More dangerous than ever

Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins shocked the world a few months ago with a declaration that he is a “cultural Christian.” This provoked scoffing at his desire to enjoy the fruits of Christianity without believing the truths at its core. Others noted the irony of Dawkins’ lifelong project of sawing at the branches of Christianity while admitting it has significant public benefit. Still, some saw an apologetic benefit to Dawkins’ words and, perhaps, a sign that the atheist is making an ever-so-slight turn toward faith.

What is indisputable is that Dawkins’ candid admission is an affirmation of the prophetic words offered 40 years ago by Richard John Neuhaus in his classic work of political theology, The Naked Public Square. Neuhaus, a Lutheran convert to Catholicism, presciently recognized the peril of pushing Christianity to the margins of public life in favor of secularism. “In a democratic society,” he wrote, “state and society must draw from the same moral well. In addition, because transcendence abhors a vacuum, the state that styles itself as secular will almost certainly succumb to secularism.”

If only Neuhaus could see how his words became reality. The steady march of the sexual revolution, the loneliness brought about by an atomized individualism, the abandonment of public virtue, and the decline of the family have left even atheists like Dawkins recognizing the social benefits of Christianity.

Neuhaus didn’t see religion as a threat to democracy, as do so many of the social critics today who hyperventilate at the slightest mention of God in public life. Instead, he saw religion as essential for democracy: “The chief threat comes from a collapse of the idea of freedom and of the social arrangements necessary to sustaining liberal democracy. … Indispensable to this arrangement are the institutional actors, such as the institutions of religion, that make claims of ultimate or transcendent meaning.”

Without these institutions—part of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons of society”—what fills the void is worse. Neuhaus feared that a naked public square would not be naked for long but would be adorned by less virtuous actors, particularly the state: “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 submit 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.”

Who can argue with Neuhaus’ thesis? Certainly not the American founders who, while wisely resisting a state church, knew their project could only work, in the words of John Adams, “for a religious and moral people.” When the Church recedes, when virtue becomes outdated, when freedom becomes expressive individualism, the government often moves in to help ameliorate the social cost. The state becomes a surrogate father to the fatherless, politics becomes an all-consuming religion, and our communities become less hospitable to human flourishing. As Chuck Colson often said, societies can choose between “the conscience or the constable.” In contemporary America, often the state enforces a new religion of sexual anarchy.

The Naked Public Square is still a good word for Christians struggling to understand their place in the life of our nation. Neuhaus’ prescription is not, as some suggest, to abandon democracy for an established state church, but for Christians to do as Jeremiah did, encouraging the exiles of Babylon to actively seek the welfare of this great country. We do this by stewarding our citizenship responsibly by speaking, voting, and, perhaps, running for public office. But we also work and pray for moral and spiritual renewal brought about by evangelism, discipleship, and revival.

In his final book, aptly titled American Babylon, Neuhaus urged Christians toward active but realistic engagement: “The alternative to the naked public square—meaning public life stripped of religion and religiously grounded argument—is not the sacred public square, but the civil public square. The sacred public square is located in the New Jerusalem. The best that can be done in Babylon is to maintain, usually with great difficulty, a civil public square.”

Christians do politics best when they rightly order their allegiances, first to the kingdom of God and then to the nation that God has sovereignly called them to inhabit. For the health of our nation, for the flourishing of our neighbors, for the glory of God, we must not retreat from America’s aspiration toward “a more perfect union.” And all Americans are served when Christians bring their faith commitments with them into the public square. This is what Richard John Neuhaus believed and, apparently, what even atheists like Richard Dawkins are beginning to grudgingly accept.