Marsden on opposing poles

Although there may be signs of change, American society is still caught in the polarized pattern that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. At one pole is the liberal culture that includes most of mainstream academia and entertainment and that is self-consciously pluralistic in the inclusivist sense, but is also overwhelmingly secular, so that it does not have much of a way to deal with religious diversity in public life.

At the other pole is a predominantly religious, conservative, popular political culture that does not often have a well-thought-out concept of pluralism that would provide equitable roles for non-Christian and secularist viewpoints in the public domain. Partisans of each side regard the other side as essentially imperialistic. Secular liberals believe their freedoms are threatened by a conservative takeover. Conservative Christians believe that secularists are excluding their Christian views and using big government to expand their own dominion.

The fears of each side are exaggerated, but those fears have some basis in a society that does not have well-developed traditions or conceptions of pluralism that can embrace a wide range of both religious and nonreligious viewpoints.

Part of the problem is that Christian conservatives and secularized liberals each often act as though they see themselves as the proper heirs to the mid-twentieth century consensus. Conservatives view that consensus as more Christian than it was. Secular liberals today may deny that they advocate any sort of consensus outlook, since they are open to embracing ethnic and racial differences.

Yet, when it comes to thinking about religiously based differences, they are likely to sound like midcentury consensus thinkers, who believed that views congenial to secular naturalism were the only ones that should be taken seriously in the public domain. To the extent that they would insist on such a rule, they are in practice asking religious people to assimilate into a melting pot defined by naturalistic intellectual and cultural norms. Each side needs to recognize that neither a religiously based nor a naturalistically based consensus could ever be adequately inclusive.

At the same time that the Kuyperian heritage provides a starting point for thinking about how to take religious differences seriously, its emphasis on common grace also provides a rationale for addressing the troubling issue of how people of fundamentally different outlooks may listen to each other and work together, rather than polarizing around their differences. Politicized American evangelicalism and fundamentalism have rarely addressed this issue well in the past generation.

Despite its American Enlightenment heritage, which acknowledged a common creator and some shared human common sense, politicized evangelicalism has tended to speak only in terms of dichotomies, as though the only choices were between a fully Christian society and a wholly secular one. A Kuyperian outlook provides a basis for recognizing that there can be both radical differences in fundamental outlooks and also a basis for social and political cooperation, based on the God-given principle of common grace.

George Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, pp. 171-72