THE MANY WINDOWS OF THE WALL
Abstract
Was I scared floating in a little yellow raft off the coast of an enemy-held island, setting a world record for paddling? Of course I was. What sustains you in times like that? Well, you go back to fundamental values. I thought about Mother and Dad and the strength I got from them – and God and faith and the separation of Church and State – George H.W. Bush.
Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God (cf. Mt 22:21), in other words, the distinction between Church and State... [T]he State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions. For her part, the Church, as the social expression of Christian faith, has a proper independence and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State must recognize. The two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated – Pope Benedict XVI.
These two affirmations of an appropriate “separation” or “distinction” between church and state come from what may, at first glance, seem unexpected sources: a U.S. politician closely associated with the Religious Right, during his 1988 presidential campaign, and the highest religious authority of the Roman Catholic Church, in a 2005 papal encyclical on faith, politics and social service. Particularly in the American imagination, both would likely evoke the Jeffersonian image of a “Wall” between these two spheres of political and social life, an image that is explored, defended and problematized by a number of the authors discussed in this review essay. Most importantly for our present purpose, both pope and politician speak in the language of singulars: a singular, secular state with its singular, secular law, and a singular “Church” with its own distinctive practices, law and moral order. The works under review here attempt, in a variety of different ways, to transpose this singular into a plural, to explore the relationship of secular and religious in a world of many different religious traditions and many different legal and social regimes.
Only one of these, The Challenge of Pluralism, by Pepperdine University political scientists Stephen W. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper, stands as a scholarly monograph, drawing on new research and fieldwork in five democracies to update and refine their original 1997 challenge to the U.S. ideal of strict separation between church and state. In some contrast to Monsma and Soper’s very clear focus, the edited collections of Stephen Prothero and D. Naresh Kumar offer loosely ordered compilations of very diverse essays solicited from prominent scholars of religion (Prothero) or reprinted from other venues (Kumar) to advance our understanding of pluralism in religious ethnography, sociology and law. The remaining two volumes stand somewhere in- between, gathering together papers presented at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law in 2006 (Moon) and as part of a lecture series hosted by the “Religion in the 21st Century” Priority Area of the University of Copenhagen, also in 2006 (Mehdi et al.). Together, these five books represent the cumulative effort of nearly fifty scholars of law, religion and the social sciences, drawn primarily from North America and Europe, to explore the consequences of globalization, immigration and religious pluralism for secular democracies in the contemporary world.
In this essay, I draw out three major areas effectively brought out by these various studies, including a number of issues on which they can be substantively engaged and brought into dialogue with one another. These are 1) diverse understandings of secularism and the secular state; 2) the significance of particular, controversial cases of adjudicating the proper relation between church and state; and 3) the broader challenges raised by religious diversity in redefining good citizenship, consensus values and civic belonging.
