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Contract and Covenant:
In search of American IDENTITY

By Richard John Neuhaus

Today there is lively and confused contention about national identity, racial identity, sexual identity, and sundry other identities that are frequently expressed in "identity politics." In this confusion the question of who we are as Americans runs up against the claim that there is no American identity, but only a hodgepodge of identities in both complementarity and competition. There is, it is said, no American culture, but only a mosaic of subcultures in which individuals elect to be who they want to be and therefore most truly are.

From the founding of the constitutional order and, before that, from the Puritan "errand into the wilderness," America was viewed as an experiment on a universal stage, and experiments can either succeed or fail. In Lincoln's fine phrase, America is "an almost chosen people," a people abiding by a social contract premised upon a transcendent covenant.

 

The story of a people
The narrative of what might be called a contract within a covenant is nicely caught by Michael Novak in his 2001 book, On Two Wings, in which he displays the inseparability of religious faith and common sense in the American founding. (A particular merit of Novak's account is his underscoring of the fact that, in the founding, Christian cannot be understood except as Judeo-Christian.) There is an important distinction to be made between a Christian society and a Christian nation, the one referring to the people and the other to the polity.

In a unanimous decision of 1892, the Supreme Court declared, "These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation." Needless to say, such a statement by the Supreme Court today would occasion puzzlement, controversy, and widespread outrage. It is not immediately evident why this should be the case. By the measurements available to researchers, an argument can be made that America is no less Christian, and is possibly more Christian, than it was in 1892. It is commonly said that we have become a much more religiously pluralistic society, but that is a claim-and, on the part of some, no doubt a wish-that is unsupported by the evidence.

The frequently visceral reaction to the idea of "Christian America" has several sources. Since the rise to political prominence of the so-called Religious Right in the late 1970s, frequently hysterical alarms have been raised, and have now reached a climax, against the looming threat of a "theocratic" dismantling of our constitutional order. While conservative Christian voices are frequently strident, the stridency should, I believe, be understood as an aggressive defense by a large part of the population that has been made to feel they are strangers in their own land.

Although their insurgency was not initially sparked by the Supreme Court's imposition of an unlimited abortion license, Roe v. Wade's exercise of "raw judicial power" (as Justice Byron White called it) has turned out to be the single most important factor in the realignment of public sentiment over the last half century that has resulted in what are aptly called the "culture wars." Support for laws protective of the unborn has in very large part driven hostility to the idea of Christian America. In second place as a cause of the culture wars, with a force that almost nobody anticipated 20 years ago, is the effort to "normalize" homosexual relations, focused in the controversy over same-sex marriage.

This is not to deny that hostility to the idea of Christian America has a historical lineage. One thinks, for instance, of "The Humanist Manifesto" of 1933 and its robust promotion of an ideology of secularism. It was signed by a wide and representative array of what today would be called "public intellectuals," led by the formidable John Dewey. This ideology was powerfully reinforced by a series of Supreme Court decisions on church-state questions, beginning in the late 1940s, that repudiated the idea of Christian America and declared the state to be neutral toward or, in the view of some, hostile to the religio-cultural identity of the American people. These developments and their consequences I have described in detail in The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, and they have been insightfully analyzed from a legal perspective by, among others, Philip Hamburger in Separation of Church and State.

An unintended consequence of the torrent of literature warning against the threat of an impending theocracy may be an increased interest in the question of how America is and is not a Christian society, and what difference that may make. An additional reason for increased interest may be the realization, still slowly dawning on most Americans, that we are confronted by a militant Islam with no doubts that America is the Christian enemy, manipulated by a cabal of Jews. The Judeo-Christian factor in American identity is reinforced by the challenge of Islam, which believes it has displaced both Judaism and Christianity in the purposes of God, and by a violent jihadist ideology set upon forcing the submission of the world to Allah by any means necessary.

A question fit for polite company
Whatever the several reasons, the subject of Christian America-long ruled out of order in polite company-is receiving increased attention. Representative is an article in the current issue of Political Science Quarterly titled "Is America a Christian Nation?" The author, Hugh Heclo, previously of Harvard and now of George Mason University, writes, "The question being posed is politically provocative in our own times because we have reached a stage of contesting the fundamentals of knowing who we really are."

Like most thoughtful people addressing this subject, Heclo answers his title question in both the affirmative and the negative. Yes, demographically speaking, there is no doubt that America is a Christian society. But if one asks whether most Americans are morally guided by or doctrinally committed to Christianity, the answer is no. On the other hand: "America's political institutions (especially in a legal separation of church and state) and America's political ethos (especially in its moralizing, redemptive character) carry the imprint of the nation's Christian heritage, making America still today a derivatively 'sort of' Christian nation."

To which one might respond that a "sort of" Christian nation is all that might be expected in view of human sinfulness and the limitations of history. Revising Gibbon, it might be said that the Holy Roman Empire was sort of holy, sort of Roman, and sort of an empire, but there is no doubt that it understood itself to be Christian. Like other commentators, he [Heclo] is impressed by the fact that most Americans are reluctant to judge the religious beliefs of others and therefore concludes that they do not really believe the teachings of Christianity. This overlooks a general reluctance to talk to strangers about matters of ultimate concern, an American protocol of civility in declining to criticize other people's religion, and a very Christian observance of the command of Jesus to "judge not that you be not judged." I suspect that doctrinally the American people are a great deal more Christian than the sociological literature suggests.

Also like others, Heclo cites the prevalence of divorce and pornography, the trash of popular entertainment, and other factors as evidence that Americans are not seriously Christian, or not Christian at all. But morality is a dubious measure. In his classic 1970 work, The Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield notes that in early-18th-century Boston there were more brothels per capita than there probably are today, but nobody suggests that 18th century Boston was not a Christian city. The pertinent fact is that Christianity majors in sin and forgiveness. A persistent problem in discussions of Christian America, both scholarly and popular, is the tendency to use "Christian" as both an honorific and a descriptive term. Except for those who make an idol of the nation and confuse America with the Church-and there are some who are prone to doing that-nobody contends that America deserves to be called a Christian nation.

There is truth in G.K. Chesterton's observation that America is a nation with the soul of a church, and further truth in the observation that, in the "almost" of almost-chosen peoplehood, Americans are aware of failing the covenant by which the nation is constituted. Conservative critics frequently fail to appreciate that expressions of "anti-Americanism" can sometimes be better understood as Americans continuing the long tradition of the mourners' bench of American revivalism. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick was right about the "blame-America-first crowd." But it will not disappear; not only because some really do hate America, but because so many more believe America is called to be better. There is much to be said in favor of America's accepting the fact that it is a normal nation, simply a nation among nations-but that is a very un-American idea.

So we return to the question "Who are we?" America is a capitalist nation, an English-speaking nation, a democratic nation, a compassionate nation, a law-abiding nation, a rich nation. We are not any of those things without notable exceptions, but we are, in general, all of those things. And we are, among all the things we are, a nation constituted by a contract within the context of a covenant. That covenant is the narrative of God's dealings with the People of Israel, a narrative borne through time by a society that is incorrigibly, however confusedly, Christian America. I do not say it should be that way. There are reasons to wish it were not that way. But it has been that way and will be that way until, which is very unlikely, the narrative is displaced by another.

Richard John Neuhaus is the editor of First Things and president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. He is the author of numerous books including The Naked Public Square. The article is excerpted from an essay commissioned for the 2007 Bradley Symposium, held on May 3, 2007 in Washington, DC, sponsored by Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. To read further information, commissioned essays, and a transcript of the discussion including Father Neuhaus" remarks, visit the Bradley Center online at http://pcr.hudson.org.



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