Week 1: The first week will be dedicated to philosophical issues. One school of political philosophy, originating in Kant and developed by John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, argues that citizens, even when they strongly disagree, can at least agree to deliberate rationally over their differences. Two contemporary political philosophers, Amy Gutmann and Stephen Macedo, in particular have extended this position to some of our contemporary controversies; both insist, for example, that because good citizens ought to be thoughtful and deliberative ones, public schools can legitimately turn down requests by fundamentalist parents not to have their children exposed to literature they consider irreligious or immoral. (Macedo goes further and suggests that liberal democracies ought to prevent fundamentalist parents from enrolling their children in private schools that teach from a fundamentalist perspective.) There is, in this tradition, a strong affirmation of a common morality, one rooted in the Enlightenment and then applied in the United States through our commitments to liberal democracy.
But critics have pointed out that the Enlightenment is itself partisan and partial, defending one particular understanding of morality against others, a position articulated by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. If MacIntyre is right, then so is Stanley Fish, who argues in The Trouble With Principle that deliberative democracy is not neutral between various religions or between religion and non-religion but represents an effort by liberals and secularists to impose their values on others who do not share them. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas goes one step further and calls on religious believers to consider themselves "resident aliens" in a liberal democratic society on the assumption that their faith commitments will never be welcome so long as a common morality is based on liberal assumptions.
I believe that the texts that explore these positions are generally written with sufficient verve and clarity of thought to constitute an excellent beginning for the seminar. They will help us address questions such as these: What role does reason play in religious faith? Is the influence of reason different between religions? Is religion a category like race or gender that involves discrimination by some against others? Are fundamentalist Christians, as critics such as anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano have suggested, hostile to reasoned debate? Is America a primarily religious society, as secularists often charge, or a primarily secular society, as believers often conclude? Does liberal democracy involve faith commitments of its own? What are the prospects for a common morality in a society composed of so many different beliefs? If those prospects are good, do they come at the cost of discriminating against those who reject liberal assumptions about the common good? If those prospects are bad, do liberal democracies face an uncertain future?
Week 2: The second week of the seminar will offer an overview of the historical transformation of the United States from a predominantly Protestant to a religiously diverse society. That transformation has involved at least four phases: from Protestant to Christian (e. g, including Catholics), from Christian to Judeo-Christian, from Judeo-Christian to Abrahamic (e. g., including Islam), and an emerging situation (without a name) that includes not only the three so-called religions of the book, but a variety of Eastern religions, people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, and, in the aftermath of the "Under God" controversy, a more assertive atheism.
There is no one text that covers all of these phases. For this week of the seminar I would assign chapters from a number of important books that cover various aspects of these changes, including Winthrop Hudson's American Protestantism; Will Herberg's Protestant Catholic Jew; John McGreevey's Catholicism and American Freedom; Diana Eck's A New Religious America; and Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers.
Among the questions to be addressed from the historical materials are these: Is the United States an exception to the so-called "secularization thesis," which holds that as societies become more modern, religion loses its hold on people's attachments? Is separation of church and state a secular idea or a specifically Protestant one? What does it mean for a tradition that has generally been identified with a state church in Europe - Catholicism - to flourish in a Tocquevillian environment of voluntary associations? Why have Jews historically been the one religious group most committed to separation of church and state in practice? Does freethinking have religious roots? What does it mean - in other words, is it possible - to be spiritual but not religious? I want to emphasize in this section of the seminar the difference between "religion" and "religions." When we debate the role of "religion" in shaping a common morality, we tend to forget that people do not believe in religion in general but in specific religions with their own traditions and histories. This fact both complicates the role that religion does or should play in fashioning a common morality, but it also adds the richness of different experiences with the question.
Week 3: The third week of the seminar will deal with sociological changes in the contemporary practice of religion. The philosophical and historical literature on religion makes some assumptions about people of faith that require further examination. For example, in the debate between Fish and Gutmann or Macedo, both sides agree that religious people are to some degree counter-cultural; the latter view them as never having fully subscribed to the rules of modern liberal democracy, while Fish (or Hauerwas) suggest that it is precisely the fact that believers are not liberals that make them different from everyone else. But are religious believers really that distinctive? The sociology of religion has an answer, and it is that modern American religion is as modern and American as it is religious. In the way they worship, honor (or dishonor) tradition, treat creeds and doctrines, relate to institutions, and search for identity, religious believers have been influenced by the same forces - individualism, popular culture, democracy - that have shaped non-religious activities from sports to politics.
This, at least, is the argument I make in my recent book, The Transformation of American Religion (Free Press 2003), which would form the basis of the discussions for this week. I will supplement the treatment of Transformation with some of the excellent ethnographic work on American religion done by R. Marie Griffith (Pentecostal women), Omar McRoberts (African-Americans), and Lynn Davidman (Orthodox Jews). I also plan to invite scholars in the Boston area who have dealt with these questions, such as Nancy Ammerman and Stephen Prothero of Boston University, to meet with the group.
