Abstract
Civil religion as formulated in Robert Bellah’s seminal 1967 article, recalling Rousseau’s Social Contract, has recently been proposed to build shared values and bridge deep partisan divides. A competing approach to shared values, based on public reason, relies on overlapping consensus in the works of John Rawls. In this paper, we present an in-between strategy that recognizes the insuperable empirical and normative problems of civil religion while using university civic engagement programs to bring about a public square in which religious reasons are found alongside neutral ones, ultimately for the sake of public justification. Having documented recent polarization trends, we consider the last major attempt to defend civil religion from the perspective of democratic solidarity, Phil Gorski’s American Covenant, but believe it falls short: based on sociological work and Augustinian insights, we show the risk of domination that Gorski’s strategy still entails, not least because of the definitional indeterminacy of civil religion and its overlap with religious nationalism. Paradoxically, a late Rawlsian approach that allows for the initial use of religious reasons, with a generosity proviso of necessary translation into public reason at some point, can lead to a public square with more religious arguments than one theorized explicitly from the perspective of civil religion. This is especially important because, given the discussed polarization trends, universities have taken on an increasingly important civic engagement role even as some still rely on a civil religion approach. We insist on public justification in university civic engagement, and for the sake of doing so take as a starting point Ben Berger’s work in favoring civil engagement, which we define as combining moral, political, and social rather than exclusively political commitments. In proposing a novel university shared values mechanism, intended to expose learners to a maximum diversity of opinions and lived experiences, we offer a fresh approach to building trust in cohorts that increases the likelihood of true dialogue across difference.
1. Introduction
Can the American project survive, or are the centrifugal forces pulling it apart simply too great? Should unity be cultivated, and if so, how? Numerous observers of the US political scene, both in and out of academia, point to alarmingly high rates of polarization. Disagreement persists as to the causes of these divisions.1 However, two different strategies (broadly speaking) to deal with them are civil religion versus the pursuit, through continued dialogue and discursive practice, of an ever-broadening sphere of consensus.2 In this paper, we propose an in-between approach that draws on the work of Augustine and the late John Rawls, and that is implemented through engagement on university campuses. The idea is to somehow construct or reconstruct shared values. However, how one does so is critical: we agree with Rawls that public reason needs to remain the ultimate justification of proposed policies. We also go beyond Rawls, who adds a proviso stipulating that comprehensive or religious justifications can help in public, so long as citizens circle back at some point to language everyone can affirm. We go beyond Rawls by proposing maximum generosity (see below) as an important component of our civic engagement university offerings. This means that all students in structured dialogues are not just allowed but encouraged to remain in the conversation, no matter the degree of inexperience of their first attempt at communication.
First, we show that public unity is not a momentary concern. Since the mid-1990s, as reported by reputable centers and polling firms, levels of polarization have reached new heights. The percentage of Americans reporting deep worry about the future of the American project is greater than ever before. What started on the periphery of talk radio has clearly moved into mainstream contexts and institutions.
Second, we unpack one strategy to address these frayed bonds of union and build shared values. This is “civil religion”, understood as originating in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (Rousseau 1762), and most recently updated by Phil Gorski. After framing both religion and civil religion using Phil Gorski’s definitions and providing background on the civil religion debates since the late 1960s, we show how Gorski is aware of the oppressive potential of the concept, as well as of its different and problematic historical associations. In light of these issues, he himself tries to broaden civil religion’s appeal: Gorski democratizes the set of awe-inspiring civic stories he has in mind and expands its number.
However, even Gorski’s liberalized and significantly more inclusive civil religion risks domination because of its proximity to religious nationalism, a. conceptual closeness reinforced by the definitional indeterminacy of civil to religion. For example, there is both a bottom-up (in Gorski and Bellah) and a top-down (Rousseau) view of civil religion. The latter is positioned to reinforce authoritarianism, and in light of recent empirical findings its existence cannot be dismissed. This risk of religious nationalism and associated domination, as a result of adopting civil religion for the sake of shared values, is further supported by Augustine’s own critique of civil religion. We therefore outline the Bishop of Hippo’s incisive points against even a well-meaning political framework of divine narrative, demonstrating how for Augustine, this approach can amplify lust, ambition, and imperialism.
It is hardly an accident that Augustine offers an alternative. Augustine presents this alternative in Book XIX of City of God, wherein shared values are achieved not through civil religion, but instead through public reason supported by an overlapping consensus. We turn to this model in the Section 4, and in eschewing a normatively significant ambiguity in Rawls, we endorse an atypical defense of public reason that avoids the pitfalls of civil religion while retaining many of its benefits. We take seriously Rawls’ stipulation added to clarify his stance towards religious participants in public forums: a comprehensive perspective can remain valid, in debate, so long as translation back to neutral or non-religious language takes place at some point.
But what does that mean? It is not clear that Rawls has one answer in mind. In adding a positive reason for the initial introduction of religion into politics, which is that participants benefit from becoming an active part of the translation process, Rawls further opens the door to the prolonged benefit not just of civil, but of actual religious reasons in public contexts or background settings connected to them.
In considering our own specific shared values program recommendations, we include an additional normative stipulation. It calls for maximum generosity. Moreover, it does not allow for the presumption of bad faith, or the exclusion of a religious person from robust debate, based simply on the perception of a lack of progress towards immediate reliance on exclusively public, and non-religious, reasons. The effect, we show, is in-between civil religion and shared values: a public sphere ultimately guided by public reason, but resembling in some ways civil religion, and causally impacted by a significant number of both civil religious and religious arguments. Our suggestion here builds on the work of Andrew March and others, who have already pushed back against a “maximalist” view of public reason. March and others show that, especially given the right circumstances and context, there are situations in which the expression of a religious opinion is, for some amount of time, consistent with public reason.
This expanded and later Rawlsian view of public reason welcomes and relies on the work of religious leaders. These individuals are uniquely positioned to encourage those under their care to express themselves in increasingly public, and less narrowly religious, ways. We rely on Eric Morrow’s work on civic engagement in the Orthodox church to discuss the importance of pastoral involvement towards this end. Even as individuals start to participate in politics or politics-related discussions based on commitments drawn from upbringing, identity, and even religion, the insistence is that justification in public terms remain the goal over time.
This leads to the key question taken up in Section 6: outside of religious bodies that implement Morrow’s strategy, where should socialization of people in a divided time, for the sake of building shared values using a public reason rather than civil religion strategy, occur? Who, or what, is the primary agent of socialization? We make the case that universities are uniquely situated, given their history of fostering engagement and connecting people to public life, to play the role of these shared values builders. Yes, universities have also been involved in disengaged education, but more recently, greater involvement has been prioritized by academics and administrators themselves, and this is altogether fitting given contemporary polarization. We survey the sizeable literature that characterizes universities as engines of engagement since the 1990s, sui generis in their capacity to promote the kind of engagement that, down the road, results in a public-reason oriented overlapping consensus.
However, as mentioned above, there is more than one way to attempt to build shared values. Is it possible that some academic frameworks would still pursue this goal, on campus, based on civil religion? The answer is yes. In Section 7 the article, we therefore survey the academic scene, considering both civil religion and public reason-oriented “civic engagement” programs, distinguishing each from the other. The former generally affirm the importance of the Constitution, or study of the Federalist papers combined with discussion of classical liberal principles, for the sake of equipping people to engage as informed and thoughtful citizens. These programs generally represent a high level of civic information and do not necessarily morph into civil religion, but it is easy to see how they might. The latter tend to prioritize “service learning”, community service, and interactions with underserved populations. One can see how these programs, insofar as they do not reverentially elevate a specific understanding of American history or privilege a particular set of stories, can more straightforwardly avoid the civil religion temptation. At the same time, they do not always insist on pairing work in the community, with the robust acquisition of civic facts and subsequent discussion of the material. This dominant civic engagement paradigm then privileges activism and grassroots experiences to successfully protect against civil religion but to the detriment of information and dialogue. We ask if there is a way to design a university engagement program firmly rooted in public reason as the preferred mode of shared values construction, even as it delivers some of the benefits of other programs that veer uncomfortably close to civil religion?
We believe it is, but before providing specifics in Section 9, consider in Section 8 the practical importance of trust, in whatever blended but still public reason strategy is ultimately adopted. Recent literature on Rawls and shared values emphasizes the importance of this affect: without trust, it is simply not possible to maintain a stable overlapping consensus. This is still a neglected area of research, but those involved have already made the case persuasively. Unfortunately, but in a way that leads to an opportunity, these scholars show that trust is not guaranteed. It is exogenous, in a sense, to the desired agreement, and so may require creative introduction from “the outside”.
In Section 9 of the article, then, and building on existing programs at Tarleton State University, Swarthmore College, and Wake Forest University, we finally provide our own model of university engagement, open to some religious giving while maintaining a commitment to public reason, focusing on building trust and real connections with people in community, while not forgetting about the value of information and reasoned dialogue. Indeed, to accommodate all of these elements, we find that Ben Berger’s expanded understanding of what is at stake, as he moves from “civic” to “civil” engagement, is useful and focuses our attempts. Under the umbrella of “civil”, Berger recommends exposing students not to activity that is political or narrowly information based (though he recognizes this as important), but to any combination of social and moral involvement. We take him up on the possibility, though for our purposes define “civil engagement” as bringing together political, social, and moral connections. In a framework of trust, we want to insist that students sample all these modes of engagement for the sake of sustainable participation in our democracy.
As in the article generally, in Section 9, we seek to thread the needle and find the in-between. In the end, it turns out that the key to practical implementation of a civic engagement program combining the best elements of civil religion and public reason-oriented frameworks, which nevertheless ultimately upholds a standard of public reason, is to adhere to our “maximum generosity” guidelines as outlined in Section 5. The fact that, on a public university campus, students in intense community–university exchanges (on criminal justice reform, homelessness, environmental policy, etc.) are exposed to a maximum diversity of opinions, both academic and non-academic, increases the likelihood of dialogue across difference. The fact that trained moderators are in place to encourage everyone in the deliberation to keep participating, regardless of whether their initial arguments have been made in neutral or religious terms, further increases the likelihood of dialogue across difference (as students are exposed to some religious points). That students see moderators encouraging religious and non-religious reasons equally (on the way to participants learning how to communicate in public reason) increases this civic affect to an even greater extent. Thus, our framework of engagement at the University level is novel insofar as it takes this question of trust with the utmost seriousness, both practically and theoretically. In addition to instituting intense and deliberative community–university exchanges, our model amplifies trust further still by building on a program exemplified by Tarleton Town Hall. As we will explain, Town Hall allows students in intro government classes to move through a semester in the standard way, by attending lectures twice weekly, but it also requires attendance once a week in a significantly smaller policy section, where getting to know fellow students is actually possible. All of this again, and as it cannot be repeated enough, increases trust, at Tarleton State and other likeminded universities, to the extent that pre-existing student–faculty–community networks are leveraged and mobilized towards engagement ends, without the need to start at the very beginning. In our era of increasing polarization and in this way, what becomes clear is the importance of university public reason based civic engagement that equips us to encounter, in a mode of civility, “the other” in the perspectives of our fellow citizens.
