Rick Garnett: "Our Real National Pastime - Religion & Politics"

(Hat tip: Mirror of Justice)

Notre Dame Law Professor Rick Garnett writes in USAToday about our "Real National Pastime":

The relationship between religion and politics has evolved over the past 25 years, but there’s still nothing un-American about believers engaging the political process.

By Richard W. Garnett

With all due respect to baseball, America's real national pastime is, and has long been, arguing about the place of religion in politics. In the USA, religious faith has always played a role in shaping policy and inspiring citizens, and those same citizens have always wondered, and sometimes worried, about this influence.

From the outset, we have believed that church and state are and should be distinct and also have known that faith and public policy are not and cannot be entirely separate. Finding and maintaining the right balance — avoiding both a reduction of religion to politics and an elevation of politics to religion — has been and remains a challenge.

One of the most important political stories of the past 25 years — one in which this challenge has been at center stage — is the emergence, energy and electoral success of the so-called Religious Right. This development unsettled what had become the comfortable consensus among many modern sociologists and suggested that their predictions of religion's decline, like reports of Mark Twain's death, were greatly exaggerated.

In the early 1980s, after the formation by Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority and the election of President Reagan, many worried that the return of conservative Christians to the rough-and-tumble of party platforms, campaigns and elections threatened to unsettle the foundations of Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall of separation" between church and state. In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus responded to these concerns in an important and influential book, The Naked Public Square. Neuhaus insisted, correctly, that there was nothing un-American — and, indeed, nothing particularly new — about religious believers, ideals, claims and commitments in public life.

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Today, our national pastime is thriving. We continue to wrestle with, and to disagree about, faith and politics, church and state. The debate is both alive and lively, and informs policy topics from global warming and suburban sprawl to school choice and human cloning. It will not — and, in a free and diverse society, should not — end anytime soon. That said, and notwithstanding the popularity in some quarters of overheated and unfair diatribes about "Christian fascism" and "American theocracy," it is worth noting, and celebrating, the progress we've made toward clarity and consensus.

Far from a theocracy

For starters, scholars and commentators across the ideological spectrum increasingly agree that religious believers are entirely free to participate, as whole persons, in public life and in the civic arena. This freedom is the mark of an open, generous democracy, not a step toward "theocracy."

Nothing in the text, history or structure of our Constitution requires Americans to accept disintegration as the price of admission to the life of active, engaged citizenship. Even a government such as ours (especially a government such as ours), which is appropriately "separate" from religious authorities and institutions, need not and should not discriminate against religiously motivated expression and action.

During William Rehnquist's tenure as Chief Justice of the United States (1986-2005), the Supreme Court, for the most part, came to appreciate that the goal of our First Amendment — which protects religion's exercise in part by prohibiting its "establishment" — is not to push religious faith to the margins, in the hope that it will wither, but to protect religion from manipulation and distortion by governments, in the confidence that it will flourish.

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My Comments:
A good op/ed by Professor Garnett. Do read the whole thing.