America's Need for a Civil Public Square: Our Conversation With Os Guinness
From August 5-8, 2010, Valley Springs Presbyterian Church (PCA) of Roseville, Calif., will host the L’Abri Conference, “Thinking and Living the Way of Christ.” Featured speakers include Os Guinness, Andrew Flew, and Dick Keys. According to the organizers, "The conference is designed to affirm that Christianity is an intellectually reasonable worldview, is relevant, and that those who believe in Christ are brought into a real relationship with the living God ... ."
Author and speaker Os Guinness will open the conference. Guinness will also conduct a workshop titled “The Case for Civility—and Why Our Future Depends on It.” ByFaith spoke with him about the concept of the civil public square.
You think it’s important that Christians understand the first amendment as the “true remedy” for ordering religion and public life. Why is that?
Today, living with our deep differences is one of the world’s great issues. There’s a sad irony that the United States, which possesses what James Madison called “the true remedy” to this issue is, at the very moment when the world is interested, not doing so well with it.
On one hand, as Christian believers we have a tremendous stake in freedom of conscience and religious liberty. That’s what allows us to exercise our faith freely. And the fact is, Christians have made a signal contribution to the rise of religious liberty, especially in America.
On the other hand, many Christians, and especially the Religious Right, are often seen as part of the problem. Their way of doing things is often sub-Christian, employing methods that don’t reflect the way of Christ. So, we have something at stake in this issue; it’s a subject for Christians to think through.
What do you mean when you say the Religious Right’s ways are “sub-Christian”?
For two-thirds of the 20th century, most evangelicals were, to generalize, privatized; that is, their faith was privately engaged and publicly irrelevant. That’s why so many of the trends in the culture slipped away from us. The wake-up year was 1973. That’s when three things happened: Watergate, the OPEC energy crisis, and Roe vs. Wade. Evangelicals suddenly realized that if they weren’t engaged the cultural rift would be disastrous. You saw the rise of various movements that are now loosely called the Religious Right, including the creation of the Moral Majority in 1975. So, for the last 30 years we’ve swung from an overly privatized faith to what is clearly an overly politicized faith. There are two problems with that. One, we’ve trusted politics to do what it can’t do. I like the maxim of Richard Neuhaus: “The first thing to say about politics, is that politics is not the first thing.” The real sources of the damaging ideas are in the universities or cultural centers like Hollywood. The notion that you could turn the country around through politics has, I think, been proved mistaken.
There’s a second problem. To put it in 19th-century terms, many evangelicals have tried to do the Lord’s work in the world’s way. Take for example the way the Religious Right has demonized the enemy and appealed to our fears. Well, Scripture tells us repeatedly to have no fear. And one of the most distinctive teachings of our Lord is that we, as His followers, are to love our enemies. I think the Religious Right has been sub-Christian in that sense. Moreover, they’ve fallen a long way from the great example of people like William Wilberforce, who fought furiously against slavery, but always with humility, grace, and remarkable love for the enemies who vilified him.
You’ve argued that we need to shift our thinking from coercion to persuasion. What, in contrast to the tactics of the culture war, does this look and sound like coming from Christians?
Historians often point out that the shift from the European state churches to American disestablishment—with its championing of freedom of conscience and voluntary faith for everyone—represented a political shift in discourse. The shift was from coercion to persuasion. The European churches had the state’s sword or the state’s purse behind them, meaning they had the power to coerce the public. But in this country, each church was on its own. If it wanted to make headway in the culture it had to persuade. That’s a trait we’re losing. Here’s an example: I am pro-life—passionately so. But one of the central weaknesses of the pro-life movement is lack of persuasion. We have protests, pronouncements, preaching, picketing—all sorts of things like this—but we lack persuasion. Once again we see the extraordinary example of Wilberforce. Take his ceramic medallion with its depiction of a slave in chains; around the image there’s a simple question: “Am I not a man and a brother?” Wilberforce and Josiah Wedgewood, who created it with him, knew that a question was more subversive than a statement, and so it would be more persuasive.
So here we are today, in the age of the Internet and the blog; there are millions of websites all over the world, and everyone—individuals, associations, groups—all have a passion to present themselves, explain themselves, and defend themselves. It's the grand era of apologetics. It's time that we, as followers of Jesus, learn to be persuasive. We need to get apologetics back into the streets. We need to be flexible enough to speak persuasively to everyone we meet, wherever they come from.
Do we, as people who hold to "absolute truth," have an apologetic advantage?