2. Polarization
How bad is the state of American polarization? The answer, it would seem, is ominously so. At the end of 2019, the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service Battleground Poll released results indicating the average respondent believed the country is two thirds of the way to a Civil War. Answers to questions were recorded on a 100-point scale, with 100 indicating perception of the country as on the edge of a complete breakdown. The mean respondent was at 67.23. Those conducting the poll noted some contradictions. For example, even in expressing concern, respondents wanted representatives to “stand up” more to politicians with different views, as well as to special interests they considered powerful. Nevertheless, the dire assessment held up across age, cultural and racial, and party groups (Goeas and Lake 2019).
Consistent with this finding, the Pew Research center has been keeping polarization data since 1994. Its most recent report notes that the measure of polarization as of 2017 is the starkest since polling began. This is based on the distance of the median Republican from the median Democratic voter on issues related to the perceived severity of racial discrimination, value of public assistance to the needy, and benefits to the US from immigration (Pew Research Center 2017). That polarization has taken a significant turn for the worse, in ways that people can intuitively affirm, is further demonstrated empirically by the growing percentage of respondents who would not be OK with a son or daughter marrying someone of the same party: shifting from a quarter of Republicans and third of Democrats who would prefer same-party union in 1958, to 63% and 60%, respectively in 2016 (Vavreck 2017).
It is instructive to note the movement of this discourse from talk radio to the results reported by a bipartisan Georgetown poll, and to academic studies and books. It may not have been a surprise that Alex Jones, having speculated that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged, that the Oklahoma City Bombing was planned, and that 9/11 was an inside job, whipped up his supporters in June 2017 with lurid images of civil conflagration (Ohlheiser 2018). Two days after the Unite the Right rally on 11–12 August 2017, however, it was an August 14 article by Robin Wright in the New Yorker that asked, “Is America Headed For a New Kind of Civil War? (Wright 2017)” Wright interviewed a number of historians of the Civil War as well as Keith Mines, a State Department expert with experience on the ground in different civil wars around the world. Having made these predictions a few weeks before in Foreign Affairs (Ricks 2017), Mines estimated that the likelihood of a late 1850s repeat in the US was 60% in the next 10–15 years. A number of conservatives were dismayed: Business Insider published a piece decrying what it characterized as the irresponsibility of the New Yorker in amplifying a far-fetched possibility (Barro 2017).
In 2018, however, the dynamics of the situation continued to evolve. It was the turn of a respected classics professor and controversial political commentator on the right to push these considerations closer to the mainstream. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, compared contemporary tension in the US to the run-up to 1861, speculating that especially given the multiplier of geographic separation, we were well past 1968 (Hanson 2018). Later that year, as a commentator of Tom Friedman’s centrist caliber joined the chorus speculating that a civil war is conceivable, it was now undeniable that speculation about this scenario is no longer the preserve of either left or right, and that it is hardly a fringe phenomenon (Friedman 2018).
As the conversation has continued to shift into academic spheres, cause for concern has only increased. Phil Gorski has thus referred, in his scholarly treatment of civil religion and in a comment whose significance has not been picked up in the literature, to the current state of incivility in America as the “Cold civil War”. In the very next sentence and by way of an aside that cannot be disregarded, Gorski adds, “lest our Cold Civil war turn hot (Gorski 2017, p. ix)”. Brown economist Jesse Shapiro has concluded that the “US is polarizing faster than other democracies (Shapiro 2020)”. In comparing levels of polarization among affluent and democratized countries since 1950, Jennifer McCoy (Georgia State) and Benjamin Press (Carnegie Endowment) have also emphasized that “the United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory (McCoy and Press 2022)”. Moreover, Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins University, commenting on the risks of polarization, sees “a huge risk of violence, partisan violence” (Kurtzleben 2021), which she connects to a resurgence of white supremacy following gains in civil rights.
Yes, it is the case that things have been worse, especially depending on the metric. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was more domestic terrorism in the US than today, as measured by the actual number of bombing incidents (Barro 2017). It is also true, during that violent time, that the country did not experience an attack on the nation’s capital. At a minimum, therefore, whether one thinks that the discourse about coming apart at the seams is alarmist or not (Bouie 2022; Douthat 2022), every political scientist and right-thinking American should be concerned about what can be done to decrease polarization, to bring people together, and to start to restore a sense of shared civic purpose.
4. Civil Religion—Dangers of Domination
4.1. In Gorski’s Own Account
Given that these three possibilities may involve different judgments about the extent to which politics and religion overlap (Gorski illustrates civil religion with two circles that point to “‘partial overlap;’” religious nationalism involves ‘“maximum fusion’” (ibid., p. 18), how exactly does the author intend for civil religion to avoid shading into or valorizing the language of religious nationalism? Gorski acknowledges, after all, that the sociologist Robert Bellah, whose seminal 1967 article reignites related debates and who defended civil religion, was misrepresented as a religious nationalist (ibid., p. 24). Even as he himself pursued greater inclusivity, the originator of the phrase “civil religion” in an American context himself dropped it in the mid-1980s. Bellah acknowledged that he found himself “tired of arguing against those for whom civil religion means the idolatrous worship of the state (Bellah 1989, p. 147; Lienesch 2019, p. 3/31)”. Gorski admits that not differentiating clearly enough between civil religion and religious nationalism is a weakness in Bellah’s account (ibid., pp. 16–17), without then going on to say how he addresses this issues in his revised presentation of Bellah’s project.
Further reinforcing the possibility that civil religion can shade (even imperceptibly) into religious nationalism is that at least one author in the special edition on Civil Religions does not believe questions of overlap have been sufficiently addressed. The definitional fuzziness of civil religion, the proliferation that we considered above, itself extends this logic, as some of the definitions that Jones and Richey provide do smack of religious nationalism. Others have also called attention to definitional ambivalence in attempts to understand civil religion. This is not to underscore, as we have just now, that civil religion can morph into religious nationalism. It is simply to make the less alarming point that, as a result of the multiplicity of meanings imputed to it, civil religion becomes so multivalent that it is no longer helpful (Demerath and Williams 1985; Lienesch 2019, p. 3/31).
4.2. With Reference to Rousseau
Especially connected to the concern about domination is that, historically, there have been two major kinds of civil religion. One is implemented in top-down fashion and associated with Rousseau. The other is spontaneous, developing ground-up. Bellah’s approach valorizes the latter. Gorski himself favors it, (ibid., p. 16) believing that the scribe of American civil religion should have emphasized it to a greater extent, given the decreased risk of state oppression and religious nationalism.
Disturbingly, a recent treatment of the subject in Religions 2019 emphasized that, in fact, for most scholars a paradigm shift has occurred. There is empirical evidence today that top-down varieties of civil religion have become the norm (Cristi 2001, pp. 73, 77). To emphasize again, in constructing his version of shared spiritual narrative, Bellah insisted that it was not engineered in this way, but that it arose spontaneously in a “bottom-up” fashion. This is one way, interestingly, in which Bellah remains within the tradition of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim) (Wallace 1977; Lienesch 2019, pp. 3–4/31). As a reminder, it is also an example of how Durkheim (following Tocqueville) breaks with Rousseau. This is because the characterization of a designed civil religion imposed from the top-down is reminiscent of Rosseau, who in the Social Contract describes the Legislator as re-creating human nature (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) (Social Contract Book 2 Chapter 7, “The Legislator”). The verified presence of more Rousseauvian civil religion, undoubtedly, would have caused Bellah to question further his openness to this understanding of politics and religion integrated for the sake of unity.
Indeed, other recent articles, for the most part, also paint a bleak picture of civil religion. They focus not on any integrative feature, but instead on its tendency and potential to lead to various outcomes of oppression and domination. Even if these articles approve of civil religion as integrative, they also emphasize its “fuzziness”, which we have argued is connected to dominating potential. Moreover, this possibility of domination is thrown into still greater relief through the conceptually distinct scenario of a bottom up, spontaneous form of civil religion that is converted, that changes, in effect, to a top-down and instrumental citizen religiosity, over time (Danielson 2019; Weiss and Bungert 2019; Johnson 2005). Given significant evidence that this happens, and with “civil religion” also a site of contestation as various groups seek to protect power and project it downwards using spiritual imagery, the case for caution grows stronger. It turns justifiably into a case for distrust, lest civil religion intensify our differences and contribute to Rousseauvian projects of revolution and authoritarianism on both the left and the right (Lienesch 2019).
4.3. With Reference to Augustine
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is a broader philosophic concern that reinforces the undesirability of civil religion in our era, or in any era. Namely: any republic, not just Rome, that is motivated by lust and using religion as a political tool to strengthen affect or loyalty without reference to Christ, will see civil religion subsumed into a dynamic or matrix of domination, cruelty, and excess. This is, after all, the distinction Augustine makes between the cities of God and man in Book XIV of City of God (Augustine 2003, pp. 539–94), which also allows him, in perhaps an unlikely way, to enter into contemporary civil religion debates in political theory. It is especially with reference to it that the scathing critique of Varro, the Roman civil theologian, in Book VI of City of God, makes sense. Straightforwardly, the preface to this part of Augustine’s masterwork could not be clearer in its condemnation of civil religion, or theological outlook used as a political tool: “The argument of my first five books has, I believe, given a sufficient refutation of those who suppose that many false gods are to be venerated and worshipped for advantages in this mortal life and for benefits in temporal things. They would accord them the ceremonies and the humble devotion which the Greeks call latreia, a worship due only to the one true God. Christian truth proves those ‘gods’ to be useless images or unclean spirits and malignant demons, creatures at any rate, and not the Creator” (ibid., pp. 539–94). The text here indicates that any set of religious precepts, adopted for utilitarian purposes or this-worldly benefits, is dangerous. It is harder to imagine a deeper and more unambiguous critique of civil religion.
