The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?
I was also struck by what the Pope said at the UN, that 'freedom of religion' doesn't just mean 'freedom to worship' -- i.e. to practice one's religion in private away from the public square -- but also freedom to work out its meaning in the public domain. Actually, what he said about 'human rights' in that speech was fascinating, too, and mostly missed by the news media; he didn't just say 'we need to emphasize human rights', but (a) we need to rediscover what the roots of 'human rights' actually are, and (b) we need a nuanced use of 'human rights', because the broad-brush use of that idea doesn't get us anywhere. I summarize and oversimplify; his piece was remarkably subtle and was perhaps calling the UN back to a larger vision of its own task than some of its members would be likely to want. In fact, it was as though he'd been reading Nick Wolterstorff's new book on Justice -- a point I put to Nick in an email and with which he agreed.
Clearly we are facing quite a new moment. Whereas in the 1990s people were buzzing about Who Was Jesus, today the key question seems to be, how do we 'do God' in public? It is as though everyone now realizes that this is inescapable -- the secularists hate it of course, and write shrill books like Dawkins and Hitchens -- but many people don't really understand the question, after two centuries of believing that 'God' and 'public' are irreconcilable, and so lurch wildly from 'theocracy' on the one hand (what is 'kingdom of God' if not 'theocracy'? but of course Jesus radically redefined 'kingdom of God' in a way which should draw the sting of what people fear when they hear that word) to fresh assertions of secularity on the other.
One of the tricky things here is that the Pope himself seems to have committed himself, as in his two Encyclicals so far, to a careful separation of church and state, so that it's not clear (or not to me) how his insistence on faith being non-private actually plays out. Nor is it clear how he then will address the issues of different religions each trying to live themselves out in public. But these, unless I am much mistaken, are among the defining issues of our new century -- a rather grandiose thing to say but I see it all around -- and unless we wrestle with them seriously, refusing to lapse back into the old, easy answers of previous generations, we won't meet the challenges of our time.
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