The Fragile Greatness of America

From The Anchor

By Father Roger J. Landry

Pope Benedict came to the United States not merely to speak with Catholics and call them to a new Pentecost. He came to speak to all Americans: to remind us who we are, what our particular cultural and political inheritance is, and inspire us to treasure, protect and advance it.

For Benedict, the greatest part of that inheritance is the way our constitution and culture has protected religious freedom. In an interview on the plane coming to our country, the Holy Father said that America's founding fathers understood and applied a crucial paradox: that the best way to preserve religious freedom was to have a secular state.

"What I find fascinating in the United States," he told the journalists flying with him, "is that they began with a positive concept of secularism,because this new people was formed by communities and people who had fled from the state churches and wanted to have a lay state, secular, that would open possibilities to all confessions, for all the types of religious exercise. In this way, an intentionally secular state was born: they were against a state church... precisely out of love for religion in its authenticity, which can be lived only with liberty."

He said that the positive American understanding of secularism contrasts sharply with the negative European secularism flowing from the French revolution, which has tried to eliminate faith from public life rather than create the conditions for its flourishing. The American version, he affirmed, is a "fundamental model" for Europe. At the same time, he noted that there is a tension in the United States today, by those who subscribe to the original American positive secularism and those - like the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other movements and individuals - who are trying to advance the negative European ideal.

In his meeting with the bishops, the Pope elaborated on the uniqueness of this "positive secularism" and the need to protect it. "It strikes me as significant that here in America, unlike many places in Europe, the secular mentality has not been intrinsically opposed to religion. Within the context of the separation of Church and State, American society has always been marked by a fundamental respect for religion and its public role, and, if polls are to be believed, the American people are deeply religious. But it is not enough to count on this traditional religiosity and go about business as usual, even as its foundations are being slowly undermined."

He then described that the foundations of this aspect of American greatness are being weakened by a growing reductionist understanding of how much faith should be allowed to influence one's public life. This new conception"allows for professing belief in God ... but at the same time it can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator. Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things 'out there; are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life: living 'as if God did not exist.'"

If this corruption of the positive American secularism continues - whereby faith becomes a civic virtue rather than leads to moral virtues - then the entire American experiment in self-government is endangered. This is not an exclusively papal insight, but, as the Pope himself noted, the clear conclusion of Presidents Washington and Adams as well as Alexis deTocqueville. The 265th pope quoted the first president, who in his farewell address said that "religion and morality represent indispensable supports of political prosperity," and added, "Democracy can only flourish, as your founding fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation."

Perhaps the greatest homage to the wisdom of the founding fathers and the greatest call to defend and advance the positive American notion of secularism - both in the U.S. and elsewhere - occurred when Pope Benedict addressed the United Nations. He didn't mention the U.S. by name, but instead gave an impassioned defense of human rights in general and the right to religious freedom in particular - the very foundations on which the founding fathers built our country.

"It is inconceivable," Benedict declared, "that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves - their faith - in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one's rights." This type of denial occurs in atheistic communist countries and religiously fundamentalist states.

Benedict, however, added that there is another form of the denial of religious liberty that occurs in some secularist states, which religious liberty is understood only as the right to worship.

"The full guarantee of religious liberty," he asserted, "cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order ... through influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives which extend from universities, scientific institutions and schools to health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the poorest and most marginalized. Refusal to recognize the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute - by its nature, expressing communion between persons - would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person." In other words, respect for religious liberty does not mean merely giving space for the person to worship on a given holy day in accordance with the person's conscience; it means allowing that person's faith to be able to influence his or her life seven days a week.

One clear application of this is in the realm of politics. In his meeting with the U.S. bishops, Pope Benedict praised the fact that, historically,Americans "do not hesitate to bring moral arguments rooted in biblical faith into their public discourse." This has allowed America to have the steady doses of salt, light and leaven that have prevented the social and moral disintegration that afflicts countries marked by relativist understandings of the truth.

But this American treasure is always fragile. "The preservation of freedom,"the Pope says, "calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one's deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate. In a word, freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good."

For that reason, "the task of upholding religious freedom is never completed." Now it's our generation's turn to protect, uphold and advance it against the conceptions and practices that seek to undermine it.