Indeed, in his critique of the thought of the civil Roman theologian Varro, whom he considers quite shrewd, The Bishop of Hippo distinguishes in his thought among mythical, natural, and civil theologies. For Varro, these represent three different religiosities. Moreover, whereas Varro tries to distinguish especially among the fabulous (mythical) and the civil deities, acknowledging that the former are obscene whereas the latter are not necessarily so, Augustine points out that the same logic the civil theologian employs against the creations of the poets applies to the fictions that are enacted in the temples (civil religion). Thus, in Chapter 7 of Book VI, this is especially evident for Augustine in a story about a guardian of the temple of Hercules who plays with one hand for himself, and with another for the god—the bet he makes is that if Hercules wins, the guardian will provide dinner for the god as well as provide a mistress for him (ibid., pp. 240–41). For Augustine, this is obscene, and evidence that there is no real difference between mythical and civil theology. At the end of the day, only true religion (never an instrumentalized version) is normatively acceptable (ibid., pp. 254–97).11
Perhaps one could argue that these are just Augustine’s pointed comments about Roman civil religion. Might other alternatives, even Bellah and Gorski’s, suffice? Yet the broader point of the critique in City of God (one applying not just to Roman beliefs) is appreciated by at least one influential commentator (Balitzer 1974, p. 42). Augustine himself, later in the book, doubles down on the critique of instrumentalized theology in his engagement with the Neo-Platonists Apuleius and Porphyry. As thinkers, they affirm civil religion, and Augustine condemns it in their specific intellectual context. He objects especially to the inegalitarian implications of believing that false beliefs are necessary for most of humanity, even as an elite can grasp truth (Augustine 2003, pp. 410–13). As Mary Keys has pointed out, the openness of Apuleius and Porphyry to prescribing certain thoughts for the philosophers and others for the masses is repugnant to the true message of equality that Christ brings. This is also reflected in their neglect of the body, which is a reality that all human beings share and again that Christ confirms (Keys 2021).
Still further support for Augustine’s critique of civil religion as intended in a general way, not just to point out the shortcomings of Roman civilization, is found in Veronica Roberts Ogle’s work on the political theologian’s assessment of the political dimension of idolatry (Roberts Ogle 2021). Strikingly, Ogle makes the case that Augustine considers idolatry the source of injustice in politics. Unpacking three modes of misdirected worship in City of God, which she identifies as pride, greed, and a subservience to mediators wrongly supposed to have a true ability to connect man to God, the author shows how all these manifestations of idolatry compound the justice perverting tendency of the human city to make itself its own foundation—to worship itself. Theology used as a political tool exacerbates this dynamic, leading to further injustice as the city is magnified in the short term and legitimation accrues to the view that God is to serve the ends of human beings in power, not the other way around (Roberts Ogle 2017, pp. 69–78).
Roberts Ogle extends this logic from idolatry to civil religion, or political religion, in a compelling treatment of the fallacy of political religion as Eric Voegelin has understood the term (Roberts Ogle 2021, pp. 73–89). Discussing Voegelin’s observations about how the religious impulse to worship easily manifests itself in the 20th century in politics, Ogle faults this important thinker for not providing an Augustinian anthropology that would explain why human beings, based on their nature, have the proclivity to worship. Now, it is true that in discussing political religion, Voegelin is referring to 20th century totalitarian regimes (Gontier 2013, pp. 25, 36–41). Ogle does not discuss Varro, or the ways in which Augustine likely critiques Apuleius and Porphyry for defending civil religion. However, Ogle’s own willingness to apply this thinking to “civil religion”—to the danger of civil religion misdirecting the impulse towards worship that is properly oriented only towards God—is evident in the one mention of civil religion in the chapter: “Citing Mucius Scaevola’s contention that religious myths are useful for cultivating heroic courage, Augustine links this attitude towards civil religion with a wiliness that is content to use any means necessary to bind citizens to their patria” (Roberts Ogle 2021, pp. 73–89). Ogle also notes Augustine’s approving not of Constantine, the exemplar par excellence of civil religion, but of Theodosius—who disregards the advice of his bishops in allowing for a massacre to take place.
That Augustine has entered American civil religion debates in political theory, and in fact that he does so on both sides, is further evident in the work of Kody Cooper and Dan Burns, respectively. Cooper, in “Existential Humility and the Critique of Civil Religion in Augustine’s Political Theology”, elaborates on some of the themes mentioned above (Cooper 2021, pp. 189–206). Throughout this piece, he goes to lengths to showcase differences between philosophical and pagan perspectives, on the one hand, and Christian, on the other, on this question of pursuing character formation and then binding those characters together in a single unit. Burns, on the other hand, rehabilitates the idea of civil religion with Augustinian support, showing how Augustinian resources can in fact help it to maintain civil religion in place (Burns 2022). The point being, two commentators as different as Burns and Cooper agree that Augustine is relevant here, meaning that he matters to these debates.
John Wilsey’s work on civil religion also links the dynamic of these narratives, in a US context, to Manifest Destiny and the inevitable Otherization and degradation of entire groups of people that ensued (Wilsey 2015, pp. 64–90). This is true even though Wilsey agrees with Gorski on the possibility of open civil religion, which is defined as inclusive and promoting democratic solidarity. Indeed, Wilsey contrasts theological commitments of the antebellum South with the ones articulated by Abraham Lincoln. The latter are “open”; the former, as the paradigmatic example of ethnic/national elections not admitting outsiders, are “closed” (Wilsey 2015, pp. 19, 39, 67). One kind of civil religion leads to injustice and oppression, whereas the other does not.
This may again raise the question of why not to pursue open, or pluralism affirming forms of civil religion. Here we hold that Wilsey simply does not emphasize enough the depth of Augustine’s critique of civil religion. It is, for Augustine, inseparable from idolatry. Wilsey mentions the seminal Christian thinker several times (ibid., pp. 45–46, 111, 131, 236, n16), but at no point (despite his own highlighting of the distinction between the city of God and man) does Augustine’s linking of the political uses of religion to matrices of power, around which the wicked and earthly city revolves, appear. There is no discussion of the critique of Varro, or engagement with Apuleius and Porphyry. What it all amounts to is that Augustine’s deep critique of civil religion withstands Wilsey’s attempted rehabilitation.12
Indeed, Augustine’s profound critique of the instrumentalization of religion is supported further by the classic work of a seminal 20th century thinker, Ernest Lee Tuveson, whom Wilsey mentions, writing about one particularly noxious form of civil religion that certainly resulted in domination and religious nationalism. This was Manifest Destiny. At its core, of course, it was the anticipation of an unavoidable future arrival of Anglo settlers on America’s West Coast and the civilizational benefits this would bring. It was nothing if not a civil religion, as affirmed by recent work showing the dangerous merger of nationalism and eschatology involved (McDougall 2019; Gomez 2012; Coles 2002). And according to Tuveson, it was made possible by a turn away from Augustine (Tuveson 1968, pp. 1–25).
The missing piece, according to Tuveson, is the millennium, or period of 1000 years mentioned in the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelation. Tuveson is clear that Puritans and, interestingly enough, Progressives who accepted various ideas about the improvement of human beings over time, based their interpretations of the directionality of history on a specific view of the millennium. It was not the perspective that the City of Man and the City of God would remain separate until the end of history. It was also not the view that God’s people would experience hardship and travail until the Second Coming. Rather, the kind of millennialism that Tuveson links to pernicious civil religion envisions the City of Man progressively becoming divine over the 1000 years in question, at the end of which time the Son of God is to come again in glory. Secularized versions of this idea include social reform in the 19th century, as in the thought of Edward Bellamy; Manifest Destiny itself, and numerous ideas animating the Civil War as well as Woodrow Wilson’s vision of America leading the nation to an era of global peace (Tuveson 1968, pp. 91–137, 187–214).
However, the eschatology presupposed by Manifest Destiny, as Tuveson explains, required a jettisoning of Augustine’s interpretation of the millennium. It necessitated replacing early metaphorical interpretations, supported by Augustine, with a literal account, which Augustine did not support. At the end of the day, as Tuveson’s work makes clear, the civil religion of Manifest Destiny required moving away from Augustine’s view of the millennium and embracing one that he opposed.
8. University Civil Engagement and the Importance of Trust
We desire, then, a university civic engagement program that avoids civil religion even as it preserves the high information content of some programs that may leave an opening for civil religion. We want immediate contact and connection for students with surrounding communities, as is more the case arguably with the public reason affirming frameworks listed on the APSA website. Moreover, we want real dialogue across difference, given the problems with polarization discussed at the beginning of this paper, as exemplified by the conversational approach of the Jack Miller center. All our efforts, to emphasize, stay within a public reason framework. Before suggesting our pilot program, reflected in developments at Tarleton State University with parallel innovations around the country, we mention a final consideration with implications for engagement and shared values on campus. This is, namely, the development of trust.
The process of producing a stable overlapping consensus may take a while, as Rawls himself seems to recognize through his “proviso”. This, then, makes further sense of our putting dialogue participants through shared experiences first, without allowing them to discuss where they stand on issues under exploration. An overlapping consensus may not only be delicate and require a long time to form. It may also depend contingently on a high degree of trust, which does not always follow simply as a result of the passage of time. Trust has been recognized as key in the peer-reviewed literature, related specifically to the viability of overlapping consensus. Without it, the agreement in question cannot survive. The specific mechanism we employ, which may at first glance seem odd, of having learners participate in activities that are not necessarily political as a preliminary step to discussing political activities, on the way to truly civil engagement, therefore finds support from a trust-building perspective in the peer reviewed literature.
A helpful discussion is offered by Lawrence Mitchell in Columbia Law Review in the mid-1990s (Mitchell 1994). When it comes to the overlapping consensus, which is that later version of Rawlsian thought on which we rely, stability is key. Rawls acknowledges that neither fear, nor compromise, nor self-interest is the binding glue that definitively ensures stability. Rather, he himself motions towards civic friendship and trust (Mitchell 1994, pp. 1919–21, n. 17; Rawls 1999, p. 435). Trust produces numerous benefits, which Mitchell emphasizes with reference to Luhmann and numerous other social theorists who include John Dunn and Alasdair MacIntyre (Mitchell 1994, pp. 1920, 1922–25). However, paradoxically, and as Mitchell argues, that later version of Rawls’ thought makes trust harder.
