Perhaps Jon moves in the wrong direction by stipulating that MLK failed to base his claims on public reason.  There was nothing sectarian in MLK's approach to the civil rights issue, and he often called us back to fundamental American ideals.  It is one thing to be motivated by religion -- and to invoke religious imagery -- it is quite another to abandon public reason for a politics that confuses the personal or salvational with the political.

I've never understood why the religious feel that secularists are attempting to "force" them out of politics, or anything else.  A simple trawling of newspapers, magazines, and television finds no end of religiously-couched arguments for social and public policy.  As there should be; as an atheist and avowed secularist, I think that effective argumentation for a worthwhile policy <i>should</i> be able to argue using reasoning and language familiar to communities that can benefit from and implement them, so long as neither is specious.  In a plural polity, like the United States, that there are so many religions requires that no policy be enacted on a solely religious foundation.  If your arguments cannot <i>also</i> be couched in religiously-neutral terms, then the reasons for your policy preference are expressly and solely sectarian.  This is anathema to liberal democracy.

The religious heart of the civil rights movement is unquestionably one of the prime reasons for its success.  But that message also spoke to an instinct felt across religions and political ideologies, to a respect for the basic dignity of man.  That the message was not <i>solely</i> religious is what made it so unquestionably right.

I'm not sure why you (Isaac) want to make the argument that people of religious conviction should not be able to invoke the basis of their morality and world view?

My understanding is that the First Amendment protect one's free pratice of her chosen religion -- and also serves as a bulwark to prevent government from becoming co-opted by any particular religion and thus that religion's enforcer.  

Those of faith who wish government to make certain policy choices to conform governmental policies to religious faith must expect to do the hard work all Americans must do to win their day in the halls of legislatures:  persuade their fellow citizens that what they propose is "good" or "right" or "preferable" rather than demand that they accept what they propose merely through the invocation of God or Allah or Buddha, etc.  (Of course the policy choices must also be in accord with constitutional principles so as to not offend the First Amendment, but that's not a concern unique to issues of faith, as evidenced by the continuing feuds over gun rights, the president's war powers, warrantless searches, etc.)

Isaac and Jon prefer to remove faith from public discourse rather than to expect people of faith to behave responsibily and fairly within our society and government.

I haven't read Ross' response to Jon, but it seems to me that Jon is suggesting that blacks weren't truly people of faith trying to find justice that conforms to that faith, that blacks were merely using the churches as safe-houses for their political organizing but where the people had no real religious conviction.  That's pretty condescending in my book and seems overboard.

Epackard, I don't think you understand what Jon Chait was arguing.  That in a pluralist, liberal democracy there should not be expressly and solely religious reasoning behind a policy argument is completely unexceptionable.  Chait was arguing against, in his own words, political religiosity as a means to solely religious ends.  Secularism insures that, for example, Hindu children are not required to pay obsequious obeisance to Jesus Christ during a mandated prayer at a state-sponsored, inclusive locale, such as a school.  It does nothing to prevent the religiosity of school children who want to pray to said carpenter; just that there should be no element of coercion -- which is unavoidable by the appearance of government sanction -- in such observance.

That there are those, like Ross Douthat, who can't grasp this boggles my mind.

jfelliott -- I don't see anything in what you wrote that differs from what I stated, to wit, I wrote:  "Those of faith who wish government to make certain policy choices to conform governmental policies to religious faith must expect to do the hard work all Americans must do to win their day in the halls of legislatures:  persuade their fellow citizens that what they propose is "good" or "right" or "preferable" rather than demand that they accept what they propose merely through the invocation of God or Allah or Buddha, etc. "

Honestly, there are a lot of people that want government to do a lot of things, even crazy people that want government to do crazy things.  We deal with each of them by measuring their arguments and deciding whether we agree or disagree (or discerning that some people are just plain crazy and have crazy ideas).  We don't ask these individuals or groups to shut up and sit down.

I don't care if you or anyone else chooses to dismiss the arguments and demands of people who raise issues and solutions that are rooted in their faith. What is offensive is to think that they don't have a place at the table.

I would kind of take issue with the contention that there was something utterly unique and exceptional about the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and the Church.  it seems to me that American Progressivism has often passed through and even emerged from communion lines, revival tents, and meetings of youth groups in church basements somewhere.  The Abolitionists were a particularly churchy bunch whose moral imperative came from a very spriitual urgency.  The suffragete movement, the settlement house movement of Jane Addams, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers movement, and, at least initially, the anti-war movement in the sixties.  There were of lots of William Sloan Coffin and Berrigan brother like folks in the those marches and protests and at those barricades.  

