least in the last 30 years.

I think you said the Court in Roe v. Wade was taking a moral position while claiming it was doing no such thing.

It may well be a justifiable moral position. But to take a moral position without claiming it seems to be precisely what alienates people from the process, leading them to say that's hypocrisy, that's simply not being honest. There will be times when for the sake of the good of the republic, government will have to say, "This is the good that we affirm as a people." There's nothing wrong with that. But the notion of neutrality makes people who are charged with public responsibility feel as though they can never say that, and that's a mistake.

Can political liberalism devise a framework for affirming specific moral positions in the pluralistic culture that we have and still preserve the values you talk about -- freedom, equality, and toleration?

I try to offer a revised understanding of liberal political theory that takes its rise from the fundamental values that Madison identified as central to the constitutional democracy: liberty, equality, and what the 18th century called toleration -- what I think we should call mutual respect.

I'm arguing that liberalism can affirm those values, which are goods, even though I want them to be formally defined. We're constantly debating the meaning of those terms, yet they're the fundamental values for which this democracy stands, and we must make reference to those values in our deliberation.

We're not neutral. We're not wholly secular in the sense that we can't engage in some kind of moral reasoning with one another. Liberalism did that in the civil rights era and the Vietnam era. Those were arguments about justice, justice based on the reading of the Constitution-- and not just about procedural justice, but about substantive justice, about what kind of people we aspire to be. Do we want to be people who live with de facto apartheid in a segregated South? Do we want to be people who are engaging in a desperately costly war -- in human as well as financial terms -- in Southeast Asia? These are moral issues. After that period, liberalism lost its moral compass. I do think that good, strong moral reflection and liberal pluralist politics are compatible.