On the Hegemony of Liberal Individualism: A Reply to ...

Socioiogy of Reli~on 1999, 60:1 35-40

On the Hegemony of Liberal Individualism: A Reply to Williams Ted G. Jelen Uni~rs~ of Nemta at Las Vegas

Psalm9:17admonishes,'The Wickedshall be tumed into hell, and all the nationsthat forget God.' America will be no exception. If she forgets God, she too wi|l face His wrath and 35

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Rhys Williams has provided us a fascinating account of alternative conceptions of the public good, and the religious roots of these competing perspectives. His panoramic description of the rhetorical frameworks within which American politics (broadly construed) are contested is extraordinarily useful, and provides a valuable intellectual resource for many future analysts of the public roles of religion in democratic politics. To the extent that I take issue with Williams's account, I would emphasize that the three traditions of public discourse do not compete equaUy in contempomry American political discourse. Williams, of course, acknowledges that his "stewardship" model does not enjoy the same level of support as his "covenental" or "contractual" models, and he convincingly demonstrates that even the most radical individualism has deep religious roots. Nevertheless, I would suggest that, at the end of the twentieth century in the United States, the "contractual" model, without explicit acknowledgment of its theological origins, has become the dominant mode of discourse. Further, insights or values derived from other traditions are accredited forms of public discussion to the extent that they can be translated into the language of liberal individualista. Perhaps the most telling evidence for this proposition can be found in the changing fortunes of the contemporary Christian Right. At least since the formation of the" Moral Majority in 1979, the political mobilization of doctrinally conservative Christians has been an important aspect of American electoral politics, and evangelicals have become an essential component of the Republican Party (see especially Kellstedt and Noll 1990). However, the Christian Right has experienced varying degrees of success, which ate in part based on the translation of the NCR's moral agenda into the language of individual rights. In its earliest manifestation, Moral Majority and its leader, Jerry Falwell, made explicit use of "covenantal" language in its public rhetoric. For example, in Falwell's initial book, Listen, America!, Falwell makes explicit use of a covenant metaphor derived from the Hebrew Scriptures"

36 SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGION judgment like every other nation in the history of humanity. But we have the promise in Psalm 33:12, which declares, 'Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.' When a nation's ways please the Lord, that nation is blessed with supematural help (Falwel119~: 24; emphasis in original).I

Our secular politics is unlikely to become the servant of any single religious tradition; the nation has become too secure in its diversity to allow that travesty to occur. But it is quite possible for religion to become the servant of secular politics, and, in the 1980's some would say, it nearly did (Carter 1993: 97). 1"It shouldbe'notedthat thisquoteappearsin a chapterentitled"The Riseand Fallof Empires."


As this passage makes clear, nations such as the United States are collectively re sponsible for a common morality. Falwell goes on to suggest that such activities as private sexual behavior, church-state separation, and "family values" (a concept to which I will return) are not simply matters of individual choice, but have very public consequences in terms of God's blessing or curse on the nation asa whole. More generally, a great deal of Christian Right rhetoric in the early 1980s emphasized the importance of communally-shared religious values, in the sense of the United States being a Christian nation. Thus, Jerry Falwell's rhetoric as one of the earliest spokespersons for the contemporary religious right appears to make explicit use of covenantal imagery in describing the public good. What is most interesting about this is the fact that the Moral Majority, as well as other Christian Right activities such as Pat Robertson's 1988 Presidential campaign, were spectacularly unsuccessful (Green 1995; Buell and Sigelman 1985, 1987; Sigelman, Wilcox, and Buell 1987; Wilcox 1987, 1992; Jelen 1991). Neither Moral Majority nor the Robertson campaign succeeded in mobilizing more than a tiny fraction of their respective target constituencies, and Moral Majority in particular was quite unpopular even among evangelical Christians (Jelen 1992). Both manifestati£ of the Christian Right were apparently fragmented by the effects of religious particularism, and by fears that the Christian Right sought to violate the constitutional separation of church and state. By contrast, more recent manifestations of the Christian Right have utilized the "contractual" language of religious free exercise, and have emphasized the idea that the "accommodation" of religious belief enhances the personal liberty of the believer. Indeed, Stephen Carter, in his famous work, The culture of disbelief (1993), has suggested that free exercise is the primary rationale for making legal accommodations, and that a more hegemonic role for religion would violate authentic Christianity as well as the US Constitution. In a chapter entitled "The 'Christian N a t i o n ' . . . and other horrors," Carter writes:

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Much of Carter's analysis is focused on criticizing the case of Employment Division v. Smith, on protecting the rights of religious minorities. Similarly, Ralph Reed, the former Executive Director of Christian Coalition, has written that the political assertion of doctrinally conservative religious belief is designed to protect the free exercise rights of "people of faith":

The contrast between the covenental language of Falwell previously quoted and these more recent apologists for the Christian Right is difficult to overstate. Specifically biblical warrants and arguments have been supplanted by the language of freedom, constitutionalism, and citizenship. Adherence to a single tradition, no matter how broadly defined, is considered neither possible nor desirable. Further, it is perhaps not coincidental that the newer manifestations of the Christian Right have enjoyed more support and staying power than their counterparts in the early 1980s. In contrast to the brief, meteoric existence of Moral Majority, Christian Coalition has drawn much more support from its target constituencies (see especially Wilcox, Rozell, and Gunn 1996) and has become an entrenched force in US politics generally, and more specifically within the Republican Party (see Moen 1992). It is perhaps unnecessary to elaborate on this point, but a few brief examples may illustrate the hegemony of liberal individualism in American political discourse as applied to the political assertion of religion. To take a couple of specific instances, both proponents of school prayer and of the teaching of creationism in public schools have asserted individual prerogatives in support of their policy positions. Rhetorical devices such as "voluntary" prayer, of "equal time" (in which students are encourage to "make up their own minds") have come to predominate the persuasive speech of religious activists (see Jelen 1998; MartŸ and Jelen 1989). Similarly, proponents of values suggested by a "stewardship" model of the public good have arguably made most progress when they have been able to tie their proposals to individual rights. For example, the US has, in recent years, witnessed the enactment of a variety of restrictions on the smoking of tobacco. Such apparent violations of personal freedom have been much easier to enact once proponents of such regulations could argue that the effects of "second-hand smoke" on non-smoking bystanders was an infringement on the "personal space" of nonsmokers. Arguments about the health of the smoker, or general environmental protection, have not been nearly as effective as the rights-based rhetoric j ustified by the specter of second-hand tobacco smoke.


The movement is best understood as an essentiallydefensive struggle by people seeking to sustain their faith and their values. . . . Presumably all of us want freedom to practice our religion, to enjoy the rights to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, and to fully participate in our duties of citizenship. Yet intolerance towards religion has reached disturbing levels, threatening civility and undermining a basic sense of fairness (Reed 1994: 18,41).

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2. This distinction is similar to one proposed by Karl Popper between the "logic of discovery" and the "logic of justification." My position here is that, in political dialogue in the US, policy choices must be iustifvzd in the language of individual rights.


More generally, many religious conservatives have placed a great deal of importance on "family values." Indeed, attempts to regulate "indecent" expression on the Internet, to restrict access to tobacco, of to restrict the rights of homosexuals, have been justified on the basis of possibly harmful effects on children (see Krauthammer 1998). Children constitute an important rhetorical resource, since they ate presumably not competent to engage in the assertion of rights or the contractual, self-imposed limitations on their rights. It seems clear, for example, that a proponent of a convenantal theology, such as Jerry Falwell, would likely seek to restrict access to pomography to anyone, not just children. However, the vocabulary of American politics lacks the intellectual resources to warrant the restriction of access to sexually explicit materials to "consenting adults." The point here is not that liberal individualism is uncontested in US political discourse. I am in complete agreement with Williams in dissenting from Hartz's account of liberalism in the United States. My point is more limited: While Williams is surely correct in asserting that there exist multiple conceptions of the public good in American political rhetoric, I contend that the price of admission into a genuinely public conversation is the ability to translate one's sense of the public good into the language of individual rights. This is quite different from suggesting that there are no other considerations competing with "rights talk" in American political dialogue. Activists (religious or secular) may derive their values from diverse sources, some of which (as WiUiams has taught us) ate clearly religious in nature. However, the success of failure of a religiouslybased claim on the public good is contingent on its adaptability to "rights talk," which might weU be considered the Esperanto of American politics. 2 Williams has provided a valuable service in directing our attention to the fact that there exist multiple conceptions of the public good, and multiple sources for these ideas. Indeed, the existence of "covenantal" and "stewardship" conceptions, which might be regarded as the illegitimate siblings of contractual discourse, may provide the dynamic by which political conflict in the US may be understood. Indeed, ir Hartz were correct, and liberalism were indeed an uncontested American ideology, it is difficult to see how principled policy disagreements might arise. However, the existence of alternative models of public propriety may provide inspiration for alternative policy positions. But, the success or failure of political movements, however motivated, is at least in part contingent on their compatibility with "rights talk." To illustrate, consider the issue of abortion. Ir is well known that the abortion issue represents a constellation of different values concerning the value

