Table Of ContentRELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS
AND POLITICAL CHOICE
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RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS
AND POLITICAL CHOICE
Kent Greenawalt
Columbia University
New York * Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1988
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
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Copyright © 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenawalt, R. Kent, 1936-
Religious convictions and political choice.
Includes index.
3. Religion and politics—United States. 2. Religion
and state—United States. 3. United States—Religion.
I. Title.
BL65.P7G73 1988 320'.01'9 87-12456
ISBN 0-19-504913-6
2468 10 97531
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Robert,
With a parent's love and pride
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PREFACE
This book is concerned with the extent to which citizens and officials in
this liberal democracy properly rely on their religious convictions when
they decide what political actions to take. Although the immediate genera-
tion of my work on this topic was an invitation to deliver the 1986 Cooley
lectures at the University of Michigan Law School, the subject reflects
themes of much longer standing in my personal and intellectual life.
I was raised in a family in which both religion and the values of liberal
democracy were seriously regarded. My father was long head of the board
of trustees of the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, Henry Ward Beecher's
old church, and as a child I went there as well as to the local community
church in which I was confirmed. During my youth, I took it for granted
that one's religious commitments and understandings would matter for
one's life, including one's life as a citizen, and that liberal democracy was a
system of governance that warranted support. At Swarthmore College,
where I took political science as a major and religion as a minor, most of
what I believed was in one way or another subjected to challenge, but my
belief that taking religion as a serious matter did not compromise one's
efforts to be a liberal citizen remained assumed and unexamined. I was
much influenced by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, who then, and
subsequently, struck me as fully committed to democratic values while
relying on a Christian perspective to inform his understanding of politics
and of right political action. A summer spent in East Harlem working under
Norman Eddy in the East Harlem Protestant Parish provided some personal
confirmation of the appropriateness of relating one's religious life to one's
political involvement.
viii PREFACE
My views about the positive relation between religious convictions and
political action did not alter during years of studying political philosophy at
Oxford and law at Columbia, or indeed for most of my career as a legal
academic. During my first year of law school, the question of religion and
politics was raised during John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, but I
took the issue then as being whether Kennedy would adhere to American
law and political institutions if these somehow came into conflict with
Roman Catholic directives or premises, not as whether his views on the
wide range of political issues would be unaffected by his religious faith. As
editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review, I read Louis Henkin's well-
known article on obscenity as sin very closely during the editing process,
but some of its possible broader implications for secularizing political
decisions escaped me at the time. Similarly when I read and admired John
Rawls' A Theory of Justice, I did not realize the extent to which acceptance of
its basic premises would exclude religious perceptions from the political
sphere.
My comfortable acceptance of the idea that one's religious convictions
may affect one's political judgment has no doubt been reinforced by the
fact that two of my oldest and closest friends, James Miller and Bruce
Hanson, my brother-in-law, William Abernethy, and my sister, Ann Green-
await Abernethy, are all ministers for whom questions of social justice have
loomed as very important. Though in my adult life I have been only an
occasional churchgoer, these close associations have helped confirm my
continuing belief in the importance of religious understanding.
My focused intellectual interest in this topic began when debate over
abortion produced frequent arguments that people were trying to impose
their religious views on others. Bruce Ackerman's book, Social Justice and the
Liberal State, which contends for the exclusion of religious premises with a
novel starkness and clarity, persuaded me that this was a subject that
warranted the most careful consideration. The invitation to deliver the
Cooley lectures provided the needed spark for me to marshall my resources
to make that effort.
Since the late fall of 1984, when I began work on the subject, I have
benefited greatly from comments of members of groups before whom I
have presented parts of my work, from individuals who have criticized
drafts, and from institutions whose financial support has freed my time for
research. Roughly in order, the work has been discussed by the faculty of
the Campbell University School of Law, the faculty of the Marshall-Wythe
School of Law, College of William and Mary, a symposium on Perspectives
on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, at the J. Reuben Clark
Law School, Brigham Young University, the Law and Philosophy colloqium
PREFACE ix
of New York University, students and faculty of the University of Michigan
Law School, a symposium on Religion and the State sponsored by the
Institute of Bill of Rights Law, at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, the
faculty of Columbia Law School, the students and faculty of Cleveland-
Marshall School of the Law, and a workshop of the Faculty of the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley Law School. The comments on my paper at
the Brigham Young symposium by Cole Durham, and the comments on my
paper at the Marshall-Wythe symposium by Michael Perry, Frederick
Schauer, Michael Smith, and Diane Zimmerman were of great value. The
richly rewarding three days I spent delivering the lectures at Michigan were
capped by a dinner on the final evening at which my fundamental ideas were
subjected to a searching examination that required many revisions in this
final version. In addition to these discrete occasions for comment, I have
also learned from students in seminars on Law, Religion, and Politics at the
Marshall-Wythe School of Law and at Columbia.
Meir Dan-Cohen, Herbert Deane, Louis Henkin, Henry Monaghan,
Gene R. Nichol, and William F. Young read all or much of the manuscript
in an earlier draft and gave me very helpful suggestions. At a number of
points in the process, Bruce Ackerman has given generously of his time. I
have been much encouraged by how fruitful conversation can be even when
views are as sharply opposed as are ours on this topic, and my sensitivity to
a major position I reject would be much less if this dialogue had not
occurred.
The honorarium that the Cooley lectures carry has been one source of
financial support. During the summers of 1985 and 1986 my work has been
aided by a grant from Columbia Law School's Samuel Rubin Program for
the Advancement of Liberty and Equality through Law. A Distinguished Lee
Visiting Professorship at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law during the
autumn of 1985 made available a great deal of time for research and writing.
My work on the book has been aided considerably by the research
assistance and comments of Joseph Nisa, Maureen Carroll, and Daniel
Alter. Steven Walt has devoted much time and effort helping me through
drafts of the manuscript, has offered trenchant criticisms of aspects of the
analysis, and has prepared the index. Krista Page, at Columbia, and Millie
Arthur, at William and Mary, typed early drafts with great efficiency and
patience. From the spring of 1986 Rhonda Callison has accommodated my
successive changes despite problems of transposition from one system to
another. Their good spirits in the face of insistent time pressures have been
a source of much reassurance.
Parts of earlier drafts of the book have been published in law reviews.
The much more summary lectures are printed, nearly as delivered, as