Why? This is because the commitment to principles of justice can be arrived at from different directions, not just necessarily the Kantianism of Rawls’ early thinking. When it comes to the overlapping consensus, as opposed to previous versions of Rawls’ thought, people could be motivated at the deepest level to arrive at the principles of justice based on utilitarianism, or virtue ethics, or other non-Rawlsian philosophies. So, fundamentally, those in agreement on the surface do not, actually, see eye to eye. If trust requires, as seems the case, an agreement on underlying ideals, then by allowing for a total lack of agreement on those guiding ideas, later Rawlsian thought contains the seeds of its own dissolution. It makes impossible the very trust of which an overlapping consensus would seem to stand most in need (ibid., pp. 1925–32).
What is the answer? As Mitchell reads Rawls, the right empirical conditions must be in place. This is not a question for philosophy alone; it may be the case, if an overlapping consensus strategy is to have a chance of viability, that a coincidental and happy level of trust is already in place (ibid., pp. 1932–35). This is what our emphasis on civil team building ahead of the dialogues aims to accomplish: we do not take anything for granted, through an exclusive reliance on deductive theory, but instead view with the utmost seriousness a needed and pre-existing empirical component. We are trying, in other words, to first bring into existence a level of trust (not related to, and preceding, the following discussion). This is for the sake, going forward, of the increased likelihood of a viable and successful overlapping consensus.
Claran O’Kelly has also considered this fascinating dynamic in the context of Northern Ireland, in the pages of the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (O’Kelly 2006) Surprisingly, as he shows, agreement on basic liberal principles in this historically volatile part of Europe exists. In theory, from the perspective of an overlapping consensus that holds, one might expect this agreement to suffice. However, the concrete problem, as O’Kelly demonstrates, is the absence of trust. The conflict itself has stood in the way of generating it—of producing a positive attitude that is exogenous to the acceptance of liberal principles, but ones that is nevertheless key (ibid., pp. 560, 562–65, 568). Both Mitchell and O’Kelly, then, show the need for trust that is both critical to overlapping consensus, and yet decidedly external to it. To emphasize, our team building civic engagement activities recognize this dynamic. This is illustrated especially by our seeking to bring about feelings ordered towards the possibility of community before the beginning of dialogue on campus, and not simply as a result of it.
Putnam himself speaks at great length to this theme. Trust is necessary for civic association, as he emphasizes especially in the chapter on “Reciprocity, Honesty, and Trust” in Bowling Alone (Putnam 2000, pp. 134–47) and in his work on networks in Italy (Putnam et al. 1992, pp. 167–70). As the University aids other civil society groups in the role of a master associator, it increases the vital store of social capital to which they have access, which includes trust. Putnam would argue that this is key and itself necessary to the ongoing development of social capital, and in fact he recognizes the vital importance of education institutions in rebuilding community (Putnam 2000, pp. 402–14), even if he does not prioritize universities, or endorse the specific university-based trust building framework that we propose.
Other work has expanded on this key dimension, and specifically the significance of trust deficits, to the loss of support for the kind of institutions and programs that later 20th century liberalism has desired. Thus, Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt has detailed the stage at which it seems that the liberal project experiences a decline in momentum. This happens amid attempts to onboard more ambitious programs intended to address poverty and discrimination in systemic ways. In this era, according to Heatherington, trust begins to evaporate (the reasons are complicated and not necessarily related to the main point of this article, but they produce the deficit in confidence in government that is important to note) (Hetherington 2005 pp. 1–7, 36–61, 75–98). The research Hetherington has performed refutes the view that, because liberalism is predicated on the individual, openness to sharing our fate with the community is irrelevant. The fact is that trust matters not just with respect to general considerations of overlapping consensus, but also in the context of the implementation of specific programs of public assistance. Here, without a belief in the good intentions of our neighbors acting through government, there is significantly more difficulty.
If more support is in order, republicanism in its different articulations also provides it. Thus, on at least one important occasion, theorist of modern republicanism Philip Pettit has discussed the significance, to his view of republicanism, of being willing to work without suspicion alongside fellow citizens. That importance of trust might seem less surprising in the context of ancient republicanism, where the city undoubtedly is prior to the individual. However, Pettit’s version of republicanism is not Skinner’s. His system of concepts has been likened to liberalism, insofar as non-domination privileges individual autonomy over the unity of the collective. To show, as Pettit has done, that trust reinforces republican non-domination and not just a generic version of virtue cultivation and character building, is therefore an accomplishment (Pettit 1995, pp. 223–24). Michael Sandel, long considered a neo-republican critic of liberalism, has provided still further reinforcement of the significance of trust (Sandel 1996, pp. 123–67, 201–49).
The point of this survey: whether related to overlapping consensus in a framework that allows us to theorize civil engagement in-between civil religion and public justification, or with reference to civic or later versions of republicanism, this feeling of openness to fellow citizens matters. Our trust building exercises, as part of the campus civil engagement framework that we recommend, will therefore represent an integral part of starting to construct viable overlapping consensus among university learners. The importance of these exercises is underscored through the fact that other traditions of thinking about politics, not just liberalism but republicanism as well, are also characterized by a commitment to engagement that presupposes trust. The idea is that, with universities uniquely positioned to make real an overlapping consensus for the sake of civic engagement, they are also well situated to cultivate the trust needed to render that agreement viable long term.
9. University Civic Engagement Reform: Pluralism and Maximum Generosity
To reiterate: the objective is to design a university civic engagement program that elevates public reason over civil religion, provides high civic information content, and remains committed to community encounters outside the classroom while also elevating authentic dialogue across difference. Our model program starts with (1) intense university–community exchanges to which students are invited and in which they can participate. It then builds on (2) existing civic engagement offerings at Tarleton, specifically in what is known as the “Town Hall” framework. It becomes clear how our “maximum” generosity proviso to the late Rawlsian proviso helps; for many, religious arguments are the “other”. To the extent that students are exposed to initially religious arguments, and insofar as those points are not merely tolerated but affirmed (even emphasizing the importance of moving over time towards public reason), students gain exposure to strange sounding rationales which become public over time but arguably in unexpected ways.
On the way to our model program that incorporates a maximum generosity proviso, and amid the proliferation of definitions of civic engagement discussed above, we follow Ben Berger: “civic engagement” as an umbrella term has outlived its usefulness, and a more precise typology is needed (Berger 2009, pp. 337–38). How does Berger, who heads the Lang center for social involvement at Swarthmore, make his case? Building on the typology of John Gerring, who seeks to unpack the usefulness or “fit” of a category related to the applicability of core concepts to eight dimensions, Berger finds a deficit (ibid., pp. 337–38). As it turns out, “civic engagement” does not apply in a helpful way when it comes to criteria that include depth, field utility, and coherence (ibid., pp. 337–38).
Berger, to support his point, references the famous distinction that Hannah Arendt made between the political and the social, differentiating between moral activity (including forms of charity) that requires anonymity (and hence is not political or social) and specifically political activism that openly benefits others. There is also the broadly defined category of social activities and engagement. A new term is therefore needed: civil engagement (ibid., pp. 344–45). In proposing it, Berger builds on the kinds of societies that Pocock and others have described in the 18th century as important to republican politics even though they were not overtly or exclusively political. They featured conversational life in the 18th century as manifested in groups and salons. Note the groups and associations Berger also acknowledges with reference to Tocqueville. These various clubs and neighborhood groups are still important from a human capital perspective, even though they are not exclusively civic, and in fact for Berger they are “social” (non-citizens impacting political outcomes is another example of social connection). “Moral” engagement encompasses, for example, anonymous forms of giving or private work on one’s character that is relevant to forging lasting bonds with others. Through “civil engagement”, then, which Berger defines as a combination of social and moral engagement, he provides the starting point for our own a category that we will also embrace (ibid., pp. 344–45).
Except that we understand “civil” engagement in a slightly different, and arguably broader, way. If for Berger the term combines social and moral forms of activism, for us it is “all of the above”—civic, social, and moral. The idea is that all of these dimensions of engagement reinforce one another, and if we want our students to excel in any one of them, we will structure their exposure to all three. Civil engagement, if translated into a workable practical framework with the maximum generosity proviso applied, promises several benefits. It can include high amounts of “civic” (or narrowly political) knowledge. It can focus on “social” activities that include going out into the community and encountering neighbors in real situations of need, which undoubtedly takes learners out of their comfort zones. Moreover, it can emphasize individual moral growth, perhaps through the writing of an anonymous letter or the making of a donation, which in turn reinforces engagement efficacy in the other two areas.
The university–community exchanges, to emphasize, are the first pillar of our recommended best-practices civic engagement strategy. To combine the benefits of different engagement programs considered in Section 6 with the maximum generosity proviso, and to reinforce components of civil engagement, imagine the following university–community deliberation: a university in rural Texas invites students and community leaders who are especially interested in questions of police brutality and civil rights, to a campus dialogue on these issues. The discussion is attended by civil rights activists, police officers, and pastors. In this example, as in the others, the key is to ensure an actual spectrum of broad disagreement in the room. Those immersed in this dialogue, including students, find that they must process new ideas and will perhaps join the exchange. Students are assured that any and all feelings or questions are legitimate to share with the group. These might include, in no particular order: “To what extent are African Americans treated differently by the police?” “What about the claim that law enforcement is going where the crime is?” “What are the statistics for officer involved shootings showing that no discrimination whatsoever exists?” Instead of reading hundreds of pages, an article or two may suffice to provide the “high-information component—perhaps a combination of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (Alexander 2011) and of James Forman, Jr.’s response (Forman 2012). Consistent with a framework of maximum generosity that emphasizes listening and not demeaning any perspective in the room, religious and non-religious questions may come up and receive encouragement from event moderators.
Notice the components of civil engagement in this framework of maximum generosity: basic criminal justice readings, in combination with interactions with police officers, other public officials, and civil rights activists, provide civic information. Meeting various actors whom one does not usually encounter in the classroom and potentially hearing religious arguments for why certain policies are or are not justified (related to human dignity) provides social engagement in a context of dialogue across difference. Moreover, greater awareness of the issues and general needs and of where one could send resources anonymously contributes to moral engagement.
