Establishments

 In one of his various self-flattering fulminations about the evils of European institutions and the glory of American ones, Mark Twain declares (in the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) that the crucial difference between the two is that the former have an established church, and the latter does not. In Twain's telling, that is to say, the greatest bulwark of American freedom is our lack of an institutionalized state-sponsored religion; and the worse tyranny of continental monarchies descends from the fact that they do have one. 

Thus, he prophesied, our liberty of thought and expression "would last" only "until [the country] had an Established Church." For, he adds elsewhere, "an Established Church is an established crime." He goes on to advocate for splitting up religion "into forty-three sects," on the theory that, in that way, "they can police each other," and no one religious body will ever become too powerful. 

All my instincts and upbringing incline me to agree with Twain on this matter. I was born and raised in the most non-conforming of Nonconformist sects; the most vocally dissident of Dissenters (namely, Unitarian Universalism). If there's any group of people that stood most against the idea of an established church, it is them, and the heterodox Protestant sects from which they descended (that is, the nineteenth century Unitarians and Universalists—originally two different denominations—both of which embraced heretical interpretations of Christianity). 

As much as I want to agree with Twain as a matter of birthright, however, I have to admit that two-and-a-half centuries into the American experiment, it is not entirely clear he is right as an empirical matter. The continental European governments that he regarded as tyrannical have proved to mostly be as free as our own, without ever shedding their state-funded churches. And, even more notably, they have proved to be far less religious than us. They all secularized very rapidly in the twentieth century; whereas the United States continues to be the land of religious fanaticism. 

I have a friend who has been trying to argue this point to me for years. He always says that religion should be a kind of "public utility," like a fountain or a waterworks. It should be available to all who are thirsty. His ideal version of public religion would therefore be entirely non-creedal. No belief statement would be required of those who show up. It would simply operate as a free resource for people who wanted to take a moment out of their day to light a candle, issue a prayer or intention, or mark a significant occasion. 

The model my friend has in mind is based on the (largely deserted, but well maintained) cathedrals of Western Europe, as well as the temples of East Asia. These are not buildings designed for proselytization or sectarian indoctrination. They mostly serve as open founts to serve the momentary spiritual needs of whoever happens to be passing by. No belief statement required. Anyone can step inside and invoke the higher powers, or however they conceive the essence of the cosmos. 

Such a model of religion, my friend maintains, is far more compatible with established religions than non-established ones. If religion is a public utility, it ought to be funded as one. This does not mean the government should be involved in foisting a creed or a specific theology on anyone. But neither does my friend think this is a danger that necessarily stems from establishments. To the contrary, he argues that the need to serve the common, everyday needs of the public at large is what makes established churches less dogmatic, less sectarian, less fanatical than their non-established alternatives. 

I was reading Matthew Arnold's witty collection of essays, Culture and Anarchy, last week, and I found in him a striking advocate for my friend's point of view on this matter. He was a defender of public establishments of religion, and he took the side of the Anglican Church in Ireland against its Liberal critics who were arguing for its disestablishment. Yet, Arnold did so not out of a fanatical sectarian devotion to the Anglican communion. To the contrary, he argues for it precisely as a curb on religious dogmatism and fanaticism. 

Arnold does indeed recognize—better than most of his contemporaries—the unfairness of the state-imposed Protestant religion on Catholic Ireland. He understood why it rankled as an "alien" imposition, as he puts it. But he suggested that the unfairness of this arrangement could be remedied by a process of leveling up, rather than of leveling down. If the problem is that it is unjust for Anglicans to be funded by the state, but no one else to be, then why not fund all the major communions in Ireland, he asks, rather than none at all? 

Arnold's defense of the salutary power of established religion, in the course of his argument, entirely reinforces my friend's position. He points to the state of religion in America as a condition to be avoided. Here, the country had indeed implemented something approximating Twain's scheme for having "forty-three sects" divided and pitted against each other (indeed, many more). And the result, argues Arnold, has not been a general cultural elevation, or a freedom from religious dogmatism: but, quite to the contrary, a tremendous fanaticism. 

And why is that? Because, as Arnold points out, most of the reasons people embrace absurdly extreme ideological positions—either in religion or politics—is simply because their rivals have embraced the opposite ones. He recounts an anecdote in which he encountered a "Nonconformist manufacturer," who wished to share his delight with Arnold that two rival sects had recently grown up in town and now roughly equalled each other in size. 

Arnold says that this state of affairs seems to him a pity. The Nonconformist retorts, "A pity? Not at all! Only think of all the zeal and activity which the collision calls forth." "Ah, but, dear friend," returns Arnold, "only think of all the nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not been contradicting your adversary in it all these years!"

Such is the result of the splitting up of religion into forty-three warring sects. Whereas the countries of Western Europe that have retained their established churches—alongside constitutional monarchies and parliamentary governments—manage to be less fanatical in their religion and their politics alike. The reason is, surely, that they aren't constantly falling over themselves to embrace the most extreme version of every available opinion that they hold, just for the sake of differentiating themselves even more radically from their opponents. 

