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The Tyranny of Disbelief
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11810 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1994 |
2,095 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF
How American Law and Politics
Trivialize Religious Devotion
Stephen L. Carter
New York: Basic Books, 1993
320 pp., $25.00
During the antiwar and black civil rights movements of the 1960s, when religious groups and clergy demonstrated against and publicly denounced racial segregation and the U.S. war in Vietnam, few people--certainly not in major media and the dominant culture--claimed that this was an impermissible intrusion of religion into public life. There were no declarations then, except from some segregationists, that this represented a breach of the principle of separation of church and state. But today, when some religious groups and clergy demonstrate against and publicly denounce abortion, homosexuality, or the teaching of evolution in the public schools, there is widespread alarm expressed by liberals against this supposedly impermissible intrusion of religion into public life, and many claims are made that the supposedly sacrosanct principle of separation of church and state is being traduced. What is the difference between these times and cases? Stephen Carter tries to come to terms with this question in his new book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion.
Carter, author of Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, himself embodies seeming contradictions: He is a black professor of law at Yale University, that stronghold of secularism, liberalism, and political correctness; and he himself is, broadly speaking, a political and social liberal. But he and his wife are also devout Episcopalian Christians. Among other things, the book represents Carter's effort to come to grips with these contradictory impulses and commitments within himself (the book has some aspects of a confessional), as well as to delineate problems and trends he sees arising in public consciousness, rhetoric, media, and law.
The central problem, Carter says, is that:
Many political leaders, commentators, scholars, and voters are coming to view any religious element in public moral discourse as a tool of the radical right for reshaping American society. But the effort to banish religion for politics' sake has led us astray: In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that
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