Or how about this deliberative scenario: a university in the urban Northeast considers homelessness policy in the context of economic development. The discussion/debate that students at this point have joined includes organizations and individuals who really disagree: the local Chamber of Commerce, an advocacy group for the poor or representatives from a homeless shelter in the area, municipal and/or state representatives on both or multiple sides when it comes to which policies work best, etc. In theory, those who favor Austin style de-stigmatization (potentially with the legalization of panhandling and sleeping in public places), democratic socialists, free market thinkers, and clergy who present different spiritual perspectives on these subjects, are all included. Once again, no question is off limits. Students as well as community leaders are encouraged to engage in an open and honest dialogue, in which religious and non-religious reasons are included, without fear of making themselves vulnerable and for the sake of real personal development. A limited reading, circulated a few weeks before the event, may consist of a few paragraphs from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations on the poor (Smith [1776] 1993) contrasted with a few pages from Marx’s Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 2002) and combined with passages from the works of Marvin Olasky (1992, pp. 1–24, 211–32) and William Julius Wilson (Wilson 1990, pp. 3–19, 125–39) that offer radically different perspectives on homelessness. The goal is for these few pages of text to serve as a springboard for discussion that involves different academic and community voices.
The civic dimension consists of reading excerpts from information-rich texts while also gaining a sense of the relevant public officials, the Chamber of Commerce, and local economic development board, and how reaching out to them about government related matters might occur. Inviting a homeless person or an advocate for the homeless, such as someone who works at a rescue mission, accomplishes the student goal of encountering community members not usually represented on a college campus. Ultimate reasons why society should or should not prioritize homelessness through public policy will inevitably expose participants to dialogue across difference, potentially involving religious and non-religious reasons that are all affirmed. Again, the awareness of opportunities to give anonymously (“moral engagement”) increases upon participation.
Imagine still another possibility: at a university in the agricultural Midwest, students take part in a heated environmental policy exchange. Which species should be protected, and what are tradeoffs as farmers wish to work and develop the land? Who is making decisions about levels of pollutants and other farming/deforestation practices that are and are not allowed? Again, the dialogue does not include only academics. The school has invited into the same room pundits, members of the Sierra Club, farmers and ranchers, and any other interested parties whose strong opinions are not in doubt. The readings here, very limited again for the sake of providing a springboard for further discussion, may include a few pages from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson 2002, pp. 53–62, 129–53) paired with brief sections from Terry Anderson and Donald Leal’s Free Market Environmentalism (Anderson and Leal 2001 pp. 27–36 and 123–42). Sections from Genesis, combined with Teddy Roosevelt’s (1908) remarks on Conservation as a National Duty, may also receive attention.
Civic engagement, flowing from this high-impact and intense community-academic exchange that students join, may involve meeting an official who works at an environmental protection agency and in combination with the readings, gaining a sense of which laws and regulations matter for environmental protection. Interacting with famers and others in the room, including indigenous people able to speak to their lived experience of environmental or conservation policy, makes for social engagement. Of course, the question of anonymous giving or even journaling comes up again, as a student reflects on all that has been discussed and processed in the exchanges so far. “Maximum generosity” is applied in all these deliberative settings as participating faculty and administrators, who are trained to respond to instances during which a religious argument appears (whether of the pantheistic or “human beings are stewards of the environment” variety) provide encouragement to all as needed.
This leaves an important question. Given the importance of trust, so important to the actual construction of shared values through public reason as discussed in the last section, how is a university to cultivate it among students ahead of these intense university-community exchanges or in another sphere of the model civic engagement framework? This brings us to the second pillar of our recommended university civic engagement framework, consisting of a number of considerations.
First, visible reliance on the principle of maximum generosity in the intense community–university policy exchanges itself increases trust. When a student, community activist, or academic has made an initial point in favor of criminal justice policy reform based on inalienable natural rights, or the imago dei in human beings, or a theological injunction to care for the oppressed, the guideline response from a facilitator is one of encouragement. When the moderator in the economic development/homelessness discussion group encounters initially offered arguments from a perspective of economic efficiency, social justice, or the dignity of human beings understood through a theological lens, the same affirmation is in order. Moreover, this principle applies in the environmental policy community–university deliberation. This display of generosity towards all participants itself builds trust.
Secondly, in these university–community exchanges as well as in other parts of the model civic engagement framework, building on already existing communities of identity and interest is key. Fraternities and sororities, sports teams, and other campus organizations are already ones in which students are already embedded and in which they already find themselves in relationships of trust. While likely requiring administrative oversight above the classroom level, randomly drawing students from different pre-existing networks of trust to different events through extra credit or through the coordinated encouragement of coaches, professors, and administrators increases the likelihood of dialogue across difference in the exchanges themselves because it makes it more likely that exchange participants (students, faculty, and community voices) are starting with a reservoir of good faith and trust that does not require construction.
Significantly, this builds on the framework already in place at Tarleton State University—not yet with respect to intense community–university idea exchanges but within some of our classes themselves. Every year, several hundred Tarleton State University students participate in what is known as Town Hall. This is a civic engagement as opposed to a social activism event, as characterized by founder Professor Casey Thompson. The Town Hall model requires students in Texas or Federal Government to research a specific policy question for several months (in fiscal, abortion, animal and crop, or gun policy) and then make a practical recommendation. From the perspective of building trust that makes achieving both shared values and dialogue across difference more possible, what is special about Town Hall is that students move through the introductory federal or Texas government class as one issue cohort. They do so by attending lectures twice a week, often with 60 or more other students. In a given week of the term, whether the lecture subject is federalism, interest groups, or parties, they are required to attend a third meeting led by a lab leader, meeting only with the smaller group of students in the class who are studying their specific policy area … fiscal policy, green energy, eminent domain or K-12 curriculum, etc. It is possible for the smaller group of students to get to know each other and build trust in a way that they simply cannot in the larger lectures.
The culminating event at Tarleton State University in the Town Hall model, Town Hall itself, further builds on this dynamic of trust that contributes to shared values and dialogue across difference. Students stay in their focused policy area groups and in them share short presentations based on their research from the semester. They are further bonded together with their small policy group in this culminating policy experience by an outside issue expert who offers real time feedback on their points of view and presentations, including ideas on how to make them better and their delivery more effective. While this approach does not prioritize the spirited debate of community–university exchanges as earlier described, it can involve significant community figures and activists listening to and providing guidance on individual student presentations in these smaller cohorts organized according to policy. The outside experts are not all necessarily academics, and some policy cohorts have had more than one “issue expert”, increasing the likelihood of dialogue across difference between the invited outside speakers, who model principled disagreement for the students to see. Thus, on the evening of the culminating Town Hall event this year, the Animal & Crop regulation small group featured Darren Turley, the executive director of the Texas Dairymen’s association, as well as a Tarleton professor, Jean Lonie, who works at the Agriculture School. Our abortion policy group of students featured as outside experts a Tarleton government professor and Amy O’Donnell of the TX Alliance for Life, while our transgender policy cohort received guidance from Alison Boleware of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and Jeff Dyke, the lead pastor at Rocky Point Baptist church. In both the proposed stand-alone community–university policy discussions and in the existing culminating Town Hall student cohort–policy discussions, the fact of openness to difference and disagreement in the groups (including the use of religious and non-religious reasons) is thoroughly consistent with our framework.
Thirdly, for the sake of building trust, decisions about which community voices and experts to include in these forums are all important. Depending on which outside experts are asked to participate in a group, a session on the same subject may go quite differently. It is important for administrators and university officials to recognize that the perception by students that gatekeeping authority was exercised illegitimately, in a way to exclude real lived experiences or questions asked in sincerity, can backfire. The maximum generosity principle, discussed above in Section 5, also applies.
Both existing civic engagement programming at Tarleton State and the proposed university-community dialogues parallel the approach that the Illinois State University Civic Engagement Center has adopted through its Deliberative Dialogues format. Although Illinois state does not list past examples of exchanges, the documents that it does make available speak to the fullness of the intended exchange. Thus, in the potential pre-reflection questions, somebody about to participate is asked about fears related to discussion of the subject and a personal story related to the topic. Afterwards, participants are questioned about whose voice was not represented in the idea exchange. Clearly, this is a model of inclusivity that does not seek to avoid discomfort at all costs but that aims for robust dialogue. The American Democracy project, supported by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), has now started to run training in the Deliberative Dialogue format.
This approach also builds on the one employed at Swarthmore College. Here, Debating for Democracy allows students to send their representatives a two-page letter in which they advocate for a particular policy approach on an issue or issues.36 The students are indicating a well-researched need for a change to an existing policy. They are, in other words, engaging in an act of persuasion in reaching out to their representative.37
Both these programs seek to extend the momentum of Democracy and Debate at the University of Michigan, where what seems emphasized and especially important is including community members as affected parties in the exchanges. A recent example at the University of Michigan included a county clerk. The University of Michigan also profiles its Democracy Café series, which makes the important historical connection for students of dialogue to coffee. Of course, it was in 18th century coffee shops, as described by Jurgen Habermas in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, that the beginnings of modern deliberative democracy and this specific kind of public sphere occur. The University of Michigan, through its Ginsburg center, more broadly offers a number of different supporting initiatives. Moreover, the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts also presents important opportunities in this way.
Finally, to extend these analogies further, one additional model program that incorporates elements of Tarleton Town Hall and has synergies with its approach is the civic engagement framework at Wake Forest.38 Here, although it is not part of the official service-learning community, A Call to Conversation prioritizes the value of working together across deep difference. Wake Forest is one of the schools that recognizes disagreement and complexity. Even more than is the case at Swarthmore, these dialogue participants are asked to recall, over dinner or in another leisurely setting, a time of collaborating with a colleague or co-worker with whom they had a relatively significant disagreement. As I spoke with Raven Scott, the Assistant Director of Programming for Leadership and Character in the College, I gained a sense of the importance in A Call to Conversation of bringing in one’s lived experience, regardless of how at odds or inconsistent with cultures at institutions it may seem. Raven Scott also emphasized to me the critical importance of maintaining a significant part of A Call to Conversation that is rooted in the local community, rather than prioritizing national expansion (Personal Communication 3/10/22). Call to Conversation may not seek to encourage spirited exchanges of ideas in real time as the informal gathering takes place, but it may be seen as pointing in that direction. Participants are asked to remember a time at work when they did navigate disagreement and were able to see it as fruitful (Wake Forest n.d.).
