Religion: A Public or a Private Right?
Sue Hanssen argues that our modern conception of religion
as a private, incommunicable, and esoteric experience
contrasts sharply with our founders' (and their classical forebears')
belief in religion's public value and accessibility.
Our public debate about religious liberty is missing a clear definition of religion. The absence of that definition has generated confusion, frustration, shrill voices, and short tempers.
Twentieth-century religious liberty jurisprudence developed on the far side of a great historic chasm that separates us from the traditional definition of religion. Between Americans in 2012 and the American founders in 1776 stand William James and the beginnings of the "science of comparative religions." If we are to grasp the founders' idea of a natural right to religious liberty, we must perform a labor of historical imagination and recover the longstanding definition of religion that has been lost to us.
The classic book that launched the social scientific approach to the study of religion was James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1903). The book was initially his series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh--the prestigious Gifford Lectures. James deliberately refused to accept the usual title "Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology" for his series of talks and chose instead to call them lectures in "Natural Religion." He assumed that religion was not, as the word "theology" implied, subject to any rational justification. Rather, he saw religion as essentially experiential and the study of religion as essentially empirical--the collection of a variety of accounts of wildly divergent spiritual experiences.
In the very first lecture James laid out a new definition of religion that cut us off from the traditional notion--for James, religion was "the spiritual experience of man in his solitude." All organized religious associations, worship, theology, creeds, or moral practices were for James utterly secondary to the nature of religion. Religion, according to James, was and always remained fundamentally an interior and incommunicable experience of man "in his solitude."
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A "republic" is precisely a regime in which "the public things"--churches, families, nations--mutually and publicly (i.e., in law) recognize the sovereignty, offices, duties, and rights proper to each. When any one ceases to acknowledge the sovereignty and rights of the others, the single imperial Leviathan state has appeared. The test of a republic's health and safety--indeed of its republican legitimacy, of its existence as a republic--is this mutual recognition. If no public agency but the state is recognized as sovereign, then the republic is at an end and an empire takes its place.
If the nation imagines that it alone is the official agent of all duties and rights, delegated at its will to families and churches that are its creatures and servants, this would be as monstrous as a church or a family that similarly claimed to possess such absolute sovereignty. Churches and families have indeed been tempted to these claims in the past, but it is the nation that is currently on the make. The American founders thought they had thrown up a bar to the imperial state's claims of absolute sovereignty in the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but the march of the modern nation-state has overtaken us. William James's iconic redefinition of religion as a private experience was merely one of the "drums from the deep" that signaled the rebirth of Leviathan on these shores.
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