Religious Convictions and Political Choice PDF
Preview Religious Convictions and Political Choice
RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS AND POLITICAL CHOICE This page intentionally left blank RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS AND POLITICAL CHOICE Kent Greenawalt Columbia University New York * Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1988 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia Copyright © 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenawalt, R. Kent, 1936- Religious convictions and political choice. Includes index. 3. Religion and politics—United States. 2. Religion and state—United States. 3. United States—Religion. I. Title. BL65.P7G73 1988 320'.01'9 87-12456 ISBN 0-19-504913-6 2468 10 97531 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Robert, With a parent's love and pride This page intentionally left blank PREFACE This book is concerned with the extent to which citizens and officials in this liberal democracy properly rely on their religious convictions when they decide what political actions to take. Although the immediate genera- tion of my work on this topic was an invitation to deliver the 1986 Cooley lectures at the University of Michigan Law School, the subject reflects themes of much longer standing in my personal and intellectual life. I was raised in a family in which both religion and the values of liberal democracy were seriously regarded. My father was long head of the board of trustees of the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, Henry Ward Beecher's old church, and as a child I went there as well as to the local community church in which I was confirmed. During my youth, I took it for granted that one's religious commitments and understandings would matter for one's life, including one's life as a citizen, and that liberal democracy was a system of governance that warranted support. At Swarthmore College, where I took political science as a major and religion as a minor, most of what I believed was in one way or another subjected to challenge, but my belief that taking religion as a serious matter did not compromise one's efforts to be a liberal citizen remained assumed and unexamined. I was much influenced by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, who then, and subsequently, struck me as fully committed to democratic values while relying on a Christian perspective to inform his understanding of politics and of right political action. A summer spent in East Harlem working under Norman Eddy in the East Harlem Protestant Parish provided some personal confirmation of the appropriateness of relating one's religious life to one's political involvement. viii PREFACE My views about the positive relation between religious convictions and political action did not alter during years of studying political philosophy at Oxford and law at Columbia, or indeed for most of my career as a legal academic. During my first year of law school, the question of religion and politics was raised during John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, but I took the issue then as being whether Kennedy would adhere to American law and political institutions if these somehow came into conflict with Roman Catholic directives or premises, not as whether his views on the wide range of political issues would be unaffected by his religious faith. As editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review, I read Louis Henkin's well- known article on obscenity as sin very closely during the editing process, but some of its possible broader implications for secularizing political decisions escaped me at the time. Similarly when I read and admired John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, I did not realize the extent to which acceptance of its basic premises would exclude religious perceptions from the political sphere. My comfortable acceptance of the idea that one's religious convictions may affect one's political judgment has no doubt been reinforced by the fact that two of my oldest and closest friends, James Miller and Bruce Hanson, my brother-in-law, William Abernethy, and my sister, Ann Green- await Abernethy, are all ministers for whom questions of social justice have loomed as very important. Though in my adult life I have been only an occasional churchgoer, these close associations have helped confirm my continuing belief in the importance of religious understanding. My focused intellectual interest in this topic began when debate over abortion produced frequent arguments that people were trying to impose their religious views on others. Bruce Ackerman's book, Social Justice and the Liberal State, which contends for the exclusion of religious premises with a novel starkness and clarity, persuaded me that this was a subject that warranted the most careful consideration. The invitation to deliver the Cooley lectures provided the needed spark for me to marshall my resources to make that effort. Since the late fall of 1984, when I began work on the subject, I have benefited greatly from comments of members of groups before whom I have presented parts of my work, from individuals who have criticized drafts, and from institutions whose financial support has freed my time for research. Roughly in order, the work has been discussed by the faculty of the Campbell University School of Law, the faculty of the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, College of William and Mary, a symposium on Perspectives on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, the Law and Philosophy colloqium PREFACE ix of New York University, students and faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, a symposium on Religion and the State sponsored by the Institute of Bill of Rights Law, at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, the faculty of Columbia Law School, the students and faculty of Cleveland- Marshall School of the Law, and a workshop of the Faculty of the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley Law School. The comments on my paper at the Brigham Young symposium by Cole Durham, and the comments on my paper at the Marshall-Wythe symposium by Michael Perry, Frederick Schauer, Michael Smith, and Diane Zimmerman were of great value. The richly rewarding three days I spent delivering the lectures at Michigan were capped by a dinner on the final evening at which my fundamental ideas were subjected to a searching examination that required many revisions in this final version. In addition to these discrete occasions for comment, I have also learned from students in seminars on Law, Religion, and Politics at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law and at Columbia. Meir Dan-Cohen, Herbert Deane, Louis Henkin, Henry Monaghan, Gene R. Nichol, and William F. Young read all or much of the manuscript in an earlier draft and gave me very helpful suggestions. At a number of points in the process, Bruce Ackerman has given generously of his time. I have been much encouraged by how fruitful conversation can be even when views are as sharply opposed as are ours on this topic, and my sensitivity to a major position I reject would be much less if this dialogue had not occurred. The honorarium that the Cooley lectures carry has been one source of financial support. During the summers of 1985 and 1986 my work has been aided by a grant from Columbia Law School's Samuel Rubin Program for the Advancement of Liberty and Equality through Law. A Distinguished Lee Visiting Professorship at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law during the autumn of 1985 made available a great deal of time for research and writing. My work on the book has been aided considerably by the research assistance and comments of Joseph Nisa, Maureen Carroll, and Daniel Alter. Steven Walt has devoted much time and effort helping me through drafts of the manuscript, has offered trenchant criticisms of aspects of the analysis, and has prepared the index. Krista Page, at Columbia, and Millie Arthur, at William and Mary, typed early drafts with great efficiency and patience. From the spring of 1986 Rhonda Callison has accommodated my successive changes despite problems of transposition from one system to another. Their good spirits in the face of insistent time pressures have been a source of much reassurance. Parts of earlier drafts of the book have been published in law reviews. The much more summary lectures are printed, nearly as delivered, as
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