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Having thrown down the gauntlet in this way, Carter begins with a quote from Aquinas: "The force of a law depends on the extent of its justice." He is worried that we may be losing the normative and moral dimensions of law or, perhaps better put, he believes that those who refuse to disconnect law from justice and deep concerns with fairness and human flourishing and good and evil are having a harder and harder time making their views heard. Why is that? Because, he claims and sets out to demonstrate, we have made "dissent seem unAmerican." Carter isn't so much concerned with generic dissent but with dissent that is faith-based, as this form of dissent has taken the most hits in our recent past. The big question democratic citizens must always concern themselves with is how "to control the apparatus of the sovereign." (It wasn't at all clear to me what Carter meant by "sovereign" at this point—that unfolds slowly over the course of the three lectures.)
Carter begins by exploring the role of religious communities in public life in a section he calls "Allegiance." He points out what is so often forgotten, namely, that our great Declaration of Independence is itself "an act of disallegiance, the breaking of the tie of presumptive obligation that we describe as loyalty." Loyalty, in the first instance, emerged as an act of dissent or, better said, as the "failure of dissent" in the sense that the petitions of aggrieved colonials had either been ignored or responded to in a wholly inadequate way by the British crown. So, given the breakdown of the petition process Carter labels "dissent," colonials moved into the extreme mode of revolution. At present (working here by analogy, although it is unclear just how far Carter wants to push it), large numbers of our citizens feel that "their petitions to their government go unanswered, and, as a result, have lost a degree of faith in that government. Does that mean that they are also losing their allegiance?" A pro vocative query, to say the least, especially if he sees revolution in the backdrop. But this is more hinted at than developed in Carter's argument.
Still, Carter doesn't mince words in exposing the attitude of contempt and belittling he finds pervasive among "secular liberals" toward citizens for "whom faith is more important than particular political ends." The political commitments of these citizens, if fully displayed, are complex and frequently do not fit any of our prefabricated options. Thus, for example, the vast majority of Roman Catholics, together with members of the African American churches, combine social traditionalism with a kind of populist egalitarianism on economic questions. Others, of course, are conservative or more liberal across the board. But Carter's point is that such views, if religiously grounded and articulated, are nigh unintelligible to mainstream politics, "with its arrogant rejection of religious argument and traditional religious values." This, he claims, "has alienated tens of millions of voters, and by no means are all of them hard-line conservatives."
One wonders if Carter would change his tune somewhat in light of the fact that both of the likely nominees of their respective parties for the next presidential election, George W. Bush and Al Gore, have come out re soundingly for charitable-choice provisions as well as forms of public assistance for faith-based social-provision and civil-society efforts. Probably not, I suspect, because his concerns cut deeper than current proposed public-policy initiatives. Specifically, he ranks the "moral upbringing of the young" as an overriding issue—one that, if anything, Carter would find even more exigent in light of the Columbine High School massacre. Although himself a skeptic in this matter, Carter notes that overwhelming popular support for organized classroom prayer is part and parcel of a deep and abiding commitment to the moral formation of the young, given added urgency by the conviction that the wider, secular society is either indifferent to this concern or finds religious commitment and education irrelevant to it. He writes of "ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding families, patriotic Americans whose political allegiance to the nation runs deep and whose moral roots are in their religious traditions, to which their allegiance runs just as deep; families who are concerned, frightened, and, more and more, profoundly alienated from politics and from a government that they think does not care about them."
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