10. Conclusions
As discussions related to January 6 move to the next stage and the troubling reality of our polarization continues to sink in, so does the realization that our civic crisis needs to be addressed. Democracy, as every student of political philosophy knows full well, is not guaranteed. No doubt, this explains the recent interest in discussions of civil religion. A looming sense of crisis seems shared, at this point, by a significant percentage of the American public, as well as by those in academia conducting rigorous and peer-reviewed research. As a yearning grows for ways in which to, substantively and meaningfully, address our current lack of and abiding need for community, students of Rousseau, Durkheim, and Bellah find a greater demand for their ideas, and specifically related to the possibility of civil religion.
The early theorists of civil religion were not religious nationalists, and they proposed the idea of a shared narrative in part to deal with their own generation’s traumas, whether these involved the Vietnam war, civil rights struggles, or other challenges. There is no suggestion, in anything we have written, that the intent behind theorizing in this way is sinister or unproductive, because very clearly, the opposite is the case. Moreover, it remains true today among theorists of civil religion who include Phil Gorski, John Wilsey, and Jonathan Den Hartog, all of whom have recently presented civil religion as a way to bring about or restore civic unity. Yet, having discussed Gorski’s book and noted inclusive aspects in its reliance on religion as a political tool, we nevertheless considered the risks involved. The prevalence of top down, as opposed to spontaneous, civil religion, throws these into stark relief. Against the intent of those who theorize it, civil religion opens the door to domination, manipulation, and a general loss of freedom that undermines democracy itself.
We considered Augustine’s remarkable treatment and savage critique of civil religion in City of God, not just of the stories about divinity told by the Greeks and Romans, but of civil religion itself. We did so because, based on his understanding of human nature and idolatry, he gives us and has been recognized by contemporary political theorists as providing additional insights to grasp why the instrumentalization of religion in politics, which civil religion involves, is a bad idea. Human beings are worshipping creatures, and the possibility of mistakenly worshipping civil religion leads on Augustine’s account to disordered souls, certainly, but also to the elevation of the power of the state at the expense of dissenting individuals, with all the realities of conquest and exploitation in which we know that civil religion historically has been implicated.
Strikingly, we saw that it is Augustine himself who offers for our reconstructed use an alternative model, as also noted by prominent Augustinian thinkers Paul Weithman and Ed Santurri, building on the insights of Robert Markus in Saeculum. Book 19 of City of God contains the rudiments of overlapping consensus, as Augustine did not heed voices who called for further Christianization of the empire but focused instead on non-religious spheres whose importance both pagans and Christians could affirm. To the extent that this reconstructed Augustinian possibility is a Rawlsian one, of special interest is the resonance with the later Rawls, who adds the famous “proviso” to his 1971 Theory of Justice according to which people can come into the public square making a religious argument, provided that at some point they translate it into neutral terms. This later turn towards religion in Rawls has been recognized by multiple Rawlsian scholars. Moreover, it shows a further correspondence with Augustine, as the Bishop of Hippo includes the rudiments of overlapping consensus in his work, but he could not imagine a politics without the presence of some religious reasons.
In our age of polarization and division and with this foundation in place, we propose to use universities to contribute to the task of constructing shared values. In a nutshell: the idea is to institutionalize a late Rawlsian understanding of constructing shared values on public university campuses. Moreover, to Rawls’ famous “proviso”, and with college campuses in mind, we have added a “maximum generosity” condition. The reason is that whereas the late Rawls is open to religious reasons as part of a public conversation, he does not provide any encouragement to religious people for the sake of their continued participation, or to increase the likelihood that they translate the reasons they provide into neutral terms. We do. We characterize the resulting discourse environment as “in between civil religion and public justification” because the paradigm still maintains public justification as the standard, even as there are potentially more religious reasons in circulation, at any given moment, than in a civil religion framework.
How would it work, concretely, on campuses? As it turns out, universities are already uniquely positioned to institutionalize a late Rawlsian understanding of public reason going forward. This is a result of their history of connecting with the public and serving broader public purposes, as well as with reference to the more recent “civic engagement” movement on campus that arguably goes back to the 1980s and 1990s. There is nothing new about the idea of an “engaged” university. Contrary to some misconceptions, educational institutions have acted in both “engaged” and “disengaged” capacities from the beginning. Therefore, it would be possible to use existing civic engagement infrastructure on college campuses, even as we seek to improve upon and reform it.
Indeed, the ready existence of programs on campuses, and their continued expansion since the most recent effervescence of engagement priorities and programs in the 1980s, is what helps us with intriguing growth and reform possibilities. As discussed, public reason is not the only mode of shared values construction; civil religion attempts and sometimes successfully accomplishes the same thing. Moreover, in surveying the institutional University scene, what is evident is that some programs take a more public-reason oriented approach, whereas others (geared towards students even if they are not directly teaching them) leave an opening for kinds of civic reverence that we seek to avoid. Even as we continue to warn against civil-religious strategies of constructing shared values in the strongest possible terms, then, we ask: is it possible that, in terms of the goals of the civic engagement movement, civil religion frameworks get certain things right, and that public reason approaches lack in concrete ways? If so, is it conceivable that features of both these different approaches could be integrated in a way that still unambiguously upholds the standard of public reason?
Our answer is yes. Using our “in between” understanding of shared values construction and by institutionalizing our “maximum generosity” proviso to the later Rawlsian openness to religion in civic deliberations, we blend features of both approaches while still upholding public reason. Our two-pronged approach, building on guidance provided by the Carnegie Foundation, the American Democracy Project, and Jack Miller Center programs, combines intense university–community deliberations around highly relevant and at times controversial issues, with a model of taking government courses using smaller student cohorts that closely resembles the Town Hall framework at Tarleton State.
Our intense community–university deliberations combined with short readings covering criminal justice reform, homelessness in a context of economic development, and sustainable environmental policy, to name only a few possibilities, include students, community members, and faculty, and are designed to encourage maximum diversity of opinion. Application of the maximum generosity proviso here means that if any of the participants initially advance a religious reason to support any policy, trained moderators will not shame or stigmatize anyone, but simply provide encouragement to keep moving in the direction of public reason and shared values. Moreover, the short readings distributed before deliberation add a higher civic knowledge component to the framework.
Moving through government courses not only in large lectures (twice a week), but then in small student groups, all focused on different policies (fiscal, animal and crop regulation, K-12 curriculum, etc.), further advances our model program goals of providing high civic information content to students, exposing them to real dialogue across difference, and building trust in order to deepen that dialogue. Ensuring that students are studying specific policies in small groups increases civic knowledge; their staying in those small groups throughout the semester allows for trust to be built, which makes it easier to have tough conversations; their participating together in an end of semester event, at which they share their findings not only with each other, but with invited policy experts and public officials presenting genuinely diverse opinions at the local, state, and national levels, only increases student trust (in each other, the university community, and the political process as a whole). Tarleton is considering additional ways to leverage trust for the sake of dialogue across difference, tapping into existing student leadership networks on campus so that positive civic emotions do not require construction from the ground up. The point is, both of these prongs combine high-civic information, practical, and dialogue-based features, drawing on public reason and civil religion embracing civic engagement frameworks. The result is a program that is truly “in between” even as a public reason standard of shared values is ultimately upheld.
As for not reaching, in this way, those who do not make it to college at all, and who may be especially prone to polarization and even radicalization, that is a fair point. There are undoubtedly additional ways in which private institutions of higher learning, state universities, and two-year colleges can positively impact their surrounding communities, raising awareness and increasing skills potentially even among those not enrolled. It may also be that addressing deep social divisions is not an issue that universities can handle all by themselves, but this does not preclude the value of using them where clear benefits exist. These are all pressing areas of future research.
For now, does our strategy involve expanding the usual definition of the term “civic engagement”, in ways to which some who rely on that term will object? Yes. However, we maintain that in our day and in what feels like a dark time, expansion and inclusion are only to the good. We hold that this is true especially if it brings about a rethinking of essential concepts related to civic engagement, along with a location of that concept in yet broader contexts of community and human flourishing. Admittedly, any number of strategies to bring about unity may be pursued. Civil religion, with the semblance of cohesion it provides, is a siren song that beckons. However, we should not pursue it even if it feels like a quick fix or seems more glamorous. This is true especially in light of the flexibility of the public reason framework that we have uncovered, as it is supported by a reconstructed Augustine and the late Rawls. Relying on the university under “maximum generosity” conditions perhaps requires more work and asks us to engage in more challenging acts of empathy and imagination. In confidence and hope, we should pursue these for the sake of civility and pluralism in our democracy.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, E.V.M., B.Z.K., C.D.H.; Methodology, E.V.M., B.Z.K., C.D.H.; writing-original draft preparation, E.V.M., B.Z.K., C.D.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
To confirm that virtually none of the public-reason oriented civic engagement programs discussed in Section 7 mention all the words, “trust,” “complex,” “disagree,” and “citizen,” we used publicly available websites linked through the American Political Science Association list of civic engagement centers and programs. This is available online: web.apsanet.org/teachingcivicengagement/additional-teaching-resources/civic-engagement-centers-and-institutes (accessed on 10 April 2022).
