What makes the invocation of religious belief by public officials so disturbing to some people? Is religious belief a purely private affair, or is it invariably embedded into the fabric of public life and culture? In light of these issues, what new questions should the Woodstock Theological Center be asking in its various projects or what new projects should it initiate? These are among the questions explored and expanded in a Woodstock forum held February 7 at Georgetown University. The event featured a presentation by José Casanova, a sociologist who has helped redefine the terms of the long-debated secularization theory. The other panelists were Father James D. Redington, S.J., who lent an international and world-religions dimension to the discussion, and scholar and journalist Peter Steinfels, who delved into why we are asking these questions in the first place. The moderator was Elizabeth K. McKeown, a professor of theology at Georgetown University and co-author with Dorothy M. Brown of The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Harvard University Press, 1977). The following is an edited and abridged version of the forum.

TOCQUEVILLE, BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Elizabeth McKeown. You cannot do religion and public life without mentioning Alexis de Tocqueville, who, as most of us have learned at some point, came to America to study our penal institutions and in the process noticed that we were also somewhat religious. And this fascinated him in 1831 and so he spent a great deal of time trying to understand what it was that he was seeing. This is an early reflection written in 1831 from just outside New York City. He says: "Sunday in New York is rigorously observed. I have seen streets barred off in front of churches during the divine service. The law commands these things imperiously and public opinion, which is much stronger than the law, obliges everyone to show himself at church and to abstain from all diversion. And yet, I am much mistaken or there is a great depth of doubt and indifference hidden under these external forms. No political passion mixes in with their religion as it does with us in France. But for all that, religion has no more power. The very strong impulsion which was given to the Americans in former times and which is now diminishing every day - faith - is evidently inert. Go to the churches . and you will hear morality preached. Of dogma, [the preacher] says not a word. Nothing which can at all shock the neighbor; nothing which can arouse the idea of dissent." He concludes: "In America, one follows a religion as our fathers took medicine in the month of May. If it doesn't do any good, one seems to say, at least it doesn't do any harm."

José Casanova is associate professor in the sociology department at the New School University in New York. His 1995 Public Religions in the Modern World has become an important resource in current discussions of the role of religion in public life. His new book from Cambridge Press is titled, Opus Dei and the Modernization of Spain, and he is currently engaged in a 3-year study of "The Role of Religion in Immigrant Incorporation" in New York City, funded by the Pew Charitable Trust.

Among the questions we were asked to address is, "What makes the invocation of religious belief by public officials so disturbing to some people?" I will point out three inter-related reasons.

The first one comes from historical experience: the long memory of religious warfare, particularly in early modern Europe, the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries being the most prominent. These religious conflicts triggered the protracted process of separation of church and state, leading to the secularization of the state and the calls for the privatization of religion, which in its positive dimension, was viewed as the necessary condition for religious freedom, religious pluralism, and the toleration of religious minorities. In typical jargon, sociologists call this "secularization," a process of differentiation of the political and religious spheres, usually understood as a process of emancipation of the secular spheres in politics, science, and economy from ecclesiastical control and religious norms.

The positive evaluation of this process is based on the well-grounded fear that the entanglement of religious, ethnic, and political conflicts makes these conflicts more violent and intractable. Today this process of secularization, this separation of church and state, is mainly completed throughout the Western world. The old historical memories of religious warfare in the European past may be fading, but these memories and the protective fears that they provoke have been rekindled by more recent experiences of religious political conflicts throughout the world.

The second main reason for the apprehension that some people sense has to do with the tradition of Enlightenment secularism. The more churches resisted the emancipation of the secularist spheres, particularly in France and in Latin Catholic Europe, the more the Enlightenment turned radical, anticlerical, and ultimately antireligious and even militantly atheist. In its most radical versions, the Enlightenment developed a view of religion as a dark force of obscurantist beliefs, which emerged in the primitive stages of the human mind, maintained by a conspiracy of priests and rulers to keep the people ignorant and oppressed. But religion was bound to disappear with the advancement of the lights of science, education, knowledge, and democracy. Thus the Enlightenment believed in progress: the more modern a society becomes, the more religion is bound to decline. Religious institutions progressively lose their power. Religious beliefs and practices recede and become more marginal and the world becomes ever more secular. In the words of the great German sociologist Max Weber, "The world becomes disenchanted."

