My paper is yet to be written but is based on the following:
The Culture of Disbelief
Don Closson
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A new book, The Culture of Disbelief by Stephen Carter, may be the catalyst to open up a much needed discussion on the role of religious belief in public life. It has even caught the attention of President Clinton. The author teaches law at Yale University, is an Episcopalian, an African-American, and to a great degree an iconoclast, a nonconformist whose ideas will please neither the right nor the left, the liberal nor the conservative. But, just as it took a Nixon, with his irrefutably conservative credentials, to open the door to better relations with communist China, it may be necessary for a Stephen Carter to help bring back into balance the role of religion in America.
This book is provocative, in an irksome, irritating, vexing way, but also in an alluring, insightful way. Carter's defense of religiously motivated actions in the public square (in government, education, and the marketplace, or wherever people conduct public business) is worth cheering about. Carter argues that our government has trivialized serious religious belief to the point that we are losing the protection once provided by the First Amendment, which was written, according to Carter, to protect religious groups from government interference, not to protect the non-religious from the religious in our society.
The vexing part of Carter's book is his consistent rejection of conservative biblical positions. He argues vehemently for the right of others to hold them, but then declares these positions to be naive, developed by shoddy thinkers, and just plain wrong. His complete confiden ...