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Long-time contributor to Law & Liberty, James Patterson, discusses his new book, Religion in the Public Square. Richard Reinsch: Today we’re talking with James Patterson about his new book, Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell. James Patterson teaches politics at Ave Maria University and I’m delighted to say, is a frequent contributor to Law & Liberty. James, glad to have you on the program. James Patterson: It’s good to be with you, Richard. Richard Reinsch: Congratulations on your new book just out with Penn Press. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it this week and preparing for this interview. Before we get to that, though, James, maybe introduce yourself more to our audience. You’ve been writing some for Law & Liberty. You teach at Ave Maria, located- James Patterson: That’s right. Richard Reinsch: in South Florida, a new university outside of Naples, Florida, I’m told. I’ve never been there. I’ve been to Naples, not to your university. I need to come sometime. If you follow James Patterson on social media you can frequently be treated to scenes from his family running across the state of Florida in the family auto, I should say motoring, as they escape oncoming hurricanes with great commentary from James about their adventures. James Patterson: Yes. That’s the next book project. It’s the travel log from Irma and other such events. Richard Reinsch: You really make it fun. One was about, the great thing about fleeing a hurricane in Florida is all the great scenery, but it was you surrounded by parking lots. James Patterson: That’s right. When fleeing Irma, we drove an unbroken trip west and most of the time, when I had time to take pictures, it was in parking lots of Panera’s. My daughter, at one point, is delusional in one of the photographs. I was very proud of her for holding it together, considering she had no expectation that that afternoon that she was just going to get trucked to Texas. Richard Reinsch: Also Ave Maria, I’m told, a new university built on or near a swamp … Frequently encountering wildlife, I’m told, is part of the job description at Ave Maria. James Patterson: That’s correct. I live in a neighborhood where there’s considerable controversy over the placement of garbage cans too late at night, or overnight. As a result, the bears come to our neighborhood relatively frequently, now during the day. They just come up and down the street. Richard Reinsch: They’re fun black bears, right? James Patterson: These are just, yeah, they’re very sweet … No, I’m just kidding. They’re black bears, but it’s terrifying when you see someone’s very large dog has apparently escaped. Then you’re like, “Oh, no, that’s-” Richard Reinsch: That’s just a bear. James Patterson: “That’s a bear.” With the sheer volume of small children at this very Catholic university it’s funny, but then it gets kind of scary because you don’t want the kids to come running outside to pet the dog. Richard Reinsch: Now, you do find time to write. You’ve written this book, Religion in the Public Square. That title, though, raises a lot of questions. What’s going on in this book? James Patterson: Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell is about three cases in which we find political, sorry, public policy influenced by major religious leaders. The cases are listed in the subtitle. Soon to be Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reverend Jerry Falwell. The public square, here, is understood in many cases as a media space, although all three figures obviously also engaged in real public square debates, such as Sheen giving public addresses, King marching through Birmingham, and Falwell giving public addresses in such places as Cambridge, Massachusetts. There’s a media story in that public square. The funny thing about those stories is that they’re all very different. Fulton Sheen was able to be ahead of the curve when it came to mass media. Richard Reinsch: Maybe a lot of our listeners have heard the name Fulton Sheen. Maybe place him for us and give us some context. Maybe we can do that a little bit more in depth in the interview. Before we talk about these three figures, you have a wonderful chapter introducing the both prevalent and difficult and complicated presence of religion in American political life and in our public philosophy. You introduce us to Alexis de Tocqueville and the way he writes about religion. You quote his famous phrase, “The spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.” Maybe talk about that. James Patterson: Yeah, that’s true. I start there. So, Alexis de Tocqueville observes that in America, unlike in France, the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty were friends and formed a common religious dogma that served as a political foundation for public discourse, which isn’t to say that American public discourse is always very pious or even necessarily very ethical. But at least it had a sense of limits that were placed on a common understanding of the human person, the nature and purpose of government and the obligations that individuals have to each other and their communities and to their broader political organizations. The achievement of this alliance was as a result of the disestablishment of churches from the federal government and