This view of secularization and progress - that of a universal historical process of religious decline - though perhaps not as unchallenged today as only a few decades ago, is still the predominant unquestioned view throughout much of Western Europe. Such a view happens to be consonant with a real historical experience of Western European societies where the process of secularization - i.e., disestablishment and differentiation of the secular religious spheres - has been accompanied by a real decline of religion, of religious beliefs and practices. Or at least, by a drastic decline of participation in traditional institutional forms of religion.

In most of Western Europe, the proportion of people participating in regular institutional religious practices today oscillates between five and 10 percent of the population. The phenomenon in Europe demonstrates all three aspects of secularization: disestablishment, differentiation, and general religious decline. Even more traditionally religious societies, like Spain, or Portugal, or Greece and more recently Ireland or Poland are undergoing today drastic forms of religious decline as they become more modern, more democratic, more economically developed. As they join the European community, they see that joining Europe would mean also joining the European way of secularization.

The path is very different in America. European visitors and observers since the 19th century have been struck by the enormous vitality of religion in America, viewing it as odd and exceptional, a case of American exceptionalism diverging from the modern European rule. Karl Marx, of all people, expressed this view most succinctly in his essay on the "Jewish question," saying, "America was both the land of perfect disestablishment and the land of religiosity par excellence." In America, therefore, the strict separation of church and state was not accompanied by religious decline. On the contrary, it led to the flourishing of religion and religious diversity across the wide spectrum of religious denominations, first Protestant, and then with increasing immigration, Catholic and Jewish.

In America, the most progressive of societies, despite widespread allegiance to the belief in progress, the view that progress entails a decline of religion is understandably difficult to sustain. Yet although the Enlightenment's negative view of religion could not make much headway in America, there is nonetheless a prominent secularist bias, at least among cultural and intellectual elites, and this is, I would argue, the third reason for the fear of religion being injected into political life. In America, this secularist bias is usually expressed through a strict secularist reading of the wall of separation that privileges the first clause of the First Amendment over the second clause, the no-establishment of religion clause over the free-exercise of religion clause. The paradox of American exceptionalism is constitutionally embedded in this dual clause tension of the First Amendment that maintains a strict wall of separation of the state from any religion but also guarantees the free exercise of religion. It is the tension and the balance between these two interrelated principles that makes the American experience so different from the European one.

This forum also presents the question, "Must public life aim to be as secular as possible for the sake of full participation, tolerance, and cooperation?" The secularist bias I refer to would answer this question in the affirmative, demanding that religion be kept within private boundaries for the sake of public civility. In my book, however, I argue that such a demand for a privatization of religion is neither grounded in the American tradition, nor is it normatively justifiable as a necessary condition for pluralistic democratic politics.

As to the next question, "Is religious belief a purely private affair, or is it invariably embedded into the fabric of public life and culture?" The answer must be, "Both." Religion, in other words, is and ought to be necessarily a private affair. The principle of religious freedom, freedom of conscience, demands the constitutional protection of internal conscience from any external coercion, be it from the state, churches or religious institutions with monopolistic claims or tendencies, or social pressure from the tyranny of the majority. The state needs to be secular and religion needs to be private in order to protect both from each other and from ecclesiastical institutions. One can well understand why not only secularists but also religious minorities, for instance, the Jews in Christian societies, or Catholics in Protestant countries, and sects like the Baptists or Quakers, have consistently advanced this principle. But religion, at least in most religious traditions, can hardly remain a purely private affair. They are indeed, invariably embedded into the fabric of public life and culture, and thus the attempt to constrain religion to a purely private sphere does violence to religious identities and impedes the free exercise of religion. So one needs to maintain the tension and seek the right balance between the two principles, which need to be affirmed simultaneously. What the right balance will be will change from time to time and from place to place.

