[T]he biggest gap between the typical intellectual and the typical nonintellectual is that the former does not use 'impurity' as a moral term, and does not find religion what James called a 'live, forced and momentous option'. She thinks of religion as, at its best, Whitehead's 'what we do with our solitude', rather than something people do together in churches. Such an intellectual is bound to be puzzled or annoyed by Stephen L. Carter's The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivializes Religious Devotion. For Carter puts in question what, to atheists like me, seems the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion—keeping it out of what Carter calls 'the public square', making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy. Whereas many religiously inclined intellectuals stick to what he calls an 'individual metaphysic', Carter, an Episcopalian, defines religion as 'a tradition of group worship'.
We atheists, doing our best to enforce Jefferson's compromise, think it bad enough that we cannot run for public office without being disingenuous about our disbelief in God; despite the compromise, no uncloseted atheist is likely to get elected anywhere in the country. We also resent the suggestion that you have to be religious to have a conscience—a suggestion implicit in the fact that only religious conscientious objectors to military service go unpunished. Such facts suggest to us that the claims of religion need, if anything, to be pushed back still further, and that religious believers have no business asking for more public respect than they now receive. Carter, however, thinks that privatizing religion trivializes it. He says that 'the legal culture that guards the public square still seems most comfortable thinking of religion as a hobby, something done in privacy, something that mature, public-spirited adults do not use as the basis for politics'.
Carter's inference from privatization to trivialization is invalid unless supplemented with the premise that the nonpolitical is always trivial. But this premise seems false. Our family or love lives are private, nonpolitical and nontrivial. The poems we atheists write, like the prayers our religious friends raise, are private, nonpolitical and nontrivial. Writing poems is, for many people, no mere hobby, even though they never show those poems to any save their intimates. The same goes for reading poems, and for lots of other private pursuits that both give meaning to individual human lives and are such that mature, public-spirited adults are quite right in not attempting to use them as a basis for politics. The search for private perfection, pursued by theists and atheists alike, is neither trivial nor, in a pluralistic democracy, relevant to public policy.
(Richard Rorty, "Religion as Conversation-Stopper," chap. 11 in Philosophy and Social Hope [London: Penguin Books, 1999 (essay first published in 1994)], 168-74, at 169-70 [italics in original])
Note from KBJ: I like Rorty's idea of a compromise. How about this one? Society agrees not to criminalize (or punish) homosexual conduct, but, in return, homosexuals must stay closeted. I suspect Rorty won't like this compromise any more than most people like his compromise about religion.