Oh, absolutely. On the surface it may seem as if, in a postmodern age, truth puts us at a disadvantage. But that’s not so. We are people of truth because God is a God of truth. We’re asked not to just defend the truth, but to know it and live in it and become people of truth.
And you can see the craziness of postmodern skepticism. In many ways relativism has run its course. People realize that skepticism is short-lived because human beings can’t live like that. There are many spheres of life—grand spheres like science or lesser spheres like journalism—that assume and require a strong view of truth. Who has such a view? Not the secularists. Not the Hindus. We do, not because we’re geniuses, but because our Lord has revealed it to us. So truth is an incredible trump card. And I agree with our Catholic friends that the irony in today’s postmodern world is that Christians, who are accused of being irrational “faithheads,” are actually the last great defenders of reason and of truth.”
You talk about a civil public square as a “conscious re-forging of the Jewish notion of covenant that already underlies the Constitution.” Therefore, rather than searching for consensus, we need to set up a covenant within which to negotiate and settle differences. Can you elaborate?
There are many gifts of the gospel to the Western world, and one them is the concept of covenant. If you look at the notion of covenant, it’s an alternative to two other options. In some cultures, blood relations have been the basis of group solidarity. In others, power or conquest is the basis of a group. In contrast, the Jewish notion of covenant is a free, voluntary, binding commitment under God. It is a highly original form of human solidarity, and it leaps from the Jews in the Old Testament to the Reformation where it was discovered by the Swiss, Dutch, Germans, and Scots. Of course it came over here and you can see it in New England, first of all in the churches, and then in marriages, and then in townships. And then, as historians have pointed out, it was nationalized and secularized in the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is actually rooted in a Jewish, and later a Christian view of covenant.
How do you think this sense of covenant could be rebuilt? And what, uniquely, would Christians bring to the process?
“Well the second half of the question is a deeper one, but put it another way: Alexis de Tocqueville talked of the “habits of the heart.” They were, he said, just as important as the law and the Constitution. In the 1920s, as American life was increasingly secularized, Americans tried to guarantee freedom through law alone. You can see even now, when Christians want to defend say, freedom of conscience against the ACLU—or whoever—they use law alone. That’s a mistake. Freedom is guaranteed not only through the rule of law, but by the habits of the heart. When these things are taught to school children they become as natural as mother’s milk.
So, when I look at the present situation, I see two extremes. On one side, there is what is called the “sacred public square,” which is advocated by those who would like one religion to be preferred. At the other extreme you’ve got the “naked public square,” which is advocated by those who would like all religion cleansed from public life.
I would argue for a third option: a “civil public square,” in which people of all faiths are free to engage in public life based on their faith. That’s freedom of conscience. But—and here’s a big but—within an agreed political framework of what is just and free for everyone else too. If it’s a right for a Christian, it’s a right for an atheist, a Mormon, a Muslim, and a Scientologist…. The mark of a free society is that the smallest community and the least popular minority know that their rights are respected. Now that entails certain implications, like the fact that we need to persuade and not coerce, that we respect the so-called three Rs: rights, responsibility, and respect. There’s huge confusion over all those things today. We need to get these back into American civic education.
You’ve also got three nurturing institutions in a free society: the family, the faith community, and the schools. The trouble in America is not only do we not have any civic education, but all three of those nurturing institutions have broken down. Families and faith communities are weak, and the schools are in crisis. So America’s in deep trouble, and it will take some doing to restore civic education and the habits of the heart. But we cannot defend freedom by law alone.
I’m curious, how would you evaluate Christians’ involvement in American public education?
I think Christians are careless about public education because we forget where it came from and what it was intended to do. All we do is look at the educational crisis today, and then reject public education and walk away. The public schools in America, if you read Thomas Jefferson or Horace Mann, were not just free universal education. They were free universal education that taught the American unum, the unity, the American first things. You had the unum that would balance the pluribus; a unity that would balance the diversity of social class and spiritual creed. The American motto of e pluribus unum is not just a motto; it’s your greatest achievement. But if you lack civic education, that will break down. And that’s the tragedy of where America is today. So many Christians are right in saying the public schools are in a mess, but they’re wrong to walk away from them carelessly. The public schools are incredibly important in the way the American republic has been designed.
I think Christians should see a strong place for the public schools. And we should encourage Christian teachers who have a strong calling to go there. As you know, there are more Christians who are teachers in public schools in America than there are Christian missionaries from America. And yet many of [the teachers] are demoralized because everyone praises the Christian schools and attacks them as if they’re faithless for going to the public schools. We should appreciate Christians in both situations.