in some cases, most cases at the time but not all of them, from the state government. And what this enabled, was the congregations and clergy to be dedicated to their own spiritual welfare. The clergy were no longer dependent on the state for the collection of tithes to support parsonages. The people were no longer scandalized by corrupt relationships between state and church after. And so, the state was then free to pursue whatever ends it was responsible for, whether at the national level that we study, through trade policy, or at the state level that the … managing contracts or setting regulations on businesses, building bridges and the like. This kind of relationship was very profitable for the United States in terms of producing as much political liberty for a republican government as possible, as well as empowering the states of the various people to be relatively unmolested, and, the entire outcome was quite a contrast to the way things were going in France at the time. Richard Reinsch: The disestablishment, being a part of American thinking, although certain states had established churches, I think the last one was 1833. Thinking about that, how does religion shape democracy in America, and how does democracy in America end up shaping religion in America? James Patterson: So, religion becomes a kind of common language that people use in order to speak to each other about all things in their lives, especially with respect to politics. And, this need for a common dogma is one Tocqueville routinely observes. As an example from a book that I relied on by Alan Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion, out from Oxford a couple of years ago, has this great example of dogma being something like the study in what colors of light mean when you enter an intersection, with individuals free to determine what the light colors mean on their own, then you have a lot of traffic accidents, because some people think red means go, some people will think yellow means go and some people think green means go. And, what religion does, is it sets what those things really are in our public discourse, and it also orients individuals away from material life and teaching those dogmas. So, the Christian church dedicates individuals pursuing a kind of spiritual happiness. It places as secondary importance on material happiness, and Tocqueville is extremely concerned about this, because American democracy shows on the seams, on the limits, there are these examples of a hunger for material wellbeing. And so, religion is very necessary to prevent people from succumbing to temptation pursuing unvarnished wealth. One final thing is that religion provides a kind of softening of the mores. It provides a discourse that is productive of better manners among individuals in their daily lives, instead of a kind of coarseness that emerges, and this is partly because religion brings people out of the home and civilizes them to engage in ordinary life, which is absolutely essential if you’re going to have a free people engaged in a self government. So, there’s a lot that religion does for democracy. As for what democracy does to religion, the general idea is that it provides for the defense of the individual conscience. In this respect, there’s a fear that if the individual conscience is left on it’s own, then it may not be properly formed to pursue the spiritual goals of whichever church denomination you belong to. But in fact, what that means is that churches then have the liberty to go out and seek people and bring them into the faith. So, there’s actually a lot of good that democracy does merely by getting out of the way of the good ministration of a clergy. Richard Reinsch: The spirit of religion and spirit of liberty, Tocqueville says, and you talk about this in your book, “Religion and liberty aren’t seen at loggerheads in the American tradition,” although we can talk about how that’s changed now. Maybe we’ll do that later in the interview. But, the spirit of religion, and the spirit of liberty reinforce one another. James Patterson: That’s right, provided that the institutions are kept in the balance that he finds them in, and it was a rather spectacular experience of no clergy in America appearing to want to belong to government. That’s the thing that really startles Tocqueville, especially when talking to the Catholic priests. Richard Reinsch: So you write about the progression from Protestant hegemony to Judeo-Christian consensus, so the Protestant hegemony being America, part of the 19th century, going into the 20th century, we can talk about the things that challenge that, and you write about Archbishop Fulton Sheen who … the Protestant hegemony was not open to Jews and not open to Catholics. Sheen opens that up, but then also the Judeo-Christian consensus, you argue, as it will receive another enlargement under Martin Luther King Jr. will then close. Curiously, you argue it’s either caused or correlated with Reverend Jerry Falwell, and so, maybe we can just move through that, but thinking about Archbishop Fulton Sheen, how does he challenge the Protestant hegemony and what does he bring? James Patterson: So, just to set some terms, Protestant hegemony, these terms I get from Darryl Hart. It refers to the period in which the United States experienced a mass evangelization in the United