One nation, divisible

It is not a good idea for liberals to spend too much time fretting about crèches in public squares. As in so many First Amendment disputes, the answer to speech (or, in this case, symbolism) that makes someone feel excluded or alienated is more speech -- menorahs, Diwali displays, images that reflect America's polyglot spiritualism rather than suppressing it. "Ultimately, the nation may have more success generating loyalty from religiously diverse citizens by allowing inclusive governmental manifestations of religion than by banning them," Feldman writes.

The trouble with Feldman's suggestion is that even if liberals embrace it -- and I think they should -- it would do almost nothing to quell the sense of evangelical grievance currently deforming our politics. That's because Feldman is very wrong about the America that the Christian right is seeking, and about the aims of the group he calls legal secularists.

The problem may be his reliance on legal arguments as a way to apprehend political causes. One of the very few people he mentions as an example of a "values evangelical" is Michael McConnell, a Christian conservative law professor considered brilliant by his ideological allies and enemies alike. (Bush put McConnell on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and he was reportedly on the shortlist to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court.)

Feldman points out that McConnell pioneered the legal strategy of depicting evangelicals as an oppressed minority in a 1995 case, Rosenberger vs. University of Virginia. The case centered on evangelical students at the university who were denied money from the school's student activities fund for their publication, Wide Awake. Representing the students, McConnell took the case to the Supreme Court. It would become, writes Feldman, "the first case in which evangelicals successfully presented themselves as minorities, discriminated against and in need of judicial protection."

The trouble with "Divided by God" is that Feldman seems to accept McConnell's legal argument as the actual political motivation of the Christian right. Values evangelicals, in his telling, just want to be heard along with everybody else. "In its most sophisticated and attractive form, values evangelicism is actually a type of mutliculturalist pluralism, professing respect for faith as faith and for cultural tradition as tradition," Feldman writes. "This inclusive vision of a society in which one can partake in the common American project by the very act of worshipping as one chooses is more than broad enough to accommodate new religious diversity that has come about as a result of Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist immigration."

If this is what "values evangelicism" is, then the term is almost meaningless, since it doesn't apply to any of the leadership of the Christian right, the group that's actually fighting the culture wars that Feldman is trying to mediate. Consider, for example, how the Family Research Council -- the Washington spinoff of James Dobson's enormously powerful Focus on the Family -- reacted in 2000 when Venkatachalapathi Samuldrala became the first Hindu priest to offer an invocation before Congress. "While it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country's heritage," the group said in an apoplectic statement. "Our Founders expected that Christianity -- and no other religion -- would receive support from the government as long as that support did not violate peoples' consciences and their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference."

This was not an isolated outburst -- it wouldn't be hard to find enough similar quotes to fill a volume larger than Feldman's entire book. Sure, the Christian right may invite a token rabbi -- often the South African ultraconservative Daniel Lapin -- to its functions to promote an image of ecumenism, but that cannot hide the motivating belief in Christian supremacy, spiritual and political, at the movement's core.

There surely are instances in which overzealous school administrators and others go too far in the cause of nondiscrimination, silencing religious speech that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. Such infringements should be fought for reasons both principled, because Christians have the same right to free speech as everyone else, and political, because these abuses generate a backlash that ultimately harms the cause of church-state separation.

But the ACLU doesn't need to be told to take this stance -- it already has, despite attempts by the Christian right to distort its record.

In 2003, Jerry Falwell published a piece on the right-wing Web site Newsmax titled "The Case of the Offensive Candy Canes." "Seven high school students in Westfield, Mass., have been suspended solely for passing out candy canes containing religious messages," he wrote. A few paragraphs later, he continued, "The fact is, students have the right to free speech in the form of verbal or written expression during non-instructional class time. And yes, students have just as much right to speak on religious topics as they do on secular topics -- no matter what the ACLU might propagate."

Next Page: Are secularists fighting a "war on Christmas"?

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