World Religions, in America. "In light of these issues, what new questions should Woodstock be asking in its projects?" Obviously there are many, many possibilities. I've been involved for two years in a project in New York on the study of "The Role of Religion in Immigrant Incorporation." As you know, in the last 20 years America has become an immigrant society again. New York has received almost three million new immigrants in the last three decades. The proportion of foreign born in the city is as high today as at the turn of the century, at the height of the great wave of historical immigration. The first historical immigration was mainly European; this one is primarily non-European. But the process of transformation and the challenges it presents are very similar. Then it was mainly of how a Protestant country was going to accommodate large Catholic minorities and Jews. Eventually a process was developed; it was not easy. American religion was transformed, and those non-American religions became American in the process.

A similar process is happening today with the other world religions which are becoming today American religions. We can talk today of American Islam, or of a new American Hinduism that is very different from Hinduism in India. And we can talk today of American Buddhism. Now those are extremely interesting challenges in a global age. It's not only a question of interreligious dialogue at the level of geopolitics and world religions, but it is the way in which the United States today serves as an extremely interesting experiment for the formation of a new type of world society. Today America is becoming a religious society made up of all the world religions. And this process is extremely interesting to observe, to learn from. I think it is going to have an impact throughout the world.

Last year, a prince of the Church, Francis Cardinal George, gave a lecture at the Library of Congress, entitled "Catholic Christianity and the Millennium: Frontiers of the Mind in the 21st Century." He said, "In the next millennium, as the modern nation state is relativized and national sovereignty is displaced into societal arrangements still to be invented, it will be increasingly evident that the major faiths are carriers of culture and that it is more sectarian to be French, American, or Russian than to be Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. Interreligious dialogue is more basic to the future of faith, therefore, than is church-state dialogue, important though that remains. And among the dialogues, that between Christians and Muslims promises to be most significant for the future of the human race." For those who know that the Catholic Church has been obsessed by the church-state dialogue for at least 10 centuries, this is an extremely important statement. He is arguing that this phase is coming to an end and the really important thing now is interreligious dialogue.

One of the most interesting questions today is the transformation of the very structures of the public. Who constitutes the public? Who are the public? It was once understood that the "public" referred to citizens of the nation state. But today, it's clear that nation states are no longer the boundaries of the public. The issues are global, and the public cannot have very clear territorial boundaries because many of the issues we are going to confront are not anymore the public issues of the old nation state. They are much broader and will require participation and collaboration beyond the borders of the United States. In that sense, transnational religions, like Catholicism, Islam, and Buddhism, have a particular role to play.

DIMENSIONS: SECULAR MEANING AND RELIGIOUS MILITANCY

James D. Redington, S.J., is a senior fellow at Woodstock, specializing in interreligious dialogue and questions of religion and culture. His academic area of expertise is Hinduiusm, and his background includes six years living in India, six years at Arrupe College in Harare, Zimbabwe, and 16 years teaching world religions and Christian theology at Georgetown University.

I would like to address four topics briefly: first, what "secular" means in the Indian context; second, some suggestions for doing interreligious dialogue in tense situations; third, how religion in the United States looks to the Indian outsider; and finally, a reflection on public religion.

First, what "secular" means in India. In India, "secular" means not that secularization is taking place, but rather that the Constitution recognizes and protects all religions. All religions are assumed to be entitled to full practice, not just privatized practice, and no one religion is "established."

One rather bizarre example will illustrate this policy of "secularization" in India and how protection works - or is meant to. It is a story of the rather widespread popular acceptance of militant Hindu chauvinism that is trying to take over India, and which now persecutes Christians as well as Muslims.

In the mid-1980s, the Communist state government was about to appoint a militant atheist principal in the Hindu Ramakrishna Mission's Rahola College, in West Bengal. The Ramakrishna Mission is one of the best known worldwide Hindu movements. The college had already chosen a Hindu monk to be principal, all according to its statutes. It was a showdown situation, creating an impasse.

