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Carl Raschke
and William Dean, eds.
The Republic of Faith: The Search for Agreement
Amid Diversity in
American Religion
The set of articles and essays included in this volume address
issues that have been raised as an ongoing agenda by a national
organization of scholars, clergy, and citizens. The name of the
organization is Res Publica. These papers were presented at
the organization’s inaugural conference in Aspen, Colorado at the
end of November in 2001, and represent different “takes” on the role
of faith in American public life and the question of how one
achieves a sense of “commonality” within a culture of proliferating
religious diversity.
Contents
Jean Bethke Elshtain,
The Liberal Social Contract and the
Privatization of Religion
Lewis S. Mudge,
Redescribing Social Inclusion: Underrepresented
Ethnicities and a New
American Identity
Eldon Eisenach,
Narrative Power and Liberal Truth in Building a
New Consensus
Alan Mittleman,
American Jews and the Public Square: Notes for an
American Jewish
Public Philosophy
Mary Doak,
The Significance of a Contemporary Catholic
Debate for American
Public Life
John B. Cobb, Jr.,
The Meaning of Faith in Public Discourse
John Quiring,
Liberal, Conservative, Progressive Dialogue
William R. O’Neill, S.J.,
Public Reason and its Religious
Discontents
Thomas A. Idinopulos,
Television and Violence
From the Preface by Carl Raschke
America, it has been said, is the only nation in human
history to have been founded purely on an idea. For generations
historians have argued over both the sources and ramifications of
this idea. Was American “republicanism,” as it was termed in the
eighteenth century, a continuation of the century-long struggle of
the English nobility and gentry against usurping monarchs, or was it
something wholly new and unprecedented? In his masterful study of
the intellectual currents that were in confluence throughout the
North American Continent during the 1770s and 1780s, Gordon S. Wood
has written that the new “republican ideology”—the notion of a res
publica which signified, according to Thomas Paine, simply “the
common good”—both “presumed and helped shape the Americans’
conception of the way their society and politics should be
structured and operated—a vision so divorced from the realities of
American society, so contrary to the previous century of American
experience, that it alone was enough to make the Revolution one of
the great utopian movements of American history.”
With a few critical exceptions, however, historians tend to
agree that the genesis of the American idea is not utopian in the
strict meaning of the word, but religious. The first American
colonies were for the most part chartered as enclaves of religious
exclusivity, as wilderness-rimmed strongholds of theological
obstinacy and doctrinal particularity. The time-honored American
value of democratic pluralism is in many respects a broad, cultural
expansion of the Constitutional principle of religious freedom,
which in turn derives from the multiplicity of religious interests
that made up the original settlements. The majority of these
interests were from the outset generally incompatible with each
other. The religious principle of voluntarism and tolerance of other
faith communities arose from a general political assessment long
before the war against England that the ardor of religion, rather
than mercantile concerns, loomed large behind the quest for
republican unity. The English Revolution of the 1640s had been
fought to maintain these prerogatives. Though that Revolution had
failed, the spirit that ignited it remained in the colonies. This
distinctive version of a res publica, which differed sizably
from the older Roman construct, rested on a strong view of the role
of faith in public life. The Roman conception of religio
implied the deferral of faith commitments to an overarching civic
consensus. The believer was primarily a citizen, and only
secondarily a believer. In the American equation the sequence was
reversed. The integrity of faith and belief were accorded priority
over secular conformity.
Today, however, the pre-Revolutionary yearning for a
“republic of faith” has been replaced by the erstwhile conception of
a secular commonwealth in which religious passion is as a practical
necessity subordinated to a wide and spiritually neutral politics of
total inclusion. Increasingly, the demands of secular empire take
precedence over republican virtues, which were always grounded from
the founders’ point of view in the sanctity and intensity of private
faith.
The ongoing struggle in the American courts of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries for a proper and “balanced” formulation
of the boundaries between “church” and “state,” or between sectarian
religiosity and the impartiality of public institutions, obscures
the central issue. The question is not so much the extent to which
religious community and observance should be limited by the
juridical requirements of a secular society. On the contrary, it
comes down to the scale in which the contemporary res publica
in both a present and past sense is, and must be, defined by the
free interchange of competing faith perspectives in the public
arena.
The following set of articles and essays, by different means,
address this tangle of issues.
The
Editors
Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Denver and co-director of
Res Publica. He is the author of
The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University,
Fire and Roses: Postmodernity and the Thought of the Body,
The Engendering God, and
The End of Theology.
William Dean is Emeritus Professor of Constructive
Theology at Iliff School of Theology. He is the author of
American Religious Empiricism,
History Making History,
and The Religious Critic in American Culture. He is also
subject editor for The Dictionary of Modern American
Philosophers, 1860–1960.
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