FAITH IN POLITICS

FAITH IN POLITICS. By A. James Reichley. Brookings Institution Press. 429 pp. $52.95 cloth, $20.95 paper

Much of A. James Reichley’s latest book reads like a backgrounder for Beltway insiders who don’t know much about religion in American politics but who think that it’s back, big time, and need to get up to speed. While liberals will find bones to pick with the author’s centerright interpretation of history—and the constitutional jurisprudence that goes with it— they will be hard pressed to deny that he has served up a good deal of solid information in easily digestible form.

But the useful summary comes wrapped in a larger argument, and this makes the book at once more interesting and more problematic. The issue Reichley poses is whether "a free society depends ultimately on religious values for coherence and vindication of human rights." He believes that it does. Is he correct?

According to Faith in Politics, the four values on which democracy rests are "personal freedom, distributive justice, citizen participation in social decisionmaking, and social discipline." In The Values Connection (2001), in which he addresses the same issue at greater length and without the American political history, Reichley lists 10 "crucial moral foundations for a functioning free society," including "tolerance of differences in behavior and belief" and "a sense of personal and social honor."

Whatever their precise number and nature, do democratic values in fact come from religion, and if so, from what religion in particular? That’s an empirical inquiry Reichley chooses not to bother with. Indeed, he grants that democratic values can be derived equally well from secular humanism (which he prefers to call civil humanism) as from "Transcendent Idealism," a generic theistic outlook that, he says, balances "individual rights against social authority by rooting both in God’s transcendental purpose."

superior outlook, in Reichley’s opinion, for a free society is that it convinces citizens that their values come from on high. Civil humanism, by rooting those values merely in self and society, fails to provide democracy with sufficient "moral support." As Thomas Jefferson, in one of Reichley’s favorite quotes, asked rhetorically in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"

That popular religious belief is required to create a strong and well-ordered society is an idea dating back to classical antiquity, and one that Western political thinkers such as Machiavelli and Rousseau, whom Reichley puts in the civil humanist camp, devoutly embraced. But ever since Augustine assailed Roman "civil theology" in The City of God, the Western Christian tradition has been ambivalent about making the case for religion on the grounds of its social utility, and Reichley often seems reluctant to admit that he is doing just that.

He makes it clear that America’s Founding Fathers from time to time expressed the view that religion, though not a nationally established church, should be an important prop to their new republic. He establishes that Americans today are pretty religious, or say they are. And he shows that a lot of religion has washed through American public life over the past 200 years. But none of this proves that the citizens of the United States and every other successful democracy need to subscribe to Transcendent Idealism. The Bush administration will be happy to think they should. The citizens of the free societies of old Europe will say, "Pas du tout."

—Mark Silk