My own progressivism was awakened and honed in the early sixties as I sat with my young brothers and sisters in MYF meetings (Methodist Youth Group, about the only thing I will admint to having in common with Hillary Clinton...) as we argued passionately about the moral issues of the day.  Civil rights, poverty, injustice  and the War.   And our politics began with that moral insistance on loving thy neighbor and caring about the least among us and evolved from there.  Liberals have a strong religious tradition to call upon as they move into politics, and I guess the only specifically "liberal" caveat I would add to differentiate it from the Christian right is the admonition to bring your moral sense from wherever you have received it (and most of us, however Buddhist or New Age, or athiest or agnostic or secular humanist we are today, got it in Sunday School when we were knee high...), but leave your theology at the door.

Christian ideals have been invoked for good causes (emancipation, civil rights); Christian ideals have been invoked for bad causes (slavery, segregation).  What can this mean?

Even if the Scriptures are the word of God Almighty, they are subject to a thousand interpretations and invite manipulation.  Some religious believers like to argue that their faith provides them with access to eternal standards of right and wrong, but in the end they're stuck with the same moral uncertainty as everybody else, and act accordingly.  Like secularists, they decide moral questions using their own faculties -- derived, presumably, from some mix of genes and experience.  Unlike secularists, they then rationalize their moral outlook by reference to Scripture, ignore the bits of it they don't like, cobble together pieces taken out of context that can be read to support their position (be it opposition to abortion or opposition to the Iraq war), and then announce that they've arrived at the Truth, and that all those relativistic atheists better get out of their way.  And this from people who ostensibly celebrate humility!

The Scriptures are at best manipulable in good ways, and at worst manipulable in bad ways.  But they're always manipulable.  At least where the Constitution is ambiguous, we have a Supreme Court to resolve conflicts by fiat (final not because they're infallible; infallible because they're final). But where the Bible is unclear, or blatantly antiquated, we're stuck with it, and with the myriad interpretations it allows.  God evidently hasn't seen fit to inform jihadists that murdering civilians wasn't part of his great plan, or that we ought to take literally the parts of the Old Testament that counsel us to stone adulterers.  I guess he's content with things the way they are.

Epackard,

First, I apologize if I misunderstood your initial comment.  Thank you for attempting to clarify.  However...

"I don't care if you or anyone else chooses to dismiss the arguments and demands of people who raise issues and solutions that are rooted in their faith. What is offensive is to think that they don't have a place at the table."

I don't think there's anything in what I, or Messrs. Chait and Choitiner, wrote that would deny the religious a "place at the table."  The benchmark is whether or not those issues and solutions are solely intended to fulfill a religious purpose.  This is far different than their being "rooted in their faith;" either you misunderstood or are stuffing a straw man.

I think that Vanwurs' admonition to "bring your moral sense" (wherever you got it; I never attended Sunday school or church myself) but "leave your theology at the door" rather more aptly sums up what I was attempting to arrive at.

Ghandi was fond of saying something to the effect of:  "Some peple say God is Truth.  I say that Truth is God."  Which kind of reduces morality to it's essence and shorts circuits all the briars and brambles of anybody's particular scriptiure.  And Ghandi believed that Truth was something we found in our gut, not in our head, and was universal and fundamentally unchanged from society to society, or religious tradition to religious tradition.  It was pretty fundamental and pretty uncluttered and could be found in what was common and universal in most major religious traditions, and was summed up, for those of us in the West, in the Sermon on the Mount.

Everything else is clutter.   And it is the clutter that ensnarls us and divides us and gives "Religion" a bad name.  If the Devil is in the details, then, I guess, God is in the essense.

jfelliot - as far as who may sit at the table, Isaac's own words: "I see nothing all that strange about an argument for taking faith out of the political arena--except in extreme circumstances."

It is fascinating to me that people challenge a believer when she chooses to say something is good or bad for society based on her faith tradition -- but do not find it strange when someone else says something is good or bad and roots that position on personal whim.

I fully agree that believers should not expect someone of no faith (or of another faith, or of a differing interpretation of the same faith) to accept that something is right or wrong merely on the authority of scripture.  But there is nothing wrong with believer's attempting to persuade others to agree with them and to promote certain certain policies within the government, as along as those policies do not conflict with the mandates of the First Amendment.

Yes, there are elements in the Christian right (and Christian left) who would love nothing better than to create a Christian theocracy here.  Isaac's comment about "taking faith out of the political arena" does not seem a measured response to just those efforts.

I'm further enticed to wonder under what "extreme circumstances" I saac believes that faith may be appropriately invoked in the political arena. It seems to me that if there is caution to let faith guide anyone on the smaller issues, why would Isaac unleash faith to address larger, more extreme issues that may speak more directly to who and what we are at our very core as a constitutional, democratic republic?