To break the roadblock, the college administration ended up suing to be reclassified as a minority religion, so as to enjoy those protections which other minority religions, like Christianity and Islam, enjoy. They succeeded in being reclassified as a minority religion, but at the cost of being legally considered non-Hindu! You can imagine how their fellow Hindus scratched their heads. The deeper question on their minds was: can we practice our own religion in our own country?

Two recommendations, prompted by this story, occur to me. First, "secular" Hindus - or perhaps more accurately "constitutional Hindus" - must themselves persuade and prevail over their chauvinist and often violent Hindu brothers and sisters culturally (including educationally), through use of the media and through elections. Second, Christians, in India and in the mission-sending countries like the United States, must take the responsibility of persuading, even admonishing, some of their Christian brothers and sisters to be less militantly evangelistic. For example, the publication, World Pulse, reported a couple of years ago that a certain church conference had come to the conclusion that what it needed was to establish 30 new churches in Gujarat by the year 2003. That is a very militant challenge to the corresponding militants on the other side.

My second major point relates immediately to this kind of tension-ridden situation. It is a recommendation for interreligious dialogue that I call the "cooling principle." A cooling-off period may be necessary before reacting to instances of religious persecution. For example, when we read stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post about religious atrocities or persecution, our first tendency is to blow our tops in righteous anger. We think our anger is sacredly right and pure. Any compromise on it would be shameful. My suggestion here is that we discern spirits, for the sake of religious peace and more fruitful coexistence, while not ignoring the truth and justice in the matter. The cooling off process goes like this. We first look critically and objectively at our first emotional response and seek some understanding of the deeper causes, as well as the immediate cause of the incident in question.

Then we can look again at the situation with a critical and historical and communal form of second naivete. What I mean by that is a freshness of response, but an informed freshness of response. We would seek understanding without losing emotion. This principle goes together with the Indian Christian observation that very strong reactions from here can be counterproductive since they seem to support the persecutor's contention that Christianity is really still a foreign religion, not an Indian one.

Third, how religion in the United States looks to the Indian outsider. Differentiation and privatization on the sociological level, plus Hollywood pop culture on the street level, can make religion in the United States look to the outsider like no religion at all, or very little. So, it's not only secularists that the United States surprises with its relatively invisible and silent, but very real religiousness. It's also religious people from secular cultures and from openly religious cultures who are surprised by the deep, but fairly silent religiousness in America.

So, I ask, what about the more evident and public religiousness of Asian and African countries, and yet their commitment (most of them) to non-theocracy and/or to non-establishment of the dominant religion? What about such very public religiousness as occurs in Asia and Africa, but with a secular constitution? Western post-Enlightenment rhetoric, especially if delivered with a "been there, done that" attitude, will not be accepted as helpful.

Conversely, Asians and Africans can help us regain more of a feel for public celebration and visibility of religion. Take for example, the present Kumbh Mela in India near Allahabad, where the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers have a confluence - the astonishingly successful festival which is being touted, and I suppose it's true, as the largest assembly in the history of the human race. Or, take the yearly hajj in Mecca, the Ramadan month of fasting, even the daily occurrence of the five times of the call to prayer, the Angelus here if we can ever get the bells straightened out. I certainly hope that we wouldn't start killing each other again, as in the pre-Enlightenment religious wars, just because we brought religion outdoors again. If we were to, aren't we the real problem that has led to the drastic solution of privatization? Has it not been too high a price to pay?

Finally, a reflection on public religion. Perhaps with faith-based organizations now helping people in need more prominently, people might even begin asking who Saint Elsewhere was? Georgetown University Law professor David Cole, writing about faith-based social services in The Washington Post, on January 31, says:

"The Constitution does not require strict separation of church and state, because in a modern society in which everyone benefits from some form of government, that would amount to discrimination against religion."

SECULARISM AND MODERNITY: WHY WE'RE ASKING THE QUESTIONS

Peter Steinfels is a visiting professor of history at Georgetown. A former editor of Commonweal, he became the senior religion correspondent for The New York Times in 1988 and currently writes the "Beliefs" column for The Times. His book, The Neoconservatives, appeared in 1978.

