Secular and Religious: An American Quest for Coexistence

By Edmund Byrne

In the United States, separation of church and state is maintained to avoid religion-centered controversy. In recent decades, though, a politically active religious right has sought to return government to what they claim are its Christian origins. By contrast, many American philosophers favor an unwavering secularism to keep church and state duly separate. Byrne responds in this book by seeking a more nuanced and open-ended relationship between religious groups and secular processes. Granting there have been religion-based excesses in the United States, he qualifies their significance by reminding readers that unconstrained secularism often engenders an intolerant civil religion. Next he discusses how US courts have gone about setting legal limits to religious influence, especially in publicly funded schools. Calling this a matter of border control, he indicates that US courts are now somewhat accommodating of religious groups in K-12 settings. But in the past, he shows, they required public schools to be quite rigorously secular; so religious groups, in particular the Roman Catholics, founded schools that could include religious instruction. Finally, drawing on group rights theory, he argues that a commitment to church/state separation need not preclude religious groups from participating in public sector processes.

To make his case for religious groups he (1) shows the need to operate in and through groups to influence government; (2) addresses moral difficulties that a political system faces if it is open to group-generated input; (3) recognizes that worthy causes can be better advanced by organized groups than by unconnected individuals; and (4) claims this is so whether the cause is advanced by religious or non-religious groups. His conclusion: a group organized around a religious motif should neither be summarily excluded from nor exceptionally favored in secular deliberations as to public policy and practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456751890

Edmund Byrne

Edmund Byrne, a retired philosophy professor, edits articles in business ethics and writes in that field and in social and political philosophy, focusing on flaws in just war theory (see www://rethinkjustwar.info). After B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy, he studied for and spent a few years as a parish priest. Then as a Fulbright scholar he obtained his doctorate in philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. He then taught philosophy for 32 years, mostly at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, where he earned a J.D. degree.

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Table of Contents

My Experience in Religious and Secular Roles

Living and Leaving a Religious Role

Living and Learning in a Secular Role

America’s Experience:

Lessons from Home and Abroad

I. Religion’s Place in a Secular State

A. Reasoners’ Restrictions on Public Discourse

B. Reasonable Limits on Religious Freedom

C. Some Hidden Dangers of Civil Religion

II. U.S. State/Religion Border Control

A. Religion-State Relations in U.S. Courts

1. Scope of Religion-State Rulings

2. Religion-State Rulings about Education

B. Alternative Schooling in America

III. Religious Groups and the Public Sphere

A. The Political Importance of Interest Groups

B. The Moral Need for Groups in a Democracy

C. Religious Groups in the Political Process

Concluding Overview

Acknowledgements

References

My Experience in Religious and Secular Roles

Have I been living my own life? Or have I, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilich, been just a functionary? This is a serious question. For, over the years I have been involved with diverse communities each of which offered me status if I played by its rules. Raised in a Roman Catholic milieu, I gradually internalized not only Catholic mores but also others’ conviction that I was called to be a priest. A high performer in school, I was singled out as a potential scholar, which I eventually came to associate with being a philosopher in academe. In each milieu in which I participated I was encouraged to write; but I often ran up against intra- and extra-societal assumptions regarding what one should think and write about. These assumptions varied from one community to another and sometimes conflicted within one and the same community. As I struggled to accommodate these idiosyncratic world views, I gradually learned to critically assess social expectations. And so it is that any autonomy I have achieved has evolved out of participation in and resistance to power relations in various communities.

I say this in full awareness of how deeply divided scholars are regarding community participation. Some extol traditional communities, especially those based on religious beliefs, as reliable bases for personal fulfillment. But others warn that a constitutive community unduly suppresses individuality and autonomy; so they recommend participating only in groups one freely chooses and can readily leave if found unsatisfactory (variously called collaborative communities or communities of choice). Others make an exception for families. Implicit in this debate, then, is a presumed dichotomy that divides the nonvoluntary from the voluntary (say liberals) or the altruistic from the selfish (say communitarians).

I myself have experienced each type of community, but never in the pure form called for by these analyses. Rather each community to which I belonged provided a mixture of sustenance and subordination that exemplified Michel Foucault’s finding that power relations entail both determinism and voluntarism – a view one commentator calls a paradox of agency. How much autonomy one can muster in any particular community depends on complex and often subtle understandings and interactions among its members. To concretize these generalizations, I propose to revisit my religious participation, intellectual pursuits, and attempts to find embodied fulfillment. But first a skeletal autobiography to frame the discursive narrative that follows.

My roots are those of a heartland Roman Catholic. Born in Missouri in 1933, educated in Catholic schools in Peoria, Illinois; majored in philosophy at a Catholic college for men in Indiana, and at a Catholic university in Chicago. Attended seminaries in Missouri and in Washington, DC, and for a time was a parish priest and part time teacher in a Catholic high school. I earned a doctorate in philosophy at a Catholic university in Belgium and taught philosophy briefly at the University of Missouri. Then I left the priesthood and the Catholic Church, taught philosophy for three years at Michigan State University, for twenty-nine years at Indiana University in Indianapolis, and briefly at a SUNY college. I studied law and practiced for a while, and I taught labor studies and philanthropic studies courses.