Jon Chait's article includes the following statement: ""Aggressive" is a strange adjective here, given that secularists are not known for door-to-door proselytizing or massacring members of opposing religious groups."

Here are a couple problems with including it in this essay: (a) generally speaking, Democratic Party grass roots groups and environmental groups like PIRG are secular in their worldview and they do go door-to-door to proselytize for money, votes, or urging folks to sign petitions favoring their worldview.  I am not saying that these groups engage in door-to-door engagement with strangers more than the Mormons or other explcitly religious groups do -- but they are examples of secular-oriented groups engaging in proseletyzing -- so it is dishonest to imply that only religious group push their views on others.

The statement also implies that religious groups in the United States today are just a hair's breadth away from an impulse to mass murder their religious rivals.  Is Mr. Chait that  removed from exposure to neighbors whoi attend traditional religious service on a regular basis that he truly believes those folks are hatching a Rwanda-style massacre on a neighbor belonging to a different sect?

No, I do not believe that Mr. Chait's statement was a literal expression of a palpable fear he has of religious folks.  However, I do believe his colorful but imprecise rhetorical device was an unconsciously disingenuous way of implying religious-minded people are prone to dangerous excess and irrationality, and secular people are balanced and rational.

The complex truth is that there are intolerant crackpots in both camps and also folks from both camps who mix and thrive in each other's company, i.e., there are religious believers who practice tolerance and accept diversity of opinon as well as the best secularists do.

Note to Jonathan Chait:  I know your essay was polemical in nature, but the folks who fear Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate because of his Mormon beliefs are not reading The New Republic.

Jon Chait and Jfelliot seem to be arguing that, in a polity like ours, there should not _be_ a religious motivation behind a policy argument.  Vanwurs seems to be arguing that there can _be_ a religious motivation, but that it should not be invoked publicly.  Epackard seems to suggest, though hesitantly, that it's acceptable to make religiously-based policy arguments publicly.

I think the last position is right, with certain qualifications.  Let's take abortion as the example.  Some (not all) opponents of legal abortion (I prefer not to use the term "pro-life") come to their position out of sincere religiously-based belief that abortion is murder.  My political beliefs are not the same as theirs, and my religious tradition does not teach what theirs does, but they have just as much right to try (within the political system) to legislate their understanding of morality as I do mine.  Further, they should not be required (I mean "required" in a political-morality, civic duty sense, not in the sense of a legal requirement) to couch their arguments in religiously-neutral terms (even assuming, which I doubt, that a rigorous secular argument is possible).  It should be politically legitimate for them to argue that abortion should be outlawed because God says that fetuses are human beings.  

What qualifications _would_ I impose (again, as a matter of civic responsibility, not as a matter of law -- the First Amendment would plainly not countenance the latter)?  Three, which are related.  First, they should acknowledge that other individuals have different views as to the morality of abortion, and that other religious traditions have different views; basically, they should acknowledge that there is respectable and serious _religious_ opinion on the other side.  Second, they should acknowledge that religious views, by their very nature, are especially susceptible to becoming a focus, or even a basis, for very ugly and very violent confrontations between groups, up to and including murder, both individual (see Barnett Slepian) and group (see the Holocaust), and they should accept the responsibiltiy for avoiding the inciting of such passions.  Third, they should realize that, while it's legitimate to argue that God wants us to outlaw abortion, as a _pragmatic_ matter, it would be advantageous for them (and desirable for the system) if they could make a secular argument.  (Note that I'm suggesting only that making a secular argument is desirable, not that it's illegitimate to refrain from doing so.)

tarfon...

    I think, as a practical matter, I agree with your position.  Folks have a right to bring any argument they want to the public square to support their position.  That's a first amemdment fact, and I would have it no other way.  But in the question of what "ought" we do, and how "ought" we argue and debate in an officially secular but in fact religiously and philosophically diverse polity, it can never be enough to simply argue that "My Bible" tells me so.  You can't expect folks with different bibles to accept that arugument and in a democracy, we have to reach a consensus before we move on to policy.  Your Bible may be your ultimate motivation, but you have to find what is common in everybody's bible or philosophy when you make your argument.  Or at least enough people's blbles to make a working majority that also respects the rights of all those minorities that disagree with you.

Nobody's bible trumps the constitution.

MLK invoked God to argue for inclusion and tolerance.  The religious right invokes God to argue for exclusion and intolerance.  I don't mind the former (though I'd want to be sure that there were other non-faith-based reasons put forward) and do mind the latter.  What's wrong with leaving it there?

The two reasons why faith-based rhetoric by political leaders is dangerous (though not prohibited outright) is that (1) it sends a message to those who don't share those religious viewpoints that the political leader in question is not really their political leader, even though the political leader presumably ran to serve all of his constituents and (2) it tends to create insoluble conflict.  Arguing about competing religious premises may be fun but it is completely outside the realm of reasoned discourse.  Thus, it tends to be counter-productive.  I like Cass Sunstein's notion about "incompletely theorized agreements."  Often people will agree on a goal but not agree on the reasons for why they want that goal.  If everybody wants the goal, then we shouldn't waste time arguing about the differences in reasons and instead get together and make the case based on all of them -- i.e., it's the Christian thing to do, it's the American thing to do, it's the right thing to do, it will make America stronger, it will make America richer, etc.  If, on the other hand, all you have is the first thing, you're probably in trouble.

Jhildner,

I have tried to discuss with you the religious basis (which is not exactly a "faith based") of civil rights (and duties). You never answer arguments and you tend to attach to dogmas, ultimately based on the unacceptability of religious foundations (even when there are no other).

Perhaps you like Sunstein's argument on "incompletely theorized agreements." But perhaps those that like incomplete things, and are not willing to go to their roots, should not commit themselves to theory. Should an evolutionist accept "incompletely theorized agreements" because they may provoke upsets? Should a student of the foundations of civil rights and duties accept "incompletely theorized agreements" because they do not fit widely post-rawlsian accepted mistakes?

And one should not that, when speaking about those "incompletely theorized agreements", Sunstein tends to invoke Jacques Maritain -- the man that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights --, that usually said that agreements could be achieved on rights even when different philosophical conceptions were at a stake.

This was never more than a rethorical devise. And could you tell me please, where do those rights are truly respected? If you're honest enough, you'll answer that that only happens in societies that are informed deeply by the judeo-christian tradition or by societies that were influenced by these latest ones (such as India) and in which religious traditions are not adverse to tolerance.

Of course, you can choose to ignore aspects like these (you usually do...) or prefer to discuss with some religious person who doesn't offer arguments and invokes dogma, so you can counter-invoke your own dogma while staying happy and nested on those convictions of yours,

Best regards

vanwurs -- perhaps I was too verbose; you are making the same basic argument I made:  people of faith have a right to bring their policy preferences -- and their faith-based arguments -- into the political arena. They should not expect, though, that an appeal to faith and religious authorities will be sufficient in and of itself to persuade others to their cause.

You (and others) should note, however, that Christian conservatives (and others of theocratic leanings) are not the only ones who have pressed policies that offend the Constitution.

epackard-02...

    I know this thread is probably played out, but it's a cold, dreary Saturday afternoon, I'm sitting home with a sick cat who wants to sit by the space heater and I don't want to go out and leave it on, and I was just rereading this discussion and wanted to expand a bit on the idea that nobody's bible trumps the Constitution.

    I think it was Gary Wills (probably in "Nixon Agonistes") who introduced me to the concept of the "Civic Religion", and I think it serves us here.  

    In the Civic Religion, Jefferson was Moses and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution (and all of it's original amendments...) and the Federalist Paper are the Old Testament.  Lincoln is Christ (complete with a sacrifice that absolved us of our national "Original Sin", Slavery...) and his speeches and writings are our New Testament.  We have rituals (the Pledge of Allegiance, Presidential Inaugerations and Convenings of New Congresses.  Voting is a kind of secular ritual.) Sacred music ( the Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, God Bless America) and Sacred Places (most of the Official Washington DC, particularly the Lincoln Memorial, the Liberty Bell in Philidelphia, Montecello, etc...)  And we have the ongoing body of interpretation of the meaning and sense of the Truths of the Faith, in the laws of the Republic and the rulings of the Supreme Court.  (Which, as somebody pointed out earlier are "final not because they are infallible, but infalliible because they are final".  Or at least provisionally final for a generation or two.)

    In America, this religion trumps them all.  And although the moral assumptions that support and animate it are undeniably "Judeo- Christian" in origin and historical context, the are not sectarian or particular to any faith or creed.  I am a practicing Buddhist and I am absolutely comfortable with them.

    This is the ultimate religion of America, a religion that allows all others to flourish and thrive, but cannot allow itself to be supplanted by any of them.  When that happens, we lose America.  I think that was the meaning of John Kennedy's speech regarding his Catholicism that served to quiet the misgivings many American had about where his ulitimate political allegiance was, and perhaps should be the subject of the speech Mitt Romney may need to give for similar reasons.

    If we always keep in mind the ultimate authority of the civc religion, then I think faith and politics can co-exist and enrich each other quite nicely.

Voting is the core sacrament. (To expand on the analogy.....).  It is the equivalent to the Eucharist.  It is the reiteration of the esential activity at the heart of this experiment in Democracy.  The act of collectively governing our selves.  As it is in the voting booth, so be it in Washington DC.  Grace traveling up, Earth legitimizing Heaven.