We’re a people who are instructed to evangelize. Is the cause of Christ advanced by the creation of this civil public square? In other words, are you describing a Christian enterprise, or an American enterprise?
We can see in the Scriptures that we are to be concerned for “the common good.” In other words, we’re to be concerned not just [about] our own interests and our own ideals, but the common good of everyone. It’s often called “human flourishing” today. So it isn’t just [for] the Christians or Americans. We’re concerned for what’s best, most free, most just for everybody. That’s the vision of a civil public square. I believe it’s of far bigger importance than [just for] America; we need to propose this for the world. First in democratic countries and then, eventually, even say in 50 years, bring it to countries in the Middle East. So it isn't just an American thing, it's a matter of the common good.
Now, let’s add another point to that: If civility were restored, many of the rejections of evangelism as "proselytism" would dry up. If we restore civility, we’ll have much greater freedom to openly witness, whereas now, if you say anything Christian in the public square, you’re violating the separation of church and state; you could be sued for it.
We have got to restore civility and recognize that if we do so, we’re cracking the ice age as it were. But, not only will we be free to speak, so will others. Now in that climate, as Thomas Jefferson says, truth is great and shall prevail. We trust that just as evangelicals flourished under the conditions of the first amendment because they were more enterprising than many of the other faiths of the early 19th century, so today we have nothing to fear if civility is restored and liberty is increased.
Somewhere, there’s a frustrated culture-warrior reading this. He sees a decline of biblical values; he sees the church losing influence. Does the creation of a civil public square offer him hope? Or further dilution of Christian influence?
The civil public square, by itself, will not answer the problem. But it sets up an arena in which we are free to engage without endless controversies.
If you look at Europe, the major reason for its secularity is the vehement reaction against the corrupt state churches of yesterday. America never had that problem because of the genius of the first amendment. You have a congenial hospitality to all religions, the high note of which was probably the Eisenhower era. But, since the Madalyn Murray O’Hair cases of 1961 and 1962, there’s been a mounting repudiation of religion among the educated classes. With the rise of the Religious Right and with culture warring, there’s now an American equivalent of the European repudiation of religion. It’s come to a climax in the new atheists. Many in the educated classes are hostile; they’ve dismissed the Christian faith and want it removed from public life. So the culture warring approach has been disastrous; we’ve got to go a better way.
I would call Christians to think—instead of culture warring—of a Christian renaissance, of faithfully living out the way of Jesus in every sphere of our life, of putting an emphasis on the creative, constructive things we do—in the civil issues in public life, but also in areas like the arts, putting the emphasis on the creative, constructive, positive things we do. We need to be for things more than we’re against things.
Have you seen encouraging signs? Is there someplace where we might see something that resembles a civil public square and the fruit it bears?
I would put it this way: if you look at many of the grand generalizations about American church life, they’re discouraging. The trends are negative in all sorts of areas. But if you look at the exceptions, the green shoots growing through the concrete, they are wonderfully encouraging. Take some of the initiatives started in the last 10 or 20 years: the founding of the International Justice Mission and the overwhelming number of young Christians fighting sex trafficking and human slavery, who are involved in things like the Blood:Water Mission in Africa. That’s magnificently encouraging. Take something like the Wedgewood Circle, which is bringing together financial investors with artistic creators in film and other areas in order to seed the culture with some Christian creativity. Think of Socrates in the City, led by Eric Metaxes in New York, which is doing a magnificent job of taking Christian ideas into settings that appeal to professionals in various spheres of society.
The generalizations are still rather discouraging. The American church is in a profound captivity to the advanced modern world. But the exceptions—the new initiatives—are magnificently encouraging. And that’s the sort of thing I mean by a new Christian Renaissance.
Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith. He is also the author of two novels, Safe at Home (March 2008) and Crossing the Lines (June 2009), both published by David C. Cook Publishers.
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But that is the big problem. By and large the Christian church has capitulated to state run schools. John Adams wrote to the effect that the establishment of the public schools were necessary to inculcate the children in the ideals of the state. He was a prophetic voice. At one time Christianity held sway in those schools, now they are thoroughly secular and opposed to Christian ideas.
Until the churches again take up again the cause of education as part of their missionary responsibility all the renewed cultural efforts will fail. It is time the church make education of their covenanted children a priority once again.