Christianity & Politics

Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--and What We Should Do about It

Name: Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--and What We Should Do about It
Author: Noah Feldman
ISBN: 9780374530389

by Noah Feldman

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

A brilliant and urgent appraisal of one of the most profound conflicts of our time

Even before George W. Bush gained reelection by wooing religiously devout "values voters," it was clear that church-state matters in the United States had reached a crisis. With Divided by God, Noah Feldman shows that the crisis is as old as this country—and looks to our nation's past to show how it might be resolved.

Today more than ever, ours is a religiously diverse society: Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. And yet more than ever, committed Christians are making themselves felt in politics and culture.

What are the implications of this paradox? To answer this question, Feldman makes clear that again and again in our nation's history diversity has forced us to redraw the lines in the church-state divide. In vivid, dramatic chapters, he describes how we as a people have resolved conflicts over the Bible, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the teaching of evolution through appeals to shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom of conscience. And he proposes a brilliant solution to our current crisis, one that honors our religious diversity while respecting the long-held conviction that religion and state should not mix.

Divided by God speaks to the headlines, even as it tells the story of a long-running conflict that has made the American people who we are.

Synopsis

A brilliant and urgent appraisal of one of the most profound conflicts of our time

Even before George W. Bush gained reelection by wooing religiously devout "values voters," it was clear that church-state matters in the United States had reached a crisis. With Divided by God, Noah Feldman shows that the crisis is as old as this country—and looks to our nation's past to show how it might be resolved.

Divided by God speaks to the headlines, even as it tells the story of a long-running conflict that has made the American people who we are.

The New Yorker

Having examined Islam and democracy in his first book, “After Jihad,” Feldman, a law professor at N.Y.U., turns his attention to America’s own fraught religious-secular divide. Much of the book consists of an agile account of the evolution of church-state relations, from the creation of the First Amendment to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling against a public display of the Ten Commandments. Feldman identifies two polarized camps today: “values evangelicals,” who uphold religious values as integral to political decisions, and “legal secularists,” whose aim is to keep religion and government separate. He downplays the heterogeneity within these groups, perhaps in order to bolster his solution for reconciliation: sanctioning “public manifestations of religion,” while withholding government funding from religious institutions.

About the Author, Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman, who teaches law at New York University, is the author of After Jihad and What We Owe Iraq. He lives in New York and Washington, D.C.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

E. J. Dionne

E.In an arena so contested and contentious, it's a blessing to have an honest voice stating uncomfortable truths, to wit: "It is appealing to think that, deep down, we all agree on what really matters. Only we don't -- and we have to come to terms with that fact of disagreement while still engaging in a common national project." Amen.
— The Washington Post

The New Yorker

Publishers Weekly

Feldman, a legal rising star and author of After Jihad (a look at democracy and Islam), turns his attention to America's battle over law and religious values in this lucid and careful study. Those Feldman calls "legal secularists" want the state wholly cleansed of religion, while "values evangelicals" want American government to endorse the Christianity on which they say its authority rests. Feldman thinks both positions too narrow for America's tastes and needs. Much of his volume shows how those needs have changed. James Madison and his friends, Feldman writes, hoped to "protect religion from government, not the other way round." Debates in the 19th century focused on public schools, whose culture of "nonsectarian Christianity" (really Protestantism) created dilemmas for Catholics, and in the 20th century faced challenges from secularists and evangelicals-the former won in the courts until very recently; the latter, often enough, won public opinion. Feldman proposes a compromise: that government "[allow] greater space for public manifestations of religion" while preventing government from linking itself with "religious institutions" (by funding them, for example). The "values" controversy, as Feldman shows, concerns electoral clout, not just legal reasoning. His patient historical chapters will leave readers on all sides far more informed as matters like stem-cell research and the Supreme Court's forthcoming 10 Commandments decision take the headlines. Agent, Heather Schroder. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Sobered and enriched by his experience in the Iraqi and Afghan constitutional debates, Feldman, a law professor at New York University, returns to the U.S. debate over secularism in this rich and rewarding book. He swiftly and competently reviews key episodes in the history of church-state relations to show how the growing religious diversity of the American people has led to new efforts to find common ground for political and social life. Feldman's brief but brilliant analysis of the recent Supreme Court approach to church-state issues is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the contemporary debate. The modern Supreme Court, Feldman argues, has gotten things almost exactly wrong. Recent decisions have lowered the walls preventing the state financing of religious activities (such as voucher programs) while raising new and historically unprecedented barriers toward religious symbols in public (such as crèches at town halls). Feldman would allow more religious symbols in the public square but try harder to keep public dollars out of church (and synagogue and mosque) coffers. Whatever the fate of his proposals, Feldman has done a superb job of making complex legal and historical information on an important public debate usefully accessible.

Library Journal

Feldman (NYU Law School; What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building) traces the evolution of the role of religion in American political life from the Colonial period to the present, paying particular attention to the development of legal doctrines. The First Amendment stipulates that Congress cannot pass laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion, yet throughout our country's history, Americans have debated what role, if any, religion should have in government and how government should treat religion. Recent elections, legislation, confirmation proceedings, and Supreme Court decisions have fanned the embers of this ever-hot topic, causing them to ignite and produce intensely heated-and damaging-partisan rhetoric. This book has two great strengths: it offers a balanced overview of the subject, clearly articulating the sources of the differences between those who seek legislation that incorporates their religious values ("values evangelicals") and those who feel the government must be secular ("legal secularists"), and it offers a reasonable approach for reconciling the differences between the two. An excellent, very readable work, deserving a wide audience; highly recommended for all libraries.-Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Can't we all-fundamentalist and atheist and nonideologist-just get along?It wouldn't seem so, writes NYU law professor Feldman (After Jihad, 2003), who argues that the ever-hotter war between the proponents of "values evangelism" on one hand and "legal secularism" on the other "now threatens to destroy a common national vision." That vision includes belief in the constitutional separation of church and state; and, as Feldman observes, the battle is not strictly about religious belief as such, but about how religious belief plays out in the conduct of politics and the running of government. Separation was, Feldman suggests, the product of a simpler time, when no one opposed the idea of religious liberty and when Protestantism-the religion of 95 percent of Americans at the time of independence-was so divided that no single denomination was likely to seize control of the state; Anglicanism may have threatened for a time to do so in Virginia, but thanks to the liberty-of-conscience clauses of the Constitution-written by dissenters Thomas Jefferson and James Madison-the "national experiment with institutional separation of church and state" was able to take hold. Things are somewhat more complex now that such a large number of religious beliefs, and not just varieties of Protestantism, are current in America. Yet, Feldman suggests, the separation of church and state does not strictly mean that a city hall cannot erect a creche, nor that a DMV employee cannot wish a motorist a Merry Christmas; the founders, he argues, "did not think that the state needed to be protected from the dangers of religious influence, nor were they especially concerned with keeping religious symbolism out of the publicsphere." Just so, that freedom does not mean that the government should necessarily be beholden to religious sensibilities-as when Sunday mail delivery was abolished, along about 1828, because clerics feared that open post offices would draw people away from church. A reasoned, reasonable and consensus-seeking argument that is, of course, in danger of going unheard amid all the shouting.