Acknowledgments
For their insights and generosity with time in reading sections or this whole article as it came together, and/or for providing edits and/or helpful suggestions, the authors would like to thank Glenn Moots, Jim Wetzel, Charles Mathewes, Ben Berger, Mark David Hall, Jonathan Den Hartog, John Wilsey, Stuart Warner, Michael Lamb, Kody Cooper, Casey Thompson, Colleen Mitchell, Tom Cook, Kelli Irene Neel, Samuel Japhets, Stephanie Kabala, and Cody McKelvey.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Notes
| 1 | For some theorists, the very idea of “civic unity” is oppressive and hegemonic. See Tinsley and France (2004) and Corlett (1989). |
| 2 | The contrast goes back to Augustine. We will expand on it in the paper. |
| 3 | Related to it for Durkheim are different beliefs and practices, and since it is community that is truly fundamental, religious symbols and divisions reflect on a deep level what society does and does not value. (Durkheim [1915] 2012, Book I (“Preliminary Questions”), Chapter I (“Definition of Religious Phenomena and Of Religion”, Section III, Par 5. See also ibid., Book II, “The Elementary Beliefs”, Chapter VII, “Origins of these Beliefs—end—Origin of the Idea of the Totemic Principle or Mana, Section II). |
| 4 | The work of Timothy Fitzgerald on this subject is considered groundbreaking—see The Ideology of Religious Studies (Fitzgerald 2000, especially pp. 3–32) and Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth, pp. 1–17, 105–14). Those who have questioned the validity or usefulness of “religion” as a category also include (Asad 1993; Milbank 1991; and Luckmann 1967). Asad in post-colonial studies views it as perpetuating colonialism and imperialism. Milbank, as a theologian, considers that “religion detracts from true faith, and Luckmann holds that it imports imprecise thinking into what needs to remain the scientific analysis of human structures and organizations. Woodhead (2011) mentions these and others, acknowledging a diversity of conceptualizations of “religion”, even as she emphasizes that an essentialist and exclusive definition is not needed (Woodhead—strikingly—also underscores that given the secular inclinations of academia, discarding “religion” completely could well result in significant confirmation bias). Her five understandings, which she is open to deploying selectively and based on context and sometimes in combination, are: religion as culture, identity, relationship, practice, and power. Before Woodhead, Frederick Ferre in his 1970 “The Definition of Religion” had also warned against the insistence on a precise definition, given that everyone knows religion on some level exists—his counsel, therefore, it to adopt one definition and use it consistently (Ferré 1970, pp. 5–8). |
| 5 | Coleman (1970, p. 69) offered a similar definition: a “special case of the religious symbol system, designed to perform a differentiated function which is the unique province of neither church nor state”. On this account, “It is a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man as citizen and his society in world history to the ultimate conditions of his existence”. Even as Cherry agreed that neither a denominational commitment nor piety really summed it up (Cherry 1971, “Introduction”, pp. 1–24), Coleman also distinguished between church-sponsored and state-sponsored civil religions (Coleman 1970, pp. 70–72). |
| 6 | James Mathisen has suggested four different relevant periods of the study of civil religion: “Setting the Ground Rules for ACR Discourse” (1967–1973), “The Goden Age of ACR Discussion” (1974–1977), “A Plateau of Evaluation and Integration of ACR” (1978–1982), and “The Waning of ACR Discussion” (1983–1988) (Mathisen 1989, p. 130). According to Mathisen, these may not only present different views of the meaning of civil religion—they may connect the subject general subject back to broader themes in different ways. Thus, phase three, for Mathisen, linked ACR discourse to broader discussions, and in particular to that of secularization (most evident in Fenn 1972) and modernization (clear in Markoff and Regan 1981) (Mathisen 1989, pp. 134–35) While it is harder, according to Mathisen, to make thematic sense of phase 4, an important book here is Demerath and Williams (1985). |
| 7 | Yet other possibilities have been suggested since Bellah’s pioneering work. Thus, Lüchau (2009) calls attention to the possibility that several different definitions of “civil religion” are connected, which according to him becomes especially apparent upon fusing the two major distinctions of religious pluralism vs. monoculture and civil religion as rhetoric vs. individual religiosity, followed by a sensitivity to context (especially pp. 376–84). Mount (1980) ties these discussions back to broader debates about realism, the normative vs. legitimating (or merely descriptive) aspects of civil religion, considerations of pluralism, and how civil religion intersects with and exemplifies virtue and character in our leaders (especially pp. 41–49). Novak (1974) parses five different Protestant kinds of civil religiosity, based on cultural history (pp. 131–47). And Williams (2013) points to the unavoidability not just of the universal emphasis, but of the particularistic component of ACR, which makes sense of the fact, specifically, in the US that race and tribal notions have been connected to a majority concern (pp. 245–47, 252–54). All told, it is clear that civil religion, since its rediscovery in the 1960′s, has meant many things to many people. |
| 8 | Gorski insists on the phrase “civil religion” instead of “shared narrative” or “public philosophy” because, he argues, everyone is already involved in a form of worship (ibid., p. 15). Use of the phrase “religion” is further intended to make secular leaning individuals more understanding of religious citizens, and to increase awareness among the religiously inclined of the civic implications of their views. Although there is overlap, “civil religion”also needs to be distinguished from “political theology”. Political theology brings to mind a German context—here the proximate scene is Bellah’s America—and the latter involves more reference pointes of doctrine, as well as concepts like secularization, etc. (Stackhouse 2004, pp. 281–91). |
| 9 | As Gorski explains, it emphasizes the discourse of blood sacrifice in the political theology of the West, (ibid. 21) contrasting the ceremonial blotting out of life in the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures with portrayals in Revelation, where the focus is clearly vengeance. And it is fueled by apocalypticism, which draws on a “certain kind of American Protestantism that arose during the early twentieth century” (ibid., p. 22). |
| 10 | Interestingly, Gorski holds that radical secularism became especially prominent in the Gilded age period after the Civil War in a “small elite within the Republican Party” (ibid., p. 107). This was “the new class of knowledge workers: Lawyers, journalists, scientists, teachers” who represented the “seedbeds of secularism”. Exemplified in the early twentieth century in the work of Robert Ingersoll and attaining a more public expression in the work of H. L. Mencken (ibid. 132), secularism has more recently been on display in the views of Christopher Hitchens (ibid., p. 30). |
| 11 | Of course, readers of Augustine with only a surface familiarity of the Confessions will not be surprised by this emphasis on non-instrumentality—throughout that shorter and deeply personal book, Augustine’s God emerges consistently as a Being immune to categorization and manipulation of any kind, defying categories of culture, space, and time. |
| 12 | Other attempts to cast civil religion in a positive light are also worth mentioning–notably that of Jonathan Den Hartog (2017), recently writing in Religions. Focusing on the Federalists (George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay, but also individuals who included Timothy Dwight and Elias Boudinot), and drawing on categories of “open” and “closed” civil religion from the work of John Wilsey, Den Hartog makes the case that these early proponents of a stronger American federal Union had a version of “open” civil religion. They relied on public religiosity to strengthen national attachments, while also not using this set of beliefs to actively promote the expansion of slavery or domination. Nevertheless, as is also true of John Wilsey’s work, this reconstruction does not fully account for the extent and depth of the Augustinian critique of civil religion. |
| 13 | To be clear, this is not to suggest the impossibility of alternative strategies of bridging deep differences in times of heightened polarization. Various strategies might include the teaching of natural law principles (for which recent scholarship suggests there is some support in Augustine), or the articulation of what several thinkers and commentators have referred to as “public philosophy”. But there are but a few considerations that mediate against either of these options. Because, if only given secularization trends (Hackett and Huynh 2015) and the perception that natural law involves a theological underpinning, coalescing the ideas may be difficult especially with the younger generations. Additionally, public philosophy in its overlap with natural law (Lippmann 1959, p. 133) has a definite content specified in advance, and not one with which there is unanimous agreement. Overlapping consensus also specifies (minimal) principles of justice in advance, but the underlying reasons and motivations for supporting them can be varied, and evolving, depending on the language conditions in which discussion participants find themselves. |
| 14 | See American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Gorski 2017). The premise of Phillip Gorski’s book aims to answer whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation or a secular democracy. |
| 15 | See reference to and discussion of Seyla Benhabib’s work on Rawls (1997), p. 775. |
| 16 | What Rawls refers to as the “background culture—contrary to other theorists)” (ibid., p. 784 fn 50) [for “background culture”, see ibid., pp. 768 fn 12–15, 775 fn 28]. |
| 17 | To emphasize, this alternative to civil religion, a public reason/overlapping consensus strategy informed by Augustinian insights, certainly applies where the principle of separation of church and state is upheld (as our discussion of civic engagement programs at American universities will show), but it is also relevant where the state controls the church. Thus, Wei Hua has described the history of politics and religion in the People’s Republic of China, up to and including the contemporary official position as expressed in the Constitution of state atheism. According to the Chinese constitution, the rights of citizens to practice religion are respected, even as there is denial of the legitimacy of any religious activities which “disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the State” (Chinese Constitution 1982). As Hua has phrased it, in describing the difference between the Self-Same churches and the house churches that have grown up autonomously apart from them, the Chinese government’s attitude towards the informal bodies of worship has vacillated between acquiescence and crackdown. The experience of Falun Gong would certainly seem to indicate the crackdown side of this equation (Chan and Junker 2021, pp. 772–74). Hua does not recommend continuation in the direction of state enforced secularism in China, but he also does not support unregulated license on the part of the house churches. A framework of mutual accountability or shared responsibility—indeed, of overlapping consensus—is best. And Hua deliberately invokes Augustine’s Book 19 of City of God to this effect (Hua 2021, pp. 113–30). |
| 18 | https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sanjacinto-atdcoursereview-usgovernment-1/chapter/engagement-in-a-democracy/ (accessed on 1 April 2022). Linked to a college course, the website contains information that helps with conceptualization of these categories. |
| 19 | Depending on the researcher, what currently contributes the most to a formed young adult’s value profile is variously understood to be family upbringing, geographical region, peer group, education background, and religious affiliation (Griffiths and Keirns 2015). But these considerations are secondar—even if a university is not the primary socializer for many, it can play a significant role in contributing to overlapping consensus in a time of dangerous polarization. Unlike families, institutions of higher learning combine extended community with the authority of learning. Unlike religious organizations, they can claim expertise in different spheres. And the intensity of the live-in experience only adds to the lasting nature, for so many students, of imparted lessons (Loss 2014, pp. 19–52) and Peters et al. (2010). |
| 20 | He made the case in Leviathan, but these and other arguments of his are also especially in evidence in Behemoth, where the English philosopher meditated specifically on the causes of social disintegration. Hobbes focused on these institutions in a way that even Spinoza did not (Kabala and Cook 2022). Their educational mission, he was clear, had to undergo focusing and reform, if stability and prosperity were to have a chance. |
| 21 | And although Newman, of course, wrote openly as a Catholic, the contours of his pedagogy remain relevant even for those with different views, provided they support a space of non-instrumentalized learning. Recent work has also challenged the view that Newman, because of his support for natural law and moral order, cannot also affirm modern pluralism (Mulcahy 2009, pp. 468–69, 484). |