An established church is not trying to differentiate itself from anything else. It is trying to reconcile itself to everything. Its fundamental impulse is to accommodate the entire populace, with all its differences of opinion and all its varying levels of commitment to religious piety. This, in Arnold's telling, accounts for the irenic tendencies of establishments, as opposed to the self-righteously combative spirit of the sectaries. 

He witheringly at one point adduces a newspaper from the ranks of the Nonconformist press that describes itself proudly as the "dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion"—and I had to confess I felt a flicker of shame; for surely that label fits the history of Unitarian Universalism better than it does any other denomination. And surely this history accounts in turn for why UUism feels obliged to embrace the most extreme version of every cause that comes to its attention and meets its approval today. They have been "contradicting their adversary" in it for so long; how could they accommodate a middle ground? 

Viz. a recent article in the Financial Times about UUism. What is most striking about the story it unfolds is not only the number of needlessly extreme left-wing opinions that members of the country's "most liberal church" (the liberalism of Liberalism, we might say; the progressivism of the progressive movement) adopt—but also how little accommodation any of them are willing to make for the ordinary weaknesses of human nature. On many of the concrete issues discussed in the article, the UUs perhaps are not wrong—but they are so unremittingly merciless in being right. 

An establishment, says Arnold, avoids these tendencies, because it perforce has to reconcile itself to people's ordinary failings and limitations. It is, he writes, necessarily part of the "main current of national life." This means it has to take people as whole beings; it cannot limit them to purely their religious, dogmatic, or ideological side. It has to take people as they are, and this means accepting that even if the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. 

Whereas failure to take people on these terms is perhaps the signal failing of the modern progressive movement: it may be right, but it is cruelly right. It demands too much of people, because it makes no accommodation for the ordinary selfishness of human nature. And because it refuses to take people as they are, it also loses any credibility when it tries to admonish them. It holds us to an impossible standard, so we end up rejecting even modest efforts we might might toward improvement, because they will be not be seen as good enough. 

By contrast, a church or party whose fundamental impulse is toward reconciling differences of opinion, rather than exacerbating them for purposes of drawing contrasts, has—paradoxically—far more moral power when it does actually draw a line. It is like what Weber says in his famous lecture on "Politics as a Vocation." There may come a time, he concedes, when people need to insist on a point of difference. They have to disagree. They must say, with Luther, that "Here I stand; I can do no other." 

But, Weber argues, it is precisely the people who are generally trying to reconcile and accommodate differences who have the most credibility when they do ultimately have to draw such lines. Whereas the dissidence of Dissent, the Protestantism of the Protestant religion, the liberalism of Liberalism, the progressivism of the Progressive movement, appears to be always spoiling for a fight. And so, no one is impressed when it chooses to draw a line ("here they go again"). For line-drawing is all it does. 

None of this is in any way an argument for creating an established church in America. It is far too late for us in that regard. An attempt to actually establish a church here could only be the result of a partisan and ideological push to impose a tyrannical creed on others. In this sense, Mark Twain is right. We would lose our freedom the day we had an established church. And to the extent that the current Supreme Court is intent on loosening the strictures of the Constitution's Establishment Clause, we should indeed all be concerned about the future of our free institutions. 

So this is not an argument for an established church in places where it has never existed before; but it may be an argument for leaving establishments untouched, where they have grown up organically in other countries around the world. Toward these, I take a Burkean view. Better to leave them alone. The best sort of religion, after all, is probably that which is most taken for granted. 

This kind of scarcely-noticed status, this "givenness," cannot be achieved through aiming at it directly. It cannot be conjured where it hasn't existed before: any such attempt would only yield the opposite, and create just another fanatical sect, but this one rendered even more dangerous by having the power of the coercive state behind it. 

But in places where it already exists—in those empty but beautiful cathedrals, where people come only to light candles and celebrate weddings, but not to preach intolerance or anathematize the heresies of others—religion is doing what it does best; which is to be seen but not heard. That religion is best which preaches least. 

We'll probably never have it in this country; it couldn't be implanted here since it wasn't here from the beginning. But we can respect it in those who are fortunate enough to have it. And we can try, in small ways, to learn from their example. We can try to be less contentious, and more irenic. We can try to aim at reconciliation, rather than at conflict. 

There will, in spite of that, come times when conflict is escapably necessary. There will be evils that truly are evils, and failures of human will and vigilance that really should not be tolerated. But if we have not ourselves been seeking to discover these in every corner, to exacerbate and underline them, so as to feel more righteous about ourselves—then people might actually be willing to believe us, for a change, when we point them out. 

If we had not forever been crying wolf about injustice at every turn, then people might actually take us seriously when a real wolf looms in our politics...