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For better or for worse, "God talk," at least as much as "rights talk," has been, and remains, the way Americans speak. Our politics is indecipherable if severed from the panoply and interplay of America's religions. Much of our political ferment de rived, and derives, from intense religious commitments. The majority of Americans has long held that religious liberty—free exercise—is much of what distinguishes America—or did historic ally—from so many other polities. Given the complex intermingling of religious and political imperatives in our history, it is unsurprising that such a huge chunk of American juridical life has been devoted to sorting out the inaptly named church-state debate. In a less churched society this would be a far less salient concern.
Were one to examine American history, and views on the power and role of religion, through a lens that began only with Jefferson and continued down to present separationists who approach religion as a kind of polluting force in political life, one would miss the boat altogether. Jefferson's blithe dictum that it mattered not to him whether his neighbor believed in no God or 20 gods—it neither picked his pocket nor broke his legs—suggests an agnosticism about religious belief not shared by the vast majority. It is, then, not at all surprising that when Alexis de Tocqueville toured America during the Jacksonian era, he noted, in his subsequent masterwork, Democracy in America, that settled ideas about God and human nature were indispensable to the conduct of daily life and that, in general, when a people's religion is destroyed, it enervates and prepares them, not for liberation but for bondage. (Here he had the horrors of the French Revolutionary Terror in mind.)
In America, by contrast, the social and political implications of the belief that all were equal in the eyes of God were being played out on a grand scale. Religion contributed powerfully to the maintenance of a democratic republic by directing the mores and by drawing people into community and away from narrow materialism. Religion helped to "purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being human beings acquire in an age of equality." The separation of church and state in America seemed a catalyst for, rather than a hindrance to, an astonishing flourishing of religion. By diminishing the official power of religion, the Americans had enhanced its social strength. They seemed to recognize that religion (by which, of course, Tocqueville meant Christianity, including Catholicism, regarded by so many others as an anti-democratic element in American life) feeds hope and is attached to a constitutive principle of human nature. Amidst the flux and tumult of American politics, religion shaped and mediated the passions. Tocqueville didn't mince words. He insisted that the ideas of Christianity and liberty were so intermingled that if one were to try to sever religion from democracy, one would destroy that democracy. What about the views of the eighteenth-century philosophes, then, who held that spreading enlightenment would inevitably bring about a weakening of religion? Tocqueville's riposte is pithy: "It is tiresome that the facts do not fit their theory at all."
Something of the Tocquevillian weariness with theories that run directly counter to lived experience is evident in Stephen Carter's The Dissent of the Governed. This crisply argued volume consists of Carter's Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization delivered at Harvard University, May, l995. The book is, as Carter's subtitle suggests, a meditation on "the relationship between loyalty and disobedience on the one hand and, on the other, between the recognition of the sovereign's au thority and realization that the sovereign is not always right. In America, this conflict is eternal." He writes, he tells us, as a "legal theorist, as a citizen of a democracy, and as a Christian." Further, he believes "deeply, in dissent, not simply as a right, but often as a responsibility."
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