| 22 | The authors also consider Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (ibid., pp. 91–100). Here, prominent is the reliance of an “office in charge of industry and community partnerships”, which can centralize some of the decision making. The University is being very clear about the fact that research is a key component of engagement, as knowledge is generated in fields as diverse as “nanotechnology and advanced materials” and “biotechnology development”. (ibid., p. 95). |
| 23 | Before The Engaged University, there was Judith Rodin’s important The University and Urban Revival (Rodin 2007). Rodin describes the multiple ways in which the University of Philadelphia intervened to make the city a more livable place. “[Students and faculty] [r]esolved to engage in efforts that would encourage the residents of University City ultimately to act of their own accord to enforce the public peace, as Jane Jacobs advocated. Increased policing was warranted and used more effectively than before. But we recognized that only by altering the physical and perceived environment would we begin to see lasting positive outcomes with respect to crime. It was up to Penn, as the largest stakeholder in the area, to step up as the agent of change. Working with the community, we would launch a campaign to repair broken windows, clean up graffiti and litter, light the streets, and, in [Malcolm] Gladwell’s words, ‘change the signals that invited crime in the first place’” (Rodin 2007, p. 60). Rodin describes Penn’s many efforts in getting involved to make the surrounding neighborhood more pleasant; making investments in the local retail economy (Penn put up some of the initial investment funds: pp. 107–37); investing in public education in the city (pp. 138–66); and still other concrete forms of (civic) leadership (pp. 167–78). |
| 24 | Richard Adler and Judy Goggin, in the meantime, have pointed out that civic engagement encompasses everything from community service through political participation to a successful push for social change. They discuss expanding engagement opportunities for older folks, even as they point out that there is no one agreed upon definition in the literature (Adler and Goggin 2005, pp. 237–41). The literature here is simply vast, even as many have made connections to the foundational work of Robert Putnam (Putnam 1992; see Field 2003, p. 143; Kenworthy 1997, pp. 646–47). |
| 25 | More documentation is needed. |
| 26 | Also, neither Ostrander nor Putnam considers, in the discussion of why this disengagement took place, that part of the reason is democracy itself (ibid. 2000, pp. 336–49). Tocqueville is clear and direct in his magnum opus. Unlike the Aristotelian understanding of regime, his view of democracy entails the equalization of conditions. And by equalizing conditions, by increasingly throwing everybody back on their own resources, democracy makes individuals weaker. Therefore, the art of association becomes exceedingly important. It recreates the salutary effects of what used to be aristocratic bodies, both making it more difficult to impose tyranny (more easily done on an undifferentiated mass of disconnected individuals) and providing people training in going-out-of-themselves (which increases their appetite for self-government, making it harder to impose an administrative or nanny state despotism). To the extent that the University, as a site of civic engagement, is then able to serve as a master Tocquevillian associational body, it would be uniquely suited to pushing back against, and moderating, democratic excess. If this is true, it is certainly fortuitous that the civic engagement movement at universities takes off right as the Cold War ends. This is the era in which liberal democracy (understood as the combination of free markets and free elections) comes to be viewed as supreme, in some cases embodying political and economic institutions at the End of History. Given that none of the college civic engagement programs that we are about to consider openly bills itself as “countering democracy” (the rhetoric on the websites is, instead, robustly and at times extremely pro-democratic), it is unlikely that countering the negative effects of democracy was an intended effect. Nevertheless, especially to the extent that these civic engagement programs are encouraging association, across the whole spectrum of political beliefs, University civic engagement programs can theoretically play a vital role in protecting the democratic regime from its worst excesses of individualism and dissociation. |
| 27 | And it is not the case that some versions of civil religion, conceivably, could not support shared values (Cristi 2001, p. 61). |
| 28 | To emphasize, it is not that Universities could not also serve as platforms where natural law and “public philosophy” as Lippman understood it are promoted—to be clear, some universities (Catholic and evangelical) incorporate a natural approach in their teaching—and although hard data is not available, of course, several institutions of higher learning with specific missions also propagate specific public philosophies. For the reasons provided above, the “shared values through public reason with a maximum generosity proviso” approach seems most promising, and so we suggest using the university in this way. |
| 29 | Thus, in addition to hundreds of pages of assigned reading, speakers at the last Jack Miller Center summer seminar included Steven Smith, discussing responsible citizenship and education in the thought of Michael Oakeshott; Nicholas Buccola, exploring the political philosophy of Frederick Douglass, related to resistance and civic education; Ben Kleinerman, considering the Federalist Papers to uncover the education they can provide in reasonableness; Bill McClay, inquiring about civic education relative to the nationalist thought of Ernst Renan, for the sake of differentiating toxic from other kinds of nationalism; and Diana Schaub, addressing Lincoln’s Lyceum address and its implications for statesmanship, as well as the potential to learn from enlightened leaders today. |
| 30 | To account for this diversity of civic engagement programs, some seemingly on the left and others on the right, one wonders whether it does not make sense to draw on different understandings of citizenship. An important article (Westheimer and Kahne 2004) points to three paradigms: personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented paradigms of citizenship. The justice-oriented clearly has parallels to a PART paradigm of civic engagement emphasizing embeddedness. Those programs emphasizing activism and community involvement, to various extents, are also generally associated with the Left, and might valorize participatory citizenship. And the different set of programs that tends to promote, through the Jack Miller center, civic knowledge, prioritizes engagement as well, and according to Westheimer and Kahne might make sense in a “personally responsible” model of civic relations. But, given the extent to which exchanges in the context of reading and civic knowledge are emphasized, it might make sense to speak of reflective, or knowledge-based citizenship. Alongside responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented categorizations … this is the civically informed citizen. Something like this view may also be supported by Bill Galston, who has written of the importance of knowledge based civic belonging (Galston 2001, 2003, 2007). |
| 31 | Ben Berger has called attention to some of these differences and points out that “Service Learning” goes back to the days of the Tennessee Authority (Berger 2019, p. 11). |
| 32 | Tennessee State University also integrates its service learning into Freshman Orientation—members of the incoming class are channeled into 4 h of work in their first semester. And the University has a ready-made list of virtual opportunities to engage—the list of links includes websites representing The West Nashville Dream Center, Miriam’s Promise, and the Cumberland River Compact. TSU further incentivizes service learning by designating a Community Service Scholar, who has completed additional hours of training and will be distinguished during graduation, with the hope of strategic positioning for contributions to public service after graduation. Clearly, this is not just community service—the engagement with the outside world is tied back directly to an academic context (Tennessee State University n.d.). |
| 33 | And this focus on embeddedness seems especially evident at the Watts College, with its four schools of Social Work, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Public Affairs, and Community Resources and Development, all placing a high priority on social justice. Its webpage displays a Black Lives Matter logo; there is a focus on research integrated into community initiatives and solutions. These have included, “Community Assessments Throughout Rural Arizona”, the “Phoenix Public Transit Report”, “Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department”, “Data Analysis for Arizona Department of Corrections”, and “Engaging Children at the Watkins Emergency Overflow Shelter”. These have included students contacting inmate populations as well as individuals residing in shelters. To emphasize, through the language of embeddedness, the focus is on making contributions to longer term and systemic change. To the extent that both the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, and the Congressman Ed Pastor Center for Politics and Public Service, either exist at the Watts College, or have provided research with long term change implications, taking on subjects from housing, to heat, to officer involved shootings, once again, this again seems consistent with PART (Arizona State University n.d.). |
| 34 | Baylor also emphasizes that its service ventures are academic, or integrated into the curriculum, to an even greater extent than Tennessee State University or Arizona State University. In addition to supporting its OEL, Baylor makes service learning a component of the core curriculum. The school allows students to substitute experience related to civics for other (required) core courses. And the fact that some of these, but only some, are internships (state and national level), shows that the school is broadly open to different ways of understanding “service”. Politics is one way to engage, but there are others, and no one form of giving back is necessarily more worthy of consideration than others (Baylor University n.d.). |
| 35 | Based on this concern, a consortium of colleges was formed in the early nineties. Project Pericles, as it is known, was founded at that point in recognition of the importance, to the maintenance of more robust democracies, of civic engagement that still requires a respect for the abiding power of ideas. The rationale of Project Pericles was laid out by the President of Amherst, writing in Daedalus at the time. He made precisely some of the above points on integrating real involvement in the community with civic information and frameworks of purpose. The sample syllabi that the Project Pericles website features all point in this direction: yes, we do need to have students “roll up their sleeves” in working with community members. But this continues to require integration with actual knowledge gained in the classroom. Baylor, despite its emphasis on the need to constantly connect service learning back to the classroom, is not officially listed as part of Project Pericles. |
| 36 | But it is Debating for Democracy on which we build. Interestingly, Debating for Democracy is a part of Project Pericles. As emphasized, the approach subscribed to by this consortium of schools values the importance of ideas, even as there is full acknowledgment that the significance of outside-the-classroom service cannot be discounted (Project Pericles n.d.). |
| 37 | Swarthmore has other programs: The Newman Civic Fellowship launches students into a year activism and advocacy on behalf of communities that have not been empowered, based on a history of underrepresentation. It is open-ended, requiring only a reflection of some kind from the students at the end of the year, and emphasizing sustainably moving an institution or set of relationships in the direction of greater fairness and justice. The Lang Social Impact Fellowship builds on some of these same themes, rewarding post-graduate work on the part of students who want to make an overall impact on systems by shifting their parameters in the direction of greater justice and fairness. |
| 38 | At Wake Forest, which also at first glance appears to prioritize involvement and grassroots activism, initiatives are generally divided into six broad categories. These are: social justice, service and leadership, civic engagement, focusing on equal outcomes in education, aiding with nutrition, and working towards providing those socio-economically disadvantaged with an economic boost. The social justice focus, the first category, features programs including Freedom School at Wake Forest University and Project Launch. Project Launch especially stands out for the way in which it allows for mentoring of 7th graders. When it comes to nutrition, to take another one of the categories, students at Wake Forest can target food insecurity at Campus Kitchen and increase the health and movement of participants in improvement. Finally, related to economic boosting, Dash Corps explores actual community development through partnerships with civic organizations and non-profits; and Religion and Public Engagement is an actual major that integrates these concerns into the curriculum. |
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