Relations between American democracy and religion have always been somewhat equivocal.

On the one hand, moral and ethical principles derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition have been a major source of democratic values. Religion was an important motivating factor in both the colonization of North America and the American Revolution. The Founding Fathers set such high store by religion that they included its free exercise along with free speech and a free press among the liberties specifically protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Organized religion played a key role in such drives to perfect democracy as the abolition of slavery, the enactment of woman's suffrage, and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Perhaps most important, the so-called Protestant ethic provided the moral bedrock on which republican institutions were built.

On the other hand, democratic theorists and much of the general public have been wary of the absolutist social outlook often associated with religion. Practically all religions claim to embody ultimate truths about the nature of the universe and the human condition. At some level, therefore, they can hardly be tolerant of rival beliefs. Religious bodies can avoid social intolerance by acknowledging that human imperfection clouds and corrupts the judgments of all institutions, including the churches, or by limiting their social pronouncement to broad moral directives. In practice, however, individuals or institutions claiming to represent transcendent moral authority are often tempted to attach certainty to their opinions on complex issues in secular politics.

During the past generation, the view has arisen that a liberal polity must remain systematically neutral on the widest possible range of moral and religious questions. During this same period, religious fundamentalism has attained an influence not seen in the United States for more than half a century. It is my thesis that these two developments are intimately related and that, considered together, they have much to teach us about public morality in a liberal society.

Early liberal theorists worked to disentangle civil society from destructive religious quarrels. But they nevertheless assumed that civil society needed morality and that publicly effective morality rested on religion. Juridical liberalism, which focused on the exercise of liberty and the limits of government, presumed a foundation of individual moral restraint. While the civil authority in a liberal society need not directly enforce this moral code in most cases, it should certainly encourage that morality—at the very least, by refraining from utterances and policies that undermine it.

This understanding of the proper relation among politics, morality, and religion dominated the American Founding. It suffused Tocqueville's analysis. In clearly recognizable form, it survived well into the twentieth century. In the past generation, however, this understanding came under attack, and the delicate balance between juridical liberalism and its social preconditions was disrupted. Influential philosophers argued that the essence of liberalism was public neutrality on the widest possible range of moral issues.

Is religion being politicized in Latin America? The question is commonly asked today, but rests only in part on concern with Latin American events themselves. To be sure, religious issues, groups, and people have lately been salient in the politics of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, or Chile—to name only some of the more familiar cases. But the question has deeper roots in a general North American concern with the potential of politicized religion to spur social protest and political change in cases otherwise as distinct as Iran, Poland, Southern Africa, Lebanon, the Philippines, or Latin America itself. Much of this concern is also clearly a refraction of puzzlement here at home with the resurgence of religious issues into national political discourse. These considerations suggest that finding answers to questions about the politicization of religion requires as much attention to the meaning of the questions themselves and to the assumptions built into their posing, as to the search for specific instances of politicized religion in Latin America today.

Questions about the politicization of religion arise from longstanding intellectual traditions which make religion secondary to supposedly more immediate, real, or rational social, economic, or political forces. When religion as an issue or religiously inspired groups do appear in political arenas, they are seen as interlopers, aberrant and likely short-lived phenomena. From this vantage point, religion appears mostly as a survivor from the past, doomed to privatization and ultimate disappearance.

Few subjects arouse emotions like religion and politics. And when combined, few subjects raise more obstacles to balanced and objective scholarly analysis. Many strong and competing biases among both religious and political groups together with a scholar's own ideological and religious views may make it difficult to examine dispassionately the issues raised.

Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority on the right and Norman Lear's People for the American Way on the left pose perplexing problems for American democracy. Each group speaks fervently with immodest assurance that its views of American democracy is correct.

Comments by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and former Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti contrast between these polarized positions. Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard University commencement address charged that humanism “started Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs. … As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed its concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism” (Solzhenitsyn, p. 53). Giamatti, on the other hand, has condemned groups like the Moral Majority by saying they “would sweep before them anyone who holds a different opinion” (The New York Times, September 1, 1981, p. 1).