First, a story that came to my mind in connection with the title, "Religion and Public Life: A New Alliance?" Titles, like headlines, of course, are chosen to stir interest and I had the sense that this one rested on some kind of prevailing assumption that right now we are facing something unusual, something perhaps disturbing or at least problematic. And that put me in mind of a famous statement by Lord Melbourne, the prime minister of England twice in the 1830s. He was a worldly Whig aristocrat, whose wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, had a notorious affair with Byron. Melbourne himself was named as a correspondent in two divorce suits. A close confidant and advisor to Queen Victoria, however, he had to deal with public religion all the time. In fact, one of his jobs was to propose names for people to become bishops of the Church of England. As accustomed as he was to the public role of religion, he was supposed to have said, after hearing an evangelical sermon, "Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life." He was working on a different set of assumptions than we are today.

In further looking over the title and the explanation of this evening's session, it seemed to me that we were really proposing to talk about something on two different levels. One is the immediate American context in which we have seen proposals to widen government support of faith-based activities, as well as the various religious elements brought into the recent presidential campaign. The second level is the deeper historical level that José Casanova has brought out so well this evening and even more in his book, and which Father Redington has expanded to an international dimension. The issue here is the relationship between secularization and modernity, or between religious vitality and modernity.

One of the things that Professor Casanova did wonderfully in his book was to divide up this question. He did not treat the issues of secularization as a simple block idea, but showed how there were different elements in it, including the element he retains as part of its core meaning. It's this: modernity involves a separation of different spheres of life so that religion no longer can play the role of tutor to all of them, whether it's science, economy, and so on, politics among them. But he says the traditional notion of secularization includes other elements, as for instance, that modernity inevitably involves a decline in religious belief and practice or a privatization of religion. And he denies that either of these claims is true.

In terms of our present context in the United States, it seems to me that when we talk about religion and public life, it would be well to keep at least four different ideas in mind.

The first is religion as legitimator; i.e., the broad role of civil religion as it has been described in the United States, where one makes a vague reference to place the American experience and the American experiment within some larger religious framework. That is a role some people have said is actually not to the benefit of religion, but it's certainly been a long part of our history, as set out many years ago in an essay by Robert Bellah, looking at all the presidential inaugural addresses.

The second role is religion as institution. And that's where I think we're now seeing a particular focus in terms of new proposals for support of faith-based activities. Thirdly, religion as a source of public language and wisdom. And that was very much an element in the course of the presidential campaign. What is the proper place for specifically religious language in public and, more narrowly, political discourse?

And finally, religion as the source of the private and personal virtues that are necessary for maintaining a democratic civil society. One can hearken back to George Washington's words in regard to that, warning against the simple assumption that maintaining the necessary virtues could be easily separated from religion.

The Meta-Question. What has struck me more and more about the larger discussion of secularization and modernity is the need to add to the question of whether we are secular or religious. The further question is, "Why are asking and why do we think that it matters?" Adding that element would help us to focus on different aspects of this discussion and perhaps add some clarity. I'd like to suggest seven reasons why we are asking this question, some of which have already been touched upon by Professors Casanova and Redington.

First, we are asking because we are seeking assurance about our own beliefs. That is to say, the idea that both as individuals, and as scholars and thinkers, we have some stake in terms of seeing what the general course of history is in regard to religious beliefs. We all know that truth is not determined by how widely a position is held, but we nonetheless look for confirmation from others whom we respect, and we take comfort in thinking that our views are gaining and growing.

Secondly, we are asking these questions because we are concerned about separation of church and state and the preservation of freedom of conscience. Thirdly, we are asking these questions because we are concerned about national unity, identity, and mission. We either fear the social divisiveness that religion can foment or we fear social fragmentation in the absence of a uniting religious commitment.

Fourthly, we are asking because we are concerned about the formation of a virtuous citizenry. I think today's discussion about faith-based efforts involves something psychological in terms of not just the support that they might get from government, but the recognition of their role and the role of religion generally in forming a virtuous citizenry.

