WITHOUT GOD, WITHOUT CREED
The Origins of Unbelief in America
James Turner
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985,
316 pp., $26.50.
THE NAKED PUBLIC SQUARE
Religion and Democracy in America
Richard J. Neuhaus
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1984,
288 pp., $16.95.
When President Reagan spoke in religious terms to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, his remarks, particularly his description of the Soviet Union as the focus of evil in the world, incited a riot of comment. For example, in a New York Times column entitled "Onward, Christian Soldiers," Anthony Lewis ridiculed Reagan, calling him "primitive." "If there is anything that should be illegitimate in the American system," wrote Lewis, "it is such use of sectarian religiosity to sell a political program." Lewis concluded by implying that Reagan had done something unprecedented in our political life.
Apparently, Lewis has forgotten that at the nominating convention of the progressive Party in 1912, all those present sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers." In the election, the party's candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, came in second to his Democratic opponent, Woodrow Wilson, but not because Wilson stood for the separation of religion and politics. In a speech in Denver in 1911, Wilson declared. "America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture." In 1918, as president, Wilson declared May 30 a day of national humiliation, prayer, and fasting. From the beginnings of the republic, Americans have mixed religion and politics. Even such a representative of the Enlightenment as Thomas Jefferson once proposed that our national seal depict Moses leading the chosen people to the Promised Land.
Traditionally, biblical theism, with an admixture of moral philosophy, has provided coherence to American pluralism, countering the centrifugal tendencies of self-interest. On July 4, 1869, Henry Ward Beecher, who served as minister to a congregation of middle-class businessmen in New York City, preached a sermon entitled "The Moral Theory of Civil Liberty." In this sermon, Beecher praised freedom and wealth but only if they led men away from their animal passions toward their higher sentiments, a Christ-like benevolence, and, preeminently, the intellectual life that leisure made possible. Both the title of his sermon and the occasion of its delivery stood upon a common ground of moral philosophy, theism, and Biblical ethics. Even those differences that went beyond what we normally encompass in the phrase "pluralism" remained upon this ground. Both sides in the Civil War, said Lincoln, "read the same bible and pray to the same God."
Our biblical and moral tradition comprised a variety of denominations, theologies, and sects. John Quincy Adams was a member of this tradition, combining philosophy and Scripture in an elegant understanding of man's privileged place in the universe, poised in that middle state between God and the beasts. So were the
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