Over these years I wrote some books, articles, contributions to books, and book reviews. Most of these writings address some group-proposed theme, fall under (applied) social or political philosophy, and address an issue regarding technology, work, business and society, or violence. A few early writings displayed Catholic preconceptions; but over time I learned to approach religion more critically, e.g., by studying Church history, teaching philosophy of religion, writing a dissertation aimed at disavowing doctrinaire Catholicism, and discovering how Bible and other religious texts came to be written and interpreted.

This transformation was dialectically inevitable – not because religion and reason are polar opposites but because of discrepancies between lifeworld challenges and others’ expectations in behalf of reason or religion. These discrepancies lead one to question the advantage of having any strongly held convictions. I will address this issue only indirectly, though, by acknowledging that on a sociological level shared convictions help satisfy the human need for meaningful interaction and collaboration. Put succinctly, for the individual the primary function of religion if not of other groups as well is social bonding.

Bonding is a mixed blessing. For, its embrace though comforting does circumscribe the choices one makes and the goals one pursues. By contrast, the process of parting company engenders a certain anonymity even as it facilitates making life decisions that are not based on disavowed collective influences. In my case, at least, having become first a believing intellectual then a questioning believer, I ceased being a dutiful subject to become successively a loyal reformist, a disenchanted apostate, and finally a contentedly fallen-away Catholic with no burning desire for alternative ecclesiastical shelter. Complexity is added to this personal hegira by the fact that I carried my religious involvement to the point of priestly ordination and pastoral ministry, which, partly because linked with celibacy, became incompatible with the multi-dimensional person that I eventually needed to become.

Living and Leaving a Religious Role

Roman Catholicism involves a Pope and under him bishops who govern the Church. This hierarchy aside, however, the Church is viewed as a community consisting of those who follow teachings attributed to Jesus; and each individual believer is expected to be both member and agent of that community. This includes the laity, more so today than in the past. But in my youth the hierarchically endorsed status of the priest was a key component of the community which provided me meaning and promised fulfillment. I came in time to think otherwise; and what I did about it constitutes a case study of the benefits and costs of exercising personal autonomy in and beyond a community.

I was born a nonbeliever in Kansas City during the Great Depression, but quickly became a believer thanks to infant baptism, which Roman Catholics practice without reference to developmental psychology. I would have grown up an Irish Catholic except that my father died suddenly when I was three. My German-American Catholic mother grew up in central Kansas, where she had been prepared for gracious wifely duties via a music major at a Catholic women’s college. She was prevented by the KKK from obtaining a teaching position in the Kansas City area, so reluctantly removed herself and her two children to her parents’ house in Peoria, Illinois.

They had chosen Peoria because two of my grandmother’s siblings and other relatives were working there as nuns in a Catholic hospital. But the occasion for their move was the Depression: they had been running a small general store in Ellis, Kansas, until the local farmers bought them out. They thereupon thought of themselves as retired; but when their daughter rejoined them with two offspring to feed, Grandpa went to work for a local Sears store, where for twenty years he prided himself on being the outstanding salesman of men’s clothing, because (he said) he knew how to talk to farmers. He took good care of his house and, in his role as substitute father, set an example by attending church regularly, and embodied many subtle aspects of the Germanic culture he had brought with him from the Volga region of Russia. He no doubt hoped I would become a priest; and those who claimed expertise in this regard seemed sure that I should.

Parish priest-spotters assigned me a vocation on the basis of my years of service as a dutiful acolyte. And their assessment was bolstered by my numerous contacts with ecclesiastical professionals. Two of my maternal great aunts were members of the Order of Saint Francis, which ran a number of hospitals east of the Mississippi. One lived her vocation in a hospital laundry, and enjoyed giving my sister and me rides in a laundry cart. Another of Grandma’s sisters was managing director of various Franciscan hospitals. And in our extended family there were other women who belonged to a religious community, one of whom became Mother General of her order. Then there was the nun who managed a farm that produced everything from pork to potatoes for a hospital kitchen. These women showed me as I was growing up different ways in which a Catholic might live a life of spiritual maternity. More influential on my choice of a career, though, were the professional religious men in my early life.

At my grade school the assistant pastors of the parish checked our progress in catechism once a week and coached our football and basketball teams. The all-boys high school I attended was staffed at first by Benedictines who in my junior year were replaced by Viatorian priests from Chicago. Following their advice, I completed four years of Latin, which better prepared me for a 1950s-style seminary curriculum. By the time I finished high school I had concluded that, unlike my normal classmates, I was stuck with a vocation to the priesthood. I thought maybe I should first help stem the tide of Communism in Korea; but my priest/teacher/counselors persuaded me that going on to college as a pre-seminary student would be more pleasing to God. To turn direction into destiny, the academic dean of Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, came to tell our graduating class about his institution’s scholarship competition. No one advised me to consider such possible alternatives as Notre Dame University (much less a secular institution such as Harvard or even the University of Illinois), so I took their test and was awarded a tuition-covering scholarship.