Fifthly, we are asking these questions because we are concerned about the appropriate place of religious argument and appeals and religious mobilization in the democratic politics of a pluralist society. That's the question of whether religion isn't, as Richard Rorty has claimed, a conversation- stopper in public discourse and hence should be eliminated from public discourse.

Sixthly, we are asking because we wonder about the possibilities for living out a deep transforming religious faith on any wide scale in our society, that is, we feel that the cultural pressures of secularization have made it almost impossible for most people to achieve a deep religious faith.

And finally, we are asking because we are anxious for the future and continuity of religious traditions and communities.

Each one of these questions is somewhat distinct and points us in different directions in our examination both of the immediate context and the deeper historical trends and the international dimensions that my two fellow panelists have brought out so well.

McKeown. Peter just concluded with a list of things that he thinks responds to the question: "Why ask?" or "Why do we want to know?" And José is deeply embedded at the moment in New York City. A shorthand way of asking the question then is to say, "Does anyone in New York care about these seven things, José?" And if they do, then we could subsequently turn to Father Redington and ask him if anyone in India does.

Casanova. Well, of course there is this image of New York as Gotham, as the secular city. But New York is as deeply religious as probably any place in America - especially now with the coming of so many immigrants. One of the interesting things about that is how important religion and religious identity have been for the organization of immigrant communities. This was the case in the time of the historical immigration of Europeans and it is the case today. People come here and are more religious here than they were in the home country. I have always been surprised by the fact that suddenly Italians going to Milan, to Turin, became anarchists, atheists, socialists. Going to Argentina, the same. They came to America and became more religious than they were there. And the same goes for most groups. Hindus become consciously Hindu here in a way more than they were India. In India, they took it for granted. You breathe Hinduism; you don't need to practice it, you need to believe it. But here, if you want to be a Hindu, you have to really actively practice it and then pass it on to your children. It is this experience that has made religion, religious reflection, religious affirmative identities such an important aspect of the American experience that is different from probably any other society.

McKeown. Jim, is the solution then to send all of the American Catholics of your acquaintance to either India or Africa to get them to practice more fully their faith?

Redington. Well, to take one example, Father Peter Schineller says he feels God in Nigeria, in Africa. He's a Jesuit priest from New York who has been in Nigeria for many years, and he has difficulty back in the States feeling God. That's put a little simplistically of course, but I can feel with him. It has partly to do with the degree of religious privatization in the United States. It is felt very often that it is a danger to religion to be so differentiated as to be thoroughly predictable.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Who's Exceptional?

I really would like to believe, as [Casanova's book] says, that religions are here to stay, putting an end to the cherished dreams of the Enlightenment, and that religion will continue to play an important role in the public sphere. But I think in view of the comments you've made on American exceptionalism, we just stand out, way out. That's in terms of what you've just said about Europe. It's also the case with Japan. And even within the United States, within academic circles, the assertion that religion is here to stay strikes me as wishful thinking for those of us who are religiously defined. And indeed, the conclusion I draw is that more than a dialogue of church-church, that is to say religion with religion, is needed. The most important dialogue is between religions and non-religions.

Casanova. I am European myself. At first, I also thought of America as exceptional. Today, I am more and more convinced that Europe is the exception to the rule, that the rest of the world is much more religious, that there is a unique historical explanation for the process of secularization in Europe that is not being reproduced elsewhere, not in Hindu civilization, not in Islam, not in Buddhism. Take Japan, which is very much like America. It is extremely secular, materialist, even hedonist and so on, and at the same time, extremely religious, deeply concerned about religion with all kinds of experiences that for us may be very strange but nonetheless has been part of the experience. And there has been a tremendous increase in education, industrialization throughout the world, and this has been accompanied by religious revival everywhere. So we cannot say that just because those societies are not yet as developed as ours that they are still religious. I think that in terms of the experience in Europe, the secularization theory works. I'm not discarding the thesis. But this idea that history is a history of religious decline - it's a myth. There is not much empirical evidence for that. And we have to simply have more complex theories for explaining how we got where we got and how deeply religious or not religious we are.