States known as the Second Great Awakening during the 1830’s. In fact, part of what so impressed Tocqueville about American religiosity was that he was here when this was going on, and could very easily credit the fact that there was no established church as one of the key institutional factors that led to this evangelization. And, hegemony really continued through the Civil War, into the beginning of the 20th century, and that hegemony expressed itself frequently when it came up against groups it didn’t like. So, one of the examples of this would be essentially the harrowing of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or what we call Mormons from northern New York all the way out to the canyon lands. We forget that we actually declared war on Mormons for a while, in 1858, I think it was. And so- Richard Reinsch: An extermination order was issued against the Mormons, I think. James Patterson: Yeah, I guess there was a lot going on in 1858, so there’s a lot of headlines that we have to … and, at the same time that’s going on, you have a lot of nativist opposition to the Catholics, especially Irish Catholics who were perceived as foreign agents who would undermine republican liberty rooted in the English Reformation, and that language was very common and frequently used for political purposes. I told this nice story from Tocqueville earlier. I don’t mean to leave out these rather unpleasant historical moments, and so, Protestant hegemony is more or less in place until itself experiences a kind of internal rift that sends two sides of Protestantism in America in two different directions, begins with the advancement of historical criticism of the Bible that became known as modernist or liberal Protestantism, and then fundamentalist people who wanted to insist on traditional Protestant dogmas, differed over the direction that this theology was taking different Protestant in our nation. You have that famous split that occurs over a period of 10 years between what I mention we call the fundamentalists and the mainline or liberal Protestants. And, once the fundamentalists go their separate ways, starting their own institutions, in some cases, denominations, that left mainline Protestants able to reach out to other organizations that maybe they shared cities with or they shared common interests with. A lot of history is told in a book by Kevin Schultz call Tri-Faith America, which ends right around the same time that I’m picking up my cases. So, I just want to set that’s what Protestant hegemony means, and these folks, these mainline Protestants that reach out to Jews and Catholics during this period are doing so because of paramilitary violence by the Ku Klux Klan. There is a real urgency to this in the 1920s, and the ironic outcome is no sooner do mainline Protestants began this kind of outreach to American Catholics and Jews, is that the leadership of the Judeo-Christian consensus is immediately under contest. So, one of the first people who really is able to marshal a kind of national audience that could describe themselves as Jews, Protestants and Catholics was not a mainline Protestant minister, but rather, Monseigneur Fulton J. Sheen in the 1930’s who would later be made a bishop in 1951. What Sheen was able to accomplish was in two stages, that proves that American Catholics were patriots, that they loved their country, and to do that required both illustrating that the common enemy that Protestants identified that is the Catholic church, was actually a friend, and at the same time, that there was an actual common enemy to all people, and that enemy was Communism. Sheen began this effort, under direct instruction from Pope Pius XI, and for those of you who don’t know Fulton Sheen was from outside Peoria Illinois, El Paso Illinois and from an Irish Catholic family. He was born in 1890, I forget the exact year, and was always a star student. He ended up just finishing his graduate work at the University of Louvain, where he received a degree of the highest honors. He was one of the most accomplished academic theologians ever in the history of the church up to that point. When he took to the airwaves in 1930, he was bringing with him the kind of full force of this neo-Thomistic revival that Louvain had been leading, and was bringing it to of all places, the living rooms of the American people all with their radios on. Richard Reinsch: So, what did Sheen want to bring to the public square? James Patterson: So, it’s no coincidence that when he was going to the public, it was 1930, be the Catholic church in America was still smarting from the vociferous anti-Catholicism of the 1928 presidential debate, in which the first Catholic nominee, Al Smith, had run for president. And so, Sheen saw that it was necessary for him to go on the air and explain Catholicism. He did so on the radio show called the Catholic hour. And, the argument that he made was that the common good in the United States was spiritual happiness. So, everybody is pursuing some kind of spiritual growth and a necessary condition for that pursuit is political liberty. And for the establishment of political liberty, you had to revere the elements of the American regime that were most responsible for it. So, he was adamant in defending the United States Constituti…
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