Secularization, Pluralism, and Moral Minimalism: A Response to Williams, Hartman, Haberski, and Hickman (Roundtable Part V)

David Sehat

I am grateful to Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman for their careful readings and their generous evaluations of my book. They have largely captured my argument and, though I have a few points of disagreement, a point-by-point engagement would be both tedious and ungenerous to their efforts. Instead, let me explain how I approached this book, which might capture and clarify to what extent we agree or disagree.

As I see it, my book turns on three somewhat abstract but important concepts: secularization, pluralism, and moral minimalism. Each involves complicated theoretical and normative positions. Since I was aiming at the general reader (that mythical beast), I didn’t want to burden the text with a full elaboration of these concepts. But after reading these responses to the book, it now seems to me that more remains to be said.

1. Secularization

Williams chides me for what he sees as a persistent tendency to seek out “a secular basis for the expansion of rights” by neglecting the role of religious people, particularly religious liberals. And it is true that The Myth of American Religious Freedom is a history of secularization. But I do not mean secularization quite the way that Williams suggests, so let me be clear about my understanding of the term.

Elephant Still in Room; Intelligent Observers Continue Not to Notice

In her Sunday post on pedagogy and U.S. intellectual history, Lauren linked to Louis Menand's recent New Yorker piece on "why we have college," and asked what we thought of it.

The Menand piece is thoughtful, interesting, and very much worth reading (like most of what Menand writes IMO).  In the course of reviewing two books on the (eternal) Crisis in American Higher Education®--Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift and Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower--Menand considers some of the reasons we might (and do) give for why students ought to have a college education.

Menand considers three possible "theories":  1) College courses are designed to distinguish the better students from the less good students in ways helpful to future employers hoping to hire the smartest workforce; 2) College courses are designed to teach students things about the world and themselves that they won't discover anywhere else; 3) College courses are designed to pass on specialized information necessary to successfully pursue a career in today's economy.  Menand labels these views meritocratic, democratic, and vocational.  He's a proponent, incidentally, of Theory 2.

Menand's article takes a slightly different approach from two other recent reviews of books on the higher-ed crisis--Peter Brooks's March 29, 2011 New York Review of Books essay (which reviewed the Arum and Roksa book, among others) and Nicholas Dames's April 13, 2011 n+1 essay (which reviewed Menand's own Marketplace of Ideas, among other books)--that I blogged about in April (respectively here and here).  The Brooks and Dames reviews are much more focused on what professors do and don't do (and should and shouldn't be doing).  Menand's essay focuses instead on what we--not only as professors but as a society--should expect post-secondary students to gain from their education.

READING OBAMA: Kloppenberg Responds to Summers

James Kloppenberg, Harvard University, responds to the John Summers review of his book, Reading Obama. At the end of Kloppenberg's response, below, is a short reply from Summers.

I am grateful to the editors of USIH for the chance to respond to the review of Reading Obama by my friend John Summers, and I am grateful to John for his spirited critique of my argument as he understood it. I have admired John’s fierce independence since I first got to know him a decade ago when we taught a course together at Harvard on democracy in Europe and America. I do not always agree with his judgment, however, whether the subject is scholarship, politics, or pragmatism. Here I will try to clarify our differences as I see them. The point of my book was not to provide a standard by which Obama’s presidency should be judged. My point instead was to show, using the evidence presented in Obama’s own writings, how he thinks about politics, where he locates himself in the history of American thought, and to explain, as well as possible given the limited evidence available now, why he sees the world as he does.

It seems fitting to address these issues in this forum. After all, it was Patricia Cohen’s October 28, 2010 article in The New York Times about the USIH conference in New York City that kicked off the lively discussion of Reading Obama that has continued for the past seven months. For readers who were not at the CUNY Graduate Center last fall, I presented a paper identifying central themes from Obama’s own books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope and suggested how one might locate his ideas in the rich traditions of American political thought. Although Cohen’s article was accurate and overall not unsympathetic, one sentence has trailed the book ever since: “Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.” That phrase, “philosopher president,” has surfaced repeatedly, in reviews from the right and the left.

Pedagogy: A Theme for the US Intellectual History Survey

I am teaching the US Intellectual History survey for the first time in Spring 2012. I've been thinking about what unifying theme I want to present to students. It's become my conviction that we need a few ideas that we keep returning to over the course of the semester, rather than an attempt to cover as much material as possible. When I first started teaching, I wanted to give my students all the information which I had discovered since coming to grad school--the kind of stuff that I read and went, "how did I not know that before?" But I realized that themes developed based around my interests, anyway, and it was usually those themes that were remembered, through the sheer force of repetition.

What themes have you used in the survey? I had been thinking about things like pragmatism, pluralism, changing ideas of conservative/liberal, but I had a bright thought this morning and would like your opinion.

What if I arranged the lectures around idea transmissions and national conversations? I would want students to ask the questions--how did people have national conversations before the internet? What did they talk about? How did the method of transmission influence the content of the discussion? We could spend the last few weeks looking at blogs, newspapers and magazines online, and social media. I could then ask the question on the final--has the internet fundamentally transformed what Americans talk about? Why or why not?