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REFERENCES Buell, E., and L. Sigelman. 1985. An army that meets every Sunday?Popular support for the Moral Majority. Socia/ScienceQuarterly 66: 426-434. 1987. A second ltx~k at "popular support for the Moral Majority: A second look." Social Scielu:e Quarterly 68:167-169. Carter, S. L. 1993. The culture of disbelief: How American law and politics trivialize religious devotion. New York: BasicBooks. Cook, E. A., T. G. Jelen, and C. Wilcox. 1992. Between two absolutes: Public opinion and the politics of abortion. Boulder, CO: Westview. Falwell,J. 1980. L/sten,America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Green, J. C. 1993. Pat Robertson and the latest crusade: Religious resources and the 1988 Presidential Campaign. Social Science Quarterly 74: 157-168. Jelen, T. G. 1991. The political mobilization of reli~ous beliefs. New York: Praeger. 9 1992. Political Christianity: A contextual analysis.American Journal of Po//tica/Science 36: 692-7149 9 1998. God or country: Debating the role of religion in public life. In Moral controversies in American politics: Coses in social regulatory policy, edited by R. Tatalovich and B. W. Daynes, 135-163. New York: M. E. Sharpe. 3. For an interestingelaborationand reconstructionof this theme,see McDonagh1996.


of h u m a n life, sexual morality, and the social role of women (see Luker 1984; Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox 1992). However, the movement to restrict access to legal abortion has come to be known as the "right to life" movement, since the most accessible warrants in general political discourse involve the protection of rights, understood as individual prerogatives. Arguably, opponents of legal abortion are on their most mlid rhetorical ground when arguing for the existence of inarticulate individuals (fetuses) bearing rights which compete with (and ultimately trump) those of the pregnant woman. 3 Even if some pro-life proponents originally base their opposition to abortion on religiously-derived values about chastity, motherhood, or other common values, they are ultimately forced to compete on the (perhaps) inhospitable terrain of competing individual rights. Since fetuses are (by definition) incapable of asserting their own rights, it is difficult to see how a right to life movement could emerge at all in a genuinely Lockean culture. Nevertheless, "rights talk" appears to be the only genuinely publicly accessible language available in the contemporary United States. Thus, there do exist, as Williams suggests, competing conceptions of the public gor which ate at least partially based on religious beliefs. Contractual conceptions of liberal individualism are perhaps an inadequate basis for community, and alternatives such as those suggested by Williams clearly motivate members of particular ideological communities. However, policies which seek to promote a general public good must, paradoxically, be justified in the language of individual rights.

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Kellstedt, L. A., and M. Noll. 1990. Religion, voting for President, and party indentification, 1948-1984. In Reli~on in American politics, edited by M. Noll, 355-379. New York: Oxford University Press. Krauthammer, C. 1998. Extorting a royal ransom. Las Vegas Review-]ourna/, I ! May, 7B. Luker, K. 1984. Abort/on and the po//t/cs of motherhood. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press. MartŸ A.R., and T. G. Jelen. 1989. Knowledge and attitudes of Catholic college students regarding the creation/evolution controversy. In Religitm and l~~litical behavª in the United States, edited by T. G. Jelen, 83-92. New York: Praeger. McDonagh, E. 1996. Breetking the abortion deadlock: Fr~rm choice to c~msent. New York: Oxford University Press. Moen, M. C. 1992. The tramfcrrmation of the Christian Right. Tuscakx~sa: University of Alabama Press. Reed, R. 1994. PoliticaUy incorrect: The emerging faith factxrr in American p~ditics. Dallas, TX: Word. Sigelman, L., C. Wilcox, and E. Buell. 1987. Ah unchanging minority: Popular support for the Moral Majority, 1980 and 1984. Soda/Scie'tu:e Quarterly 68: 876-884. Wilcox, C. 1987. Popular support for the Moral Majority in 1980: A second kx,k. Socia/Science Quarterly 68: 157-167. --. 1992. God's ~,arriors: The Christian Right in the twentieth century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilcox, C., M. J. Rozell, and R. Gunn. 1996. Religious coalitions in the new Christian Right. Soda/Science Quarterly 77: 543-558.