Just over 40 years ago Richard John Neuhaus released his now classic work, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Eerdmans, 1984). Neuhaus (1936-2009) was a writer, ethicist and Lutheran pastor who later became a Catholic priest. He founded and edited the monthly journal First Things.
In his 1984 volume he reminds us that the notion of a public square devoid of any moral and religious values is a myth. It will always be filled by something, and if it is not the Christian view of things, then it will be something else – most likely the state itself usurping the role of God. In the West that has clearly been our experience over the past century or so.
Every day this is becoming more apparent. Religion – primarily Christianity – is being removed and replaced by a radical secularist religion. Neuhaus says this idea of a naked public square is a rather recent concept, and the attempt to let an ideology of secularism take over is an exceedingly dangerous path to take.
He reminds us of how the Catholic social analyst John Courtney Murray had warned us about seeking to build and maintain a nation in a spiritual vacuum. The resulting moral confusion can only destroy a nation like America. Neuhaus writes:
Our argument is that the naked public square is not desirable, even if it were possible. It is not desirable in the view of believers because they are inescapably entangled in the belief that the moral truths of religion have a universal and public validity. The Ten Commandments, to take an obvious example, have a normative status. They are not, as it has been said, Ten Suggestions or Ten Significant Moral Insights to be more or less appreciated according to one’s subjective disposition. Even if one is not a believer, the divorce of public business from the moral vitalities of the society is not desirable if one is committed to the democratic idea. In addition to not being desirable, however, we have argued that the naked public square is not possible. It is an illusion, for the public square cannot and does not remain naked. When particularist religious values and the institutions that bear them are excluded, the inescapable need to make public moral judgments will result in an elite construction of a normative morality from sources and principles not democratically recognized by the society.
The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church. Not without reason, religion is viewed by some as a repressive imposition upon the public square. They would cast out the devil of particularist religion and thus put the public square in proper secular order. Having cast out the one devil, they unavoidably invite the entrance of seven devils worse than the first. (p. 86)
Note how he warns that “the establishment of the state as church” is the inevitable result of all this. He continues:
The totalitarian alternative edges in from the wings, waiting impatiently for the stage to be cleared of competing actors. Most important is that the stage be cleared of those religious actors that presume to assert absolute values and thus pose such a troublesome check upon the pretensions of the state. The state is not waiting with a set of absolute values of its own or with a ready-made religion. Far from waiting with a package of absolutes, in a society where the remnants of procedural democracy survive the state may be absolutely committed only to the relativization of all values. In that instance, however, the relativity of all things becomes the absolute. Without the counter-claims of “meaning-bestowing” institutions of religion, there is not an absence of religion but, rather, the triumph of the religion of relativity. It is a religion that must in principle deny that it is religious. It is the religion that dare not speak its name. In its triumph there is no contender that can, in Peter Berger’s phrase, “relativize the relativizers.”
The entrance of the seven devils that take over the cleansed public square is not an alarmist scenario. Conceptually there is no alternative to it, unless of course one believes that a society can get along without a normative ethic. Admittedly, there are those who do believe this…. (pp. 86-87)
The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in Americaby Neuhaus, Richard John (Author)
The bloodthirsty dictatorships of Nazism and Communism have clearly demonstrated how the naked public square is quickly filled with other religious orthodoxies – even if they are clearly cruel and secular religions. He says in a chapter on the “purloined authority of the state” the following:
This, then, is the burden of our historical moment – to be facing moral dilemmas of unprecedented complexity at a time when we are inclined to throw away compass and map and to scuttle the ship. In our public life we are feverishly engaged in moral disarmament when the battle for what it means to be human, for the humanum, has not yet reached its peak. We cannot rely upon law alone. The great atrocities of our century were all perpetrated with the color of law, from Hitler to Stalin to Mao….
What is required is law combined with moral sentiment that is rooted in a tradition of belief. Moral sentiment that is not grounded, institutionalised, and transmitted in a living tradition is always subject to becoming mere sentimentality. Such living traditions cannot be created ex nihilo. (pp. 151-152)
Neuhaus concludes that chapter with these words:
[O]f all the institutions in society, only religion can invoke against the state a transcendent authority and have its invocation seconded by “the people” to whom a democratic state is presumably accountable. For the state to be secured from such challenge, religion must be redefined as a private, empathetically not public, phenomenon. In addition, because truly value-less existence is impossible for persons or societies, the state must displace religion as the generator and bearer of values. Therefore, it must screen out of public discourse and decision-making those values too closely associated with religion, lest public recognition be given to a source of moral authority other than the state itself. To put it differently: in the eyes of the state, the dangerous child today is not the child who points out that the emperor has no clothes but the child who sees that the emperor’s garments of moral authority have been stolen from the religion he has sent into exile from the public square. (p. 155)
He looks in other chapters on what prospects might face us in the days to come. The book’s closing paragraphs are these:
The naked public square may be the last phase of a failed experiment, a mistaken proposition. We have no divine promise that a nation so conceived and so dedicated will endure any longer than it has. Afterward, there will still be laws, of that we can be sure. And the history books, if history books are allowed then, will record this strange moment in which a society was in turmoil over the connections between laws and the law, between law and life. Then the turmoil will seem very distant, for then no dissent will be permitted from the claim that the law is the law is the law.
The dour prospect is not alarmist. Surely something like it is what those thoughtful people must mean when they say that the day of liberal democracy is past. It makes little difference whether the successor regime is of the right or of the left or unclassifiable. By whatever ideology the idea, this audacious democratic idea, would be declared discredited. By whom, where, under what circumstances, by what conception and what dedication could it ever be tried again? Yes, of course, life would go on and God’s purposes will not be defeated, not ultimately. But the world would be a darker and colder place. That it can happen is evident to all but the naive and woefully blind. That it will happen seems probable, if we refuse to understand the newness, the fragility, the promise, and the demands of religion and democracy in America. (p. 264)
Many have noted how the secularisation of society must lead to the sacralisation of the state. When the one true God is booted out of public life, a false god – the all-powerful state – will readily move in and take his place. Neuhaus was warning about this over 40 years ago.
The passage of time has proved that his concerns were well-founded, and things really are moving us in the direction of what is found in dystopian novels. As we find in Scripture itself, prophetic warnings are almost always ignored and dismissed – and to our great disadvantage.
It is a pity this important book was not thoroughly heeded back then. Now things might be too late.