I had this thought reading Louis Menand's discussion of the "Value of College in America" in the most recent New Yorker. I am thinking of assigning the article for students to begin to think about college as a form of idea transmission and center for dialogue. (On a side, more relevant note, what did you all think of the article?)

I've also been thinking a lot about American literature. When I took my European Intellectual History comp, I read a lot of literature/philosophy. Less so for my US Intellectual History comp. Do you ever assign novels?

Finally, do you assign monographs in an undergrad class? I feel like I should assign more than a week for undergrads to read a whole book, but if I assign a monograph, we may only be discussing that topic for a single week. Perhaps it is better to assign article length primary and secondary sources and tie them to the specific discussion of each class meeting?

P.S. The image is from Menand's article in the New Yorker.

Hickman on Sehat, THE MYTH OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS FREEDOM (Roundtable, Part IV)

Dear Readers: This guest post by Christopher Hickman is the fourth and penultimate addition to the roundtable dedicated to our colleague David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom. The final addition should come next week in the form of David's response. If you wish to get caught up to speed, here are links to the first three contributions, by:

Daniel Williams
Andrew Hartman
Ray Haberski

Christopher Hickman has a Ph.D. in history from the George Washington University and is working to convert his dissertation, "The Most Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court and Its Critics in the Warren Court Era," into a book.

At the end of the 1991 Supreme Court term, a divided Court issued an opinion in Lee v. Weisman. Justices Kennedy and O’Connor—ever the votes that mattered in many of these high-profile cases during their tenures—joined the Court’s liberals (Blackmun, Souter and Stevens) in invalidating a public school practice of mandating prayer at the end-of-year commencement ceremony. The flashpoint issue of religion in public schools had appeared just in time for the 1992 presidential election. Months after the pronouncement of Lee, both Patrick Buchanan and George H.W. Bush made sure, from the GOP Convention podium no less, to remind Americans that the Republican Party remained committed to a restoration of prayer in public schools. Precisely how the GOP would accomplish this or what energy would be expended to bring this about scarcely mattered. What did matter was the mere reminder that one political party stood up for the rhetorical restoration of God and morality to the public sphere. An issue that had festered since at least the seminal Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp decisions, of 1962 and 1963 respectively, had once again received a boost from a Court ruling that had, apparently at least, re-confirmed the country’s constitutional commitment to secularized public schooling.

Concurrent to these developments, my own youthful awareness of the country’s political and legal developments remained scattered at best. Lee, however, had come to my attention; I had, from an even earlier age, always taken notice of the persistent inclusion of Christian activities and messages in what I could only presume represented a typical public school incapable of operating as a nearly secular school. Nearly a year after the Lee ruling, my own high school graduation ceremony featured a prayer led by a local leader of a Christian congregation. While nine jurists, their law clerks, the ACLU, and other noticeable legal system actors busied themselves determining what the Constitution required, some Americans persisted in making their own law.

David Sehat’s aggressively argued The Myth of American Religious Freedom constantly brought me back not only to this personal episode of a community’s non-compliance with a High Court ruling but also to my own work on the Warren Court and its many, often diverse, critics. His cogent, book-length analysis of a persistent, though often obscured, Christian establishmentarianism across American history might not appear in gift bags at next year’s GOP convention, but it represents primary source-based analysis of the American past at its most ambitious.

“When the Zulus Produce a Tolstoy We Will Read Him”: Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition

In his excellent recent Dædalus article, “Racial Liberalism, the Moynihan Report & the Dædalus Project on ‘The Negro American,’” Daniel Geary (author of Radical Ambition, the superb biography of C. Wright Mills, which I reviewed here) concludes his analysis with a cogent reference to the post-1960s shift in racial liberalism. He writes that “public criticism of the Moynihan Report emerged from an increasing disenchantment with the core assumptions of racial liberalism”—or, at least, racial liberalism as it stood in 1965, the year Moynihan authored his infamous government report on The Negro Family.

Left-leaning critics of that form of racial liberalism, who would go on to pioneer another form, otherwise known as multiculturalism, “came to reject the common sociological view that African American culture was a pathological distortion of white American culture and that blacks should have to conform to white values in order to achieve equality.” In short, the Moynihan Report predated the cultural turn taken by post-60s racial liberalism, anticipated by Ralph Ellison in his critique of liberal sociology circa 1965: “The sociology is loaded… The concepts which are brought to bear are usually based on those of white, middle-class, Protestant values and life style.” Ellison pointed towards a new form of racial liberalism: one that tended to valuate, and even celebrate, minority cultural forms.


For Geary’s purposes (he’s currently writing a book on the Moynihan Report), multiculturalism—or, the post-60s cultural turn taken by racial liberalism—merely serves as a bookend to the sociological liberalism that informed Moynihan and his cohort. But for my purposes—in my efforts to write a book on the culture wars—multiculturalism is that which needs full explanation, historical and epistemological. My research thus leads me to Charles Taylor’s indispensable long essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” the centerpiece of a book edited by Amy Gutmann, entitled, simply, Multiculturalism. (Following the suggestions of several readers, I’m in the midst of a deep engagement with Charles Taylor. Next week I hope to blog on his monumental A Secular Age—as if a blog post can do justice to a 900-page book!)