Of church and state

I guess I should be prepared to denounce this column by Michael Gerson, neocon hack and evangelical blowhard. And indeed, its contempt for modern American culture ("Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra") is pretty uninformed and ridiculous. But Gerson also makes this interesting assertion:

In recent decades, some legal theorists and judges have contended that a constitutional pluralism requires that the public sphere be scrubbed of religious influence. In his landmark book "The Naked Public Square," [pastor/priest and civil rights activist Richard John] Neuhaus countered that American democracy depends on a robust religious life, including the sort of religiously informed public argument found in the civil rights movement. Americans must be allowed to bring their most deeply held values into the public square.

It would be easy to read a sentence like that and scream "theocracy!" But in the past few years, I've come around to this way of thinking; I now believe that politically active religious institutions pay a crucial role in any pluralistic democratic society.

One reason that politically-involved religions are important is that they are NGOs. In churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., social and political ideas are formed and promulgated that do not originate inside the government itself. Although religious politics are mostly conservative in contemporary America, there's no law of nature that decrees it to be so - just look at the civil rights movement (whose leaders were mostly clergy), the prison reform movement in the 19th century, or the pro-immigrant and anti-poverty movements led by churches at the turn of the 20th.

I strongly believe that democratic societies benefit from the existence of multiple Alternative Sources of Ideas. Just witness the difference between Japan - where the ruling party has been unopposed for over 50 years, crippling the state - and South Korea, where Christian activists played a large role in establishing and sustaining the liberal oposition party (and even provided shelter to pro-democracy protesters in the brutal clashes of the '80s). Religions are not the only Alternate Sources of Ideas - independent universities, ethnic-based community organizations, labor unions, neighboring countries, certain businesses, and the media are all part of the mix. But the more sources of ideas there are, the less likely it is that power - which, in the end, flows from ideas - will be concentrated in the hands of one group or movement.

Now, this is not to ignore the dangers of theocracy. One glance at Iran and Saudi Arabia (or, to a lesser extent, rural Alabama) will demonstrate that religions, given an excss of power, will stifle society and establish tyranny. But the same tendency exists when governments, corporations, or neighboring countries gain a monopoly on power - fascism, communism, and imperialism are all as bad as theocracy.

Democracy is unstable by its very nature. Its life depends on its citizens dividing themselves up by ideas, when they would rather form into tribes. The more Alternate Sources of Ideas a society has, the more free and stable it will be. "Scrubbing the public sphere of religious influence" might be gratifying to American liberals in the short run, but in the long run it would make us a poorer democracy.