STEPHEN CARTER IS A FORMER CLERK to the late justice Thurgood Marshall, a professor of constitutional law at Yale University and, at 38, an accomplished African-American scholar. He is also amazingly lucky. His first book, an astringent critique of affirmative-action programs, from which he himself benefited, appeared in 1990 just as the Clarence Thomas hearings became a national obsession. Two weeks ago Carter’s new volume, “The Culture of Disbelief,” an equally provocative summons to rethink the role of religion in American law, politics and culture, got an unexpected prepublication plug from the nation’s First Reader. On his return from his summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, President Bill Clinton cited the book to an audience of clergy, saying, “I would urge you all to read it.”
And talk about preaching to the choir. From the abolition movement of the 19th century to the civil-rights movement of the 20th, Carter observes, religious convictions fueled progressive social reform and informed public discourse. So why is it, he–asks, that for the last 20 years, “liberals have been shedding religious rhetoric like a useless second skin” while political conservatives act as if they owned the copyright to the Bible? His short answer: because of abortion. The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion (Roe v. Wade), he argues, shifted the tradition of religious protest to the nascent pro-life movement, jolted evangelical Christians into political activism and fueled the Roman Catholic Church’s aggressive public stand for the protection of fetal life.
But Carter’s longer, more challenging answer is that religion of every stripe is now threatened by state-enforced “public secularism.” In the court of public opinion, he charges, the nation’s liberal elites have “come to belittle religious devotion, to humiliate believers and, even if indirectly, to discourage religion as a serious activity.” Although the majority of Americans are religious, he believes that law, politics, the media and the universities pressure devout believers to treat religion as merely a private matter and “God as a hobby.”
For Carter, who credits his wife for helping him to become a serious Episcopalian, “Religion is, at its heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world.” Its role in public affairs, he writes, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, is to provide an “independent moral voice” and, through institutions, to “mediate between the citizen and the government. " Carter fully supports the First Amendment’s ban on government-sponsored religion. But in his reading of constitutional history, the metaphorical wall of separation “originated in an effort to protect religion from the state, not the state from religion.” Today, he believes, the “regulatory ubiquity of the modern welfare state” threatens the autonomy of religion far more than religious fanaticism endangers the body politic.
Carter is convinced that public agencies can and should do more to accommodate religious believers especially marginal groups. If he had his way, no state could prohibit the ritual use of peyote by Native Americans. Although opposed to organized school prayer, he would include parochial schools in voucher plans. Devout parents would enjoy wider latitude in shielding their children from public-school programs about evolution or sex which they consider harmful to faith or morals. His own children attend an Episcopal school. “As a religious parent,” he writes, “I would not dream of sending my children to a school that felt itself constrained not to reinforce the message of abstinence that my wife and I teach.”
Above all, Carter is disturbed by what he sees as efforts by secular liberals to reject as inadmissible religious motives and rationales in public debate–especially over issues like abortion, euthanasia and the teaching of evolution. Instead, Carter argues for a “politics of inclusion” that welcomes religion’s alternative readings of reality–much as advocates of multiculturalism insist on ethnic pluralism. His views happily transcend conventional liberal-conservative categories. No wonder, then, that Carter captured a vacationing president’s attention.