Among other issues, we will discuss in this week whether all religions in America, despite the distinct histories examined in the previous week, will blend into a particularly American synthesis. This is a way of asking whether a common morality can be determined through a generalized religion detached from the moorings of all specific religions, and, if so, whether such a common morality would violate the beliefs of people who are not religious at all. In short, I see a tension between the historical work in the field and the sociological, with the former emphasizing what makes religions different and the latter dealing with some of the commonalties. Can both be correct? If so, what does this teach us about the relative salience of religion and culture, both enormously powerful forces that shape how people act and think, but also ones that can come into conflict with each other?
Week 4: For the fourth week, the seminar will turn to the question of whether or not the perspective being developed in the seminar is helpful in treating important legal cases in the United States. Here the readings will be of two kinds. On the one hand, participants ought to be familiar with some of the important attempts to provide an overview dealing with questions of religious establishments and separation of church and state in America. Fortunately, Philip Hamburger has recently published the seminal text on this question, Separation of Church and State, which will be required reading. Not unlike MacIntyre, Hamburger argues that separation of church and state is not neutral; its historical origins, he claims, have much to do with the anti-Catholicism of the eighteenth century Republic (a point underscored by John Locke's A Letter Concerning Religious Toleration, which found the basis for toleration in Protestant theology and which contains, as does John Stuart Mill's On Liberty much later, some pretty harsh words about Catholics).
Hamburger's analysis is helpful in understanding what can be called the decline of strict separationism. Since the 1960s, when the U. S. Supreme Court generally decided against allowing religious displays or religious sentiments in public places, there has been, depending on which side you are on, a retreat from strict separationism or a greater attempt to be fair to people of faith. The seminar will examine such decisions as Lee v. Weisman, which held that it was unconstitutional for clergy to offer graduation remarks at public schools and will contrast it with Rosenberger v. Rectors of the University of Virginia, which allowed public funds to be used to publish an evangelical student newspaper. The Rosenberger case is especially interesting because it was decided not on First Amendment grounds (that is, whether the provision of public funds for a religious newspaper violates the Establishment Clause) but on Fourteenth Amendment grounds (that is, whether denying evangelicals funds that are available to non-religious students constitutes discrimination against them). Can liberals, who generally support separation of church and state, be unconsciously supporting discrimination? If conservatives adopt Fourteenth Amendment grounds for religion in public life, can they then oppose strong efforts to overcome racial or gender discrimination?
This week will also examine in some detail cases involving school vouchers, such as the Zelman decision, which gave the green light to a school voucher program in Cleveland. School vouchers are a particularly good example to be used in the seminar, not only because the cases are difficult to resolve, but because such scholars as Nancy Rosenblum, Michael Perry, Richard Mouw and Martha Minow (along with Amy Gutmann and Stephen Macedo) contributed to a book I edited called School Choice: The Moral Debate (Princeton University Press, 2003), which explores all these issues. I plan to invite a legal scholar who has worked in this area to join the seminar for one of these discussions. John Garvey, the Dean of the Boston College Law School, is a person with whom I have worked in many capacities, and is the best person for this purpose. It has been my experience with previous NEH summer seminars that non-lawyers benefit greatly reading and discussing U. S. Supreme Court cases.
In this week of the seminar, we will ask whether the attempts by the Court to reach a consistent jurisprudence in this area are doomed to failure because, as MacIntyre and others would argue, there is no common position to be found. Or is the problem that those who adhere to separation of church and state, recognizing that their position might be unpopular in the country as a whole, have been reluctant to follow constitutional logic where it ought to lead? The legal questions are important in the context of the seminar because they deal so directly with contemporary realities. Even if a common morality is possible in the face of religious differences, and even if the contemporary sociology of religion were to make possible such a common morality, would it matter if those conditions could not be translated into legal rules that would be accepted as legitimate by all, or at least by most, people in the society?
Week 5: The fifth week will allow participants to present their projects and to receive feedback from other participants. The fifth week will also offer an opportunity for participants with special expertise in the subjects we have been discussing to lead discussions and to frame questions for the other participants.
Week 6: The sixth and final week of the seminar will seek to bring all the material together by reading Gene Outka's Prospects for a Common Morality, which contains a number of essays that are generally optimistic toward the prospects for a common morality, as well as The Culture of Disbelief by Yale law professor Steven Carter, which tends to be more pessimistic. This issue has also been addressed with considerable insight by David Hollenbach, S. J. from Boston College's theology department, who will be invited to address the seminar. It is also a question to which I devote myself in the final chapter of The Transformation of American Religion.