Solemn Reverence

November 15, 2020
A slender but thoroughly argued case for reinforcing the wall between church and state. Balmer, a historian of evangelicalism in America and professor of religion at Dartmouth, is firmly on the side of a truly secular public sphere, trusting in the wisdom and logic of the "establishment clause," the portion of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of an official or officially endorsed religion. There are good reasons for that clause, including the fact that the Puritanism and Quakerism of the Northern states were much different from the Anglicanism and breakaway Protestantism of the Southern ones. Rather than allow the state to impose a religious preference on its population, writes the author, the models to follow are those of Roger Williams, William Penn, and Thomas Jefferson, the last of whom protested that to tax a citizen in order to support an established church "is sinful and tyrannical." Fast-forward to the rise of the religious right, which "mobilized not, as commonly supposed, to battle abortion, but rather to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions such as Bob Jones University." As an instrument of emergent White nationalism, the religious right has been well served by the current administration and Supreme Court, which, in a 2020 decision, allowed people like the current secretary of education to feast on funds diverted from public coffers and given to private religious schools. The "religious liberty" that the religious right seeks is less about the diversion of funds and more about the imposition of discriminatory measures against putative enemies and the suppression of the rights of minorities. The irony in all of this, notes the author, is that evangelical churches in particular have flourished in this country precisely because not oppressed by an official religion: "This has lent an energy and dynamism to religious life in America, a vitality unmatched anywhere in the world." A stern warning that those who push for the intrusion of religion into public life do so at the peril of both.

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