Recently Ive taken up the role of religion in the formation of culture, and in particular the ways in which our own personal faith
is supposed to shape the larger culture around us (see, for example, two recent blog entries, and The Beginning of a Catholic Culture). How religion and faith influence culture is, of course, a vast subject, and it will vary according to an immensely wide variety of circumstances. For today, then, let us narrow the field to how religion and faith ought to influence public life. And let us examine not so much the particular manifestations of that influence as the broad principles on which it ought to rest. The Essentially Public Character of Religion
There can be no conceivable God to whom one could discharge his duty of religion through mere interior sentiment. Yet sentiment is exactly the status to which our modern culture tends to reduce religion through the bizarre stricture that we may believe whatever we wish as long as it does not affect anyone else. But just as such a mere interior sentiment will be utterly insufficient for the purpose of satisfying the obligations of our relationships with any other person&151whether governor, employer, friend, spouse, or childso too is it utterly insufficient, laughable and even insulting in our relationship with God. Instead, religion is a matter of enacting our deepest beliefs, in the company of our fellows, in order to satisfy our obligations to God and to ensure Gods blessings on all undertakings, whether we classify them as public or private.
An interesting historical anomaly may help make the point. During the period of the Protestant Revolt in sixteenth century Europe, there was a strange Christian sect (whose name I can no longer remember) that not only recognized the tendency Christians had to dissemble in the face of potential persecution by rival groups, but also pronounced dissembling a virtue and adopted it as a doctrinal cornerstone. The theory was that under no circumstances should one cast pearls before swine, “swine” being defined as anyone who did not yet hold this sect’s peculiar views. Therefore, the faithful were to reveal their religious beliefs to absolutely nobody, including their own children. The result was a religion as purely private as one could make it. Needless to say, this sect died out in a single generation. Religion, for a wide variety of reasons, is essentially public. Christianity and Public Life
This classification of public life can be, and often is under militant secularism, pushed to an extreme. Thus, ordinarily, we would understand that a gathering of co-religionists in a church to offer worship, while certainly a public event, is not thereby part of what we call our public life, by which we mean essentially our civic life&151such as the activities of a court of law, the operations of the local zoning commission, or elections of civil officials. Based on a false extension of civic life to include everything that is public, an ardent secularist may argue that the very existence of a Christian church or the very utterance of a Christian prayer imposes unfair public pressure and distress on an unbelieving citizen who chances to see the church or hear the prayer, and so both Christian prayer and Christian church buildings may be rightfully suppressed for the common good. Most people would recognize this as an extreme and foolish argument, but it does conceal within it a legitimate and often difficult question: To what degree ought the devotions and moral duties of a particular religion to be permitted to shape and inform public life
To this question Christianity provides a particularly practical and sensitive answer, proposing a truth which rightly deserves to be elevated into a second key principle. Thus in discussing the great many things that are public in various ways, Christian social theory distinguishes between the activity of the Church, which has supernatural love as its end, and the activity of the State, whose end is natural justice. Now those things having primarily to do with charity or love are necessarily voluntary, for that which is not voluntary cannot be done out of love. For this reason, the particular aspects of Christianity which are known only through Revelation and which must be apprehended through faith and embraced through love are not to be forced upon anyone, and so can rightly be incorporated into the public order only insofar as they are the natural expression of those who participate in public life, and never as a requirement under pain of civil punishment. The degree to which any culture publicly expresses such things will vary, within the limits of this principle, according to all the attendant circumstances.
The Culture Wars