Steve Ruckman shares a vision of faith in politics, grounded in the thoughts of our Founding Fathers, where all religions can flourish in the public realm

In late December, the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, claimed a secular victory in America’s culture war over religion. Liberals across the country no doubt cheered when, in a unanimous vote, the newly elected board cemented the Pennsylvania district court’s ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District by repealing the school district’s policy of teaching “Intelligent Design” in ninth grade science classes. And they should have: conservative Christian school board members in the district had finally been defeated in their effort to impose their particular religious understanding upon public school science instruction, an effort incompatible with our country’s founding vision of plural religious expression, free from singular dominance.

Still, while the Dover ruling and subsequent vote may be hailed as a victory for those seeking to prevent religious domination in the public domain, the ruling also calls attention to a more general approach by liberals to public religious expression that, while appropriate in this case, often goes too far. Many liberals hail the ruling as a victory solely because it mutes public religious voices, but in describing its success in this light, they are articulating an approach that is itself incompatible with our country’s founding vision for such voices. Just as the conservative action of establishing one form of public religious expression is mistaken, the liberal reaction of muting any form of public religious expression is similarly misguided.

In America’s ongoing battle over public religious expression, one in which the debate over Intelligent Design is only the latest skirmish, both sides have forgotten our Framer’s winning approach to the problem of religious despotism in the public square. Our Framers, all too familiar with the oppression caused by a lone, tyrannical voice (i.e., that of a monarch and his or her established church), sought to create a system of governance that would prevent any one voice from dominating political discourse. The best system, they thought, was one in which, as James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” This, of course, is a federalist system, and Madison and his colleagues derived it in part from observations of the success of religious pluralism in the American colonies. “In a free government,” he wrote in Federalist 51, “the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”

Given this pluralism-promoting system of governance, inspired to a certain extent by plural religious sects, it is not surprising that the Framers’ constitutional approach to religious expression was also one of pluralism. Rather than seeking to mute religious voices, they sought to ensure that many such voices flourished, and that no one voice would dominate. Hence the Free Exercise Clause and Establishment Clause in our Constitution’s First Amendment, dictating that no federal law may restrict individuals' religious expression or mandate one public form of that expression. This is an eminently intelligent design: an approach to religious voices structured to both prevent the public entrenchment of one religious voice and public silencing of all religious expression, something the Framers’ knew would be synonymous with a tyranny of a (secular) majority. This is also the only approach compatible with our federal, representative democracy, a democracy that relies on full and free public expression of diverse voices.

Liberals engaged in the war over public religious expression would be wise to remember our Framers’ approach. They should thus cheer the ruling in the Dover case because it prevents the public entrenchment of one particular religious voice – Christian, creationist – in our nation’s public classrooms. However, they should not cheer its silencing of religious expression. Such silencing was appropriate in this case, since the concern was over formal conflation of religious expression with scientific theorization and not over religious expression in general, but it may not be appropriate in others (such as cases wherein individual citizens are seeking to pray on public property). Those who think that our public religious controversies are best resolved by an approach that quells religious voices are forgetting the beauty of our Framer’s vision.

Again, Madison offers us insight: “The degree of security [in American society] will depend on the number of interests and sects.” The greater the number interests, sects, and voices giving them expression, the greater the degree of security from tyranny, religious or otherwise. If we reduce that number to zero with respect to religious voices, we diminish the integrity of our democratic discourse, and insult the intelligence of our Framers’ pluralistic design.

Stephen Ruckman holds a master’s degree in Philosophy, Policy, and Social Value from the London School of Economics, and is currently a joint degree candidate in law and ethics at Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School.