On registration day at Saint Joseph’s College I met Edward A. Maziarz, a sinewy square-jawed man with an engaging manner and a specialization in philosophy of mathematics. I signed up for his Introduction to Philosophy course, and he became my friend and counselor. He introduced me to wrestling and running, and showed by his stoic lifestyle that celibacy is not only possible but preferable for an academic. After my freshman year, I worked for him in his new role as Dean of Summer Session. As a sophomore, I attended classes with students planning to become priests in the society that ran the college; and then I decided to join them at the Society’s novitiate near Burkettsville, Ohio.

During the summer we novices functioned as farm hands: stacking hay, picking potatoes, and tending to various animals. It was a birthing cow, in fact, that occasioned the first crisis in my sacerdotal quest. I watched her deliver a calf with the help of humans who brought block and tackle to the project; and I wrote home about what I had seen. The Novice Master, who perused our mail for signs of spiritual flaws, told me to exercise more prudence in my letters. I said I would, not wanting to make waves. But then in the Fall, at a lecture by a theologian sent from the Society’s major seminary nearby, I raised my hand and questioned his assertion that only Catholics could be saved. I was thereafter watched even more carefully, and in time the Novice Master noticed that I was entering and leaving the chapel with hands at my side and not folded as true spirituality dictated. He ordered me to fold my hands while in transit, and I told him I would obey externally, but because I considered my custom preferable could not give internal consent. He insisted that anything less than unqualified assent would be a derogation of his rightful authority. I replied that my position was authorized by Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica I had been reading (in Latin).

He thereupon reported this to the Society’s Provincial, and the Provincial told him to give me all the time I needed to develop my qualified obedience thesis. So while others went off to chores, I stayed at my desk and wrote about freedom of conscience, borrowing liberally from Aquinas and some Fathers of the Church. In a week or so, I brought my brief to the Novice Master and invited him to read it. Instead, he sealed it in an envelope and sent it to the Society’s Provincial. Soon after, I was called away from a Halloween apple-bobbing competition to another room, where the Provincial thanked me for making his decision so easy, told me I had no vocation, and gave me twenty-four hours to get out and go home.

Maziarz retrieved me the following day, then arranged for me to register late for classes at the college’s new extension in Whiting, Indiana. I was free, I thought to myself; God was cancelling my vocation. It was not to be that simple, though. I completed the semester there, then spent a lonely semester at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where I wrote gloomy letters and enjoyed a course on theodicy taught by the Jesuit author of the textbook. On balance Milwaukee afforded me no escape from my spiritual failure, so I accepted Maziarz’s invitation to return to Saint Joseph’s for my senior year.

The summer was without incident as I did editorial work for Maziarz, who had become Dean of the College. But when classes resumed in the Fall, I became conscious of how ashamed I felt for having failed my vocation. Anyone who had known me before my fall from grace now despised me, I was sure, so I sought invisibility. When walking about the campus, I avoided meeting people who had respected me in the past but now surely not. Though under this psychological cloud all year, I passed my courses and graduated with honors. Then for lack of any clear direction I undertook an assistantship at Loyola University of Chicago to study for a Master’s Degree in Philosophy. With few social distractions I produced a robust thesis about Thomas Aquinas’s theory of distinction. After I defended my mini-tome before several faculty members and then left the room, my adviser Rev. Robert Mulligan, S.J. (later president of Xavier University in Cincinnati) came out to tell me the panel had voted to grant me the degree but felt I had defended my thesis too somberly so should learn to smile more.

Smiling, it seems, was not my forte just then. In the course of that year Maziarz, in consort with some other priests on the faculty at Saint Joseph’s College, had petitioned their society to reinstate me for priesthood studies. But their philistine Council upheld the Provincial’s decision. Thus left to flounder, I taught two Summer Session philosophy courses and pondered what I should do next. Then Maziarz told me his onetime mentor had just been named bishop of a new diocese to be headquartered in Jefferson City, Missouri. The new bishop, Joseph Marling, had been a professor at The Catholic University of America (CUA), and while there had interested Maziarz in philosophy of science. I went to Jefferson City and spoke with him about becoming a priest in his diocese, and he quickly arranged for me to attend the Benedictine-run Immaculate Conception Seminary, in the northwest corner of Missouri.

In view of my credentials in philosophy, I was placed in the theology division at Conception. I learned to chant the Divine Office (periodic community prayer) and became known as a good reader, which led to my becoming reader to retreatants in my second year. My suitability for Holy Orders was, however, twice called into question at Conception; but I now understood better how the power game must be